Recent nuances and nudges in government
policy as well as tacit support for the most obscene anti-Semitism
and anti-Americanism by the ruling political party of Turkey ought
to cause the United States to begin to rethink its comprehensive
policy toward Asia in general and toward one non-Arab minority in
Iraq in particular: the Kurds.
What, today, is the most intractable political problem in Iraq? It
is the very real political and religious aims of Shiite, Sunni and
Kurdish regions of the nation. Since the inception of Operation
Iraqi Freedom, President Bush has maintained that the unity of the
nation of Iraq was non-negotiable. In politics and in war, however,
nothing should be non-negotiable.
Iraq is not a nation in any real sense, but it was rather three
separate concentration camps each with differing degrees of
oppression. The Sunnis, the smallest group in the economically and
landlocked center of Iraq, had the most to gain by making peace
quickly and joining a unity government. Coalition forces have
supported the ungrateful Sunnis by opposing a partition of Iraq. Now
President Bush should embrace such a division.
This would divide Iraq into three separate nations: a relatively
unimportant Bagdad Iraq of Sunnis, a Basra Iraq of Shiites who could
govern themselves without the need for Iranian support, and an Mosul
Iraq which would be the first true homeland for Kurds in many
centuries, an oil rich area that is well able to defend itself and
has shown the most gratitude to America of the three nations of
Iraq.
Why has America shied away from this approach? The principal reason
is that Kurds are a dispossessed people whose natural homeland
stretches across much of the Middle East. A substantial number of
Kurds live in Iran, which is as close to a mortal enemy of the
United States as there is in the world today. American support for
reclaiming those colonial possession of Teheran and the
incorporation of those lands into Kurdistan would roughly double the
area of the Iraqi Kurds.
A significant, but smaller, number of Kurds live in Syria, an enemy
of America and a supporter both of the Iraqi insurgency and of
international terrorism. If the Baathist regime did not give up its
Kurdish lands, then the Kurds, with American military support,
should smash the Syrian Army and force as humiliating a peace treaty
as possible on Damascus.
The majority of the thirty million or so Kurds, however, live in
Turkey – almost one quarter of the population of Turkey. That, more
than anything else, has stayed our hand so far. Kurdistan with the
southeast quarter of Turkey, is a fairly large nation.
Traditionally, Turkey has been an ally of America, but that has been
changing fast and Turkish support for American policies has always
been based entirely on cynical self-interest. We owe Turkey –
neutral in World War Two and our enemy in World War One – nothing.
Our support for Turkey costs us the goodwill of Greeks, Armenians
and other European nations that suffered through centuries of
Turkish oppression. It also has cost of much of the goodwill of
Kurds, who would otherwise welcome the presence of a superpower that
was not intolerant, not Arab, and sought nothing but friendly
relations with it.
Another important reason for supporting a true Kurdistan is that the
Kurds are a genuinely diverse people. Although they were forced to
covert to Islam, today only about seventy percent of the Kurds are
Moslem, and many of those only nominally, Jews, Christians,
Zoroastrians (or a faith much akin to that) and Bahai have lived
within the long-persecuted Kurdish community with their first
allegiance as Kurds, and there is no single branch of Islam that
clearly dominates the Kurdish community.
Kurdistan could then be a democracy with an Islamic majority that
was genuinely inclusive of all faiths, both needing the support of
all Kurds to survive (much like Israel) and also because of
centuries of living largely underground, tolerant of all Kurds.
There is little doubt that it would become an affluent nation as
capable of defending itself as Israel is today, and that along with
the establishment of a truly free and democratic Lebanon, would
create three strong, free and prosperous democracies which would
naturally become allies or at least friends.
The dismemberment of Iran, which would lose ten percent of its
population, and the humiliation of Syria, which would be forced into
a very precarious position, would be great peripheral benefits. The
downside has always been the impact on Turkey, but a Turkey which
continues to deny its Armenian holocaust and is rapidly moving
toward denial of HaShoah as it embraces vicious anti-Semitism,
should increasingly lose our concern about its interests.
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