Iraq and Afghanistan

So much of the world continues to be convulsed by struggles for independence, freedom and rights. We see these struggles as struggles for "democracy", but that is more often our spin than that of the people involved. Frequently, "good government" and "security" are higher priorities than we might expect. But in the realm of individual opportunity, of individual lives rather than nationalistic romance there is a calculus that runs the other way, toward entrance to wider world rather than encasement in small independencies.

Yesterday's paper offers democratic and independent Armenia as an example of a people that "got what it wanted" and yet the people today do not feel they have what they wanted. Independent Armenia drifts. Young people feel trapped in an unimportant place without prospects. Many, young and old, look back to a time when they belonged to the Soviet Union, and they could look forward as individuals to playing a much more positive role in Moscow than they can now. They even treasure the fact that they were educated in Russian and could contribute to that culture. Many people in small European countries have had similar feelings as they emerged into independence. But now with the new Europe developing, their hope is in a new nationality and culture that transcends the limits of their small states. At least the new Europe helps. But Armenia has no such out. It is geographically trapped next to Georgia, another small country in a similar position, and Azerbaijan with which Armenians have little in common aside from mutual antipathy.

One can imagine that these same problems are apparent, or will be apparent, to many Iraqi Kurds as they consider their options. Many Kurds have participated in the larger Iraq society. Indeed, even now the foreign minister of the Interim Government is a Kurd. Yet Kurds want their freedom, their independence. Perhaps the solution would be for all the Kurds to carve out a greater Kurdistan, but this is an unlikely and dangerous perhaps.

One thinks of the dilemma of Taiwan. The Taiwanese are divided between those who developed a different culture with the help of the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and those more purely Chinese who came from the mainland. To some degree these two regional cultures have melted together. Still, today, with the more purely Taiwanese in the majority the country strives for a future that is both Chinese and not Chinese. No longer do they see Taiwan as "China", with its aspiration to reclaim all of China (much as the Armenians dream of a greater Armenia and the Kurds of a greater Kurdistan). But now this ruling group strives for a separate state, a new country, with a different dialect and a different connection to the world. Unlike Armenians, and more like the Iraqi Kurds, the Taiwanese independence movement has little support from the outer world and faces a looming danger of invasion and absorption. If the United States were as dedicated to self-determination in our day as Wilson was in his, we would actively champion the Taiwanese independence movement, and perhaps even Tibetan and Uighur independence movements. Yet today we are more wedded to our relations with the great and looming China, for the sake of what we used to call "the mighty dollar" (which rings a little hollow now).