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The Kurds: 'Be Friends with Your Friends'
21.2.2007 |
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February 21, 2007
Years ago under another Bush administration, the
Kurds of Northern Iraq bravely answered the call of
the American President when he told them to rise up
and topple Saddam following the tyrant's eviction
from Kuwait.
In a page out of the Bay of Pigs, the Americans were
nowhere to be found after egging on those who were
their allies. A crippled Saddam Hussein was still
strong enough to mow down the Kurds with great
ferocity, and the Americans let it happen.
Now the brothers and sons of those brave Kurds have
been fighting with us in our War on Terror in Iraq.
Many of them would like to have an independent
"Kurdistan," set apart from the rest of Iraq, with
Sunnis and Shiites killing each other off every week
in their emerging civil war.
Who can blame them for wanting to get out of a
dysfunctional situation like that?
However, the Turks worry about an independent
Kurdistan. They have an ethnic Kurd minority near
the border with Iraq, and the Turks can see a fight
brewing as their Kurds want to unite that part of
Turkey with a greater Kurdistan.
Turkey's anxiety, the Kurds' nationalistic hopes,
and the United States' quagmire in Iraq's civil war
may all come together to develop an exceptional plan
that would the needs of all those involved -- except
the non-Kurdish Iraqis.
If the United States withdrew its forces from the
emerging civil war and planted them in the far safer
soil of the Kurdish people in Northern Iraq, they
could:
1. Get out of the way of a brutal civil war;
2. Help the Kurds develop their own region in
relative calm;
3. Assure the Turks that no "Greater Kurdistan" is
in the offing, so long as the U.S. is there.
My word! Is this a solution that would actually make
a huge Islamic nation like Turkey happy that we have
a presence in their backyard? Will wonders never
cease?
If the civil war in Iraq could be prevented, then we
should stay and do what we can. But if it's
inevitable, we should at least make up for running
away from our Kurdish friends the first time,
securing them from the spillover of the civil war.
A wise man once said, "Be friends with your
friends." Helping the Kurdish people would not only
be strategically smart but morally justified about
now.
A more fitting way for the Bush family to clean up
some of its errors before 2008 would be hard to
imagine. Good karma
huntingtonnews net
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