Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Kurdistan Again
Yesterday Peter Galbraith wrote an impassioned plea for an essentially autonomous Kurdistan. Today Leslie Gelb follows it up with a less clear but nevertheless supporting case for a constitution that writes in a large role for the Kurds. This has been something that Galbraith (sometimes with Gelb) has been promoting for a long time. It seems to go back to his experience in Yugoslavia where the country was blown apart because it could not accommodate such ethno-nationalist longings.
Galbraith was one of the first to blow the whistle on the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. He has worked on the problems of East Timor as well as Iraq and Yugoslavia and is now associated with an institution committed to the struggle against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has lately been mounting quite a campaign. One of his arguments for Iraq is that our other more pressing security concerns, such as that relating to nuclear proliferation, compels us to rapidly develop a viable exit policy (See article in the New York Review of Books here in which he writes: “From my experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state.”
His thesis now is that the American government has been keeping their head in the sand on this one. They do not want there to be a Kurd problem, so are willing to accept the sweet nothings that Kurdish leaders feed them. Yet the old head of the Kurdish mountaineers, Massoud Barzani, said in an election day interview that “I am certain that there will be an independent Kurdistan and I hope to see it in my lifetime.” It is most reporters on the ground that the Kurdish people as a whole have no use for Iraq. Much of their area does not even fly the Iraq flag. It only adds fuel to the fire that the worst mistake in Sunday’s election appears to have been the failure to deliver about 200,000 ballots to prospective Kurdish voters in the north.
Galbraith curiously seems unwilling to draw the final conclusion from his analysis. He wants the United States to insist on a constitution that gives the Kurds great autonomy within an Iraqi state. This is just what he knows has not worked in these situations. Now the world faces even the splitting off of Montenegro from Serbia, one of the two last acts in the miniaturization of Serbia.
It seems to me that while we struggle with different federal solutions, we should be making a parallel effort to convince all the states in the region that an independent, democratic Kurdistan is better than a festering sore like Northern Ireland, the Tamil resistance in Sri Lanka, or the Basque provinces of Spain. It should also be pointed out that it will reduce the relative size of Iraq by 20% and reduce the size of their economy (presuming the Kurds get all or part of the Kirkuk fields). It will also mean that secularism will dominate politics in an area adjacent to Turkey, which will serve one of the main needs of the Turkish military that fears more than the Kurds the growing militancy of Islam in the region.
At a minimum, we should be sure that we never end up training or even leading troops that are dispatched by Baghdad to put down a Kurdish resistance. We should also abandon the idea of establishing a permanent Middle Eastern military base in Kurdistan, a dream floated back at the beginning of this adventure. In extremis, we could and should provide an aerial cover for Kurdistan, much as we did in the Saddam days, if at some future point this becomes necessary.
Galbraith was one of the first to blow the whistle on the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. He has worked on the problems of East Timor as well as Iraq and Yugoslavia and is now associated with an institution committed to the struggle against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has lately been mounting quite a campaign. One of his arguments for Iraq is that our other more pressing security concerns, such as that relating to nuclear proliferation, compels us to rapidly develop a viable exit policy (See article in the New York Review of Books here in which he writes: “From my experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state.”
His thesis now is that the American government has been keeping their head in the sand on this one. They do not want there to be a Kurd problem, so are willing to accept the sweet nothings that Kurdish leaders feed them. Yet the old head of the Kurdish mountaineers, Massoud Barzani, said in an election day interview that “I am certain that there will be an independent Kurdistan and I hope to see it in my lifetime.” It is most reporters on the ground that the Kurdish people as a whole have no use for Iraq. Much of their area does not even fly the Iraq flag. It only adds fuel to the fire that the worst mistake in Sunday’s election appears to have been the failure to deliver about 200,000 ballots to prospective Kurdish voters in the north.
Galbraith curiously seems unwilling to draw the final conclusion from his analysis. He wants the United States to insist on a constitution that gives the Kurds great autonomy within an Iraqi state. This is just what he knows has not worked in these situations. Now the world faces even the splitting off of Montenegro from Serbia, one of the two last acts in the miniaturization of Serbia.
It seems to me that while we struggle with different federal solutions, we should be making a parallel effort to convince all the states in the region that an independent, democratic Kurdistan is better than a festering sore like Northern Ireland, the Tamil resistance in Sri Lanka, or the Basque provinces of Spain. It should also be pointed out that it will reduce the relative size of Iraq by 20% and reduce the size of their economy (presuming the Kurds get all or part of the Kirkuk fields). It will also mean that secularism will dominate politics in an area adjacent to Turkey, which will serve one of the main needs of the Turkish military that fears more than the Kurds the growing militancy of Islam in the region.
At a minimum, we should be sure that we never end up training or even leading troops that are dispatched by Baghdad to put down a Kurdish resistance. We should also abandon the idea of establishing a permanent Middle Eastern military base in Kurdistan, a dream floated back at the beginning of this adventure. In extremis, we could and should provide an aerial cover for Kurdistan, much as we did in the Saddam days, if at some future point this becomes necessary.
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