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A 1991 Kurdish Betrayal Redux?
2.12.2006
By Najmaldin Karim |
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December 2, 2006
The media are building up the forthcoming report of
the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of
State James Baker, and former Democratic
Congressman, Lee Hamilton, as the solution to
America's problems in Iraq. Sadly, the report is
unlikely to offer anything other than the same
discredited policies that for 60 years created a
dangerous illusion of stability in the Middle East,
a "stability" bought with the blood of Middle
Easterners and that produced such horrors as the
massive 1991 bloodletting of Iraqis who sought to
overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The Iraq Study Group looks balanced, just as for
many years the Middle East looked "stable." Baker is
from the 'realist' school of foreign policy, while
Hamilton is a longtime ally of the movement to
liberate Iraq. The devil lies in the details. The
Iraq Study Group's "expert" advisors included many
diehard Arabists, supposedly objective analysts who
opposed the liberation of Iraq and have long stood
shoulder to shoulder with Arab dictatorships. In
their published writings, many of these "experts"
bend over backwards to accommodate the interests of
Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, the third largest
ethnic-religious group in Iraq after the Shiite
Arabs and the Kurds. Some of the "experts" are
Arabs, and in once case, an Iraqi Sunni Arab.
Interestingly, none is a Shiite Iraqi or a Kurdish
Iraqi.
Worse yet, the Iraq Study Group, which has made
great play of visiting Iraq and talking to Iraqi
officials has refused to visit the safest and most
pro-American part of Iraq -- Kurdistan. Even Turkey,
which has been openly unhappy with the growing
importance of Iraq's Kurds, on a day-to-day basis
deals with the reality that the Kurdistan Region of
Iraq is a fully recognized and constitutional
entity, an autonomous region with considerable
powers. Russia, which backed Saddam's regime to the
end, has also bowed to the inevitable and has a
consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan -- not the Iraq Study
Group, however, which has not set foot in Kurdistan.
The failure to visit Iraqi Kurdistan, or to consult
with its democratically elected president and prime
minister, or simply to see the evidence of a
peaceful, thriving economy, is no oversight. The
Iraq Study Group has considerable policy experience
and its expert advisory groups, if expert they truly
are, must know about the advances made by the Iraqi
Kurds. The most casual follower of the news knows
that Iraqi Kurds are massively pro-American and that
Iraqi Kurdistan is the one part of Iraq where people
complain that they do not see Americans enough.
No, the Iraq Study Group has shunned America's
closest allies in Iraq, the Kurds, out of
ideological prejudice. It's not just that the
pro-American Kurds make it difficult to argue that
Iraqis all hate Americans, thereby obliging troop
withdrawals. The Kurds make 'realists' and Sunni
Arab advocates nervous; the evidence of Kurdish
suffering is irrefutable and it is hard for the
United States to walk away from the victims of
genocide.
The Kurds also attest to the 'realist' betrayal of
Iraq in 1991. As Coalition Forces were breaking the
back of Saddam's army from the air, President George
HW Bush's public suggestion to Iraqis, "to take
matters into their own hands and force Saddam
Hussein, the dictator, to step aside," encouraged
Kurdish and Shiite uprising against the Baathist
regime. George H.W. Bush and Baker provided no
support and tens of thousands of Shi'a and Kurdish
Iraqis were slaughtered in reprisal once the regime
regrouped.
The last truly 'realist' administration in United
States history only intervened after considerable
public pressure following shocking CNN images of
Kurdish refugees, and after Turkey resisted
accepting thousands of refugees. Even then, the
intervention was mitigated. A safe haven was set up
for the Kurds, but little was done for the Shiites
beyond the "no-fly zone" in southern Iraq, in which
Saddam's almost non-existent air force was not
allowed to fly but where Iraqi attack helicopters
were.
Having suffered so much under the rule of the
largely Sunni Arab Baathist regime, Iraq's Kurds and
Shiites want a decentralized state. Yet the Iraq
Study Group, and its many "experts" has already
dismissed the notion of establishing three
autonomous ethnic-religious regions in Iraq, a
proposal promoted by Senator Joe Biden and emeritus
president of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Leslie Gelb. Biden and Gelb's proposal is profoundly
respectful of the Iraqi democracy, as such a plan
would be legal under the 2005 constitution that
nearly 80% of Iraqis voted for.
Of course, why would a panel that has spent more
time talking to America's enemies, Syria and Iran,
than America's allies, the Iraqi Kurds, care about
the democratic wishes of the people of Iraq? Looking
at the Iraq Study Group, what Iraqis, and Kurds in
particular, see is not an expert group coming up
with new ideas, but a likely repetition of the
failed and costly policies of the past.
Najmaldin Karim, M.D. is the president of the
Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI).
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