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The Kurds: New key to long-term victory
15.7.2007
By Andrew Sullivan |
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July
15, 2007
The phrase on everyone’s lips now is “postsurge”.
The logistics of military tour cycles, the logic of
congressional politics and the sheer impossibility
of putting Iraq back together again in anything like
the foreseeable future have caused something of a
Rubicon in Washington.
It has been approaching for a while but last week
you could feel the collective decision being made.
Some time in the next six months there will be a
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Quite when it
happens, how it happens and who will take credit or
blame have yet to be determined. But it will happen.
The question then becomes: what is salvageable? What
is the opportunity in this transition?
An honest assessment would have to acknowledge that
in many parts of Iraq even worse horrors will
probably unfold. In areas of sectarian conflict the
violence could be dreadful even by Iraqi standards.
This is one reason not to feel uncomplicated relief
at some realism entering into US policy so late.
I think intelligent, careful withdrawal is the least
worst option. But I’m not going to pretend it’s
morally clean. It isn’t. Many innocents will die.
The problem is: staying isn’t morally clean either.
And many innocents are already dying in a civil war
we cannot get a handle on.
But it’s also a stretch to see all of Iraq
necessarily going up in smoke. There are smaller
regional success stories. Anbar is one, where Sunni
tribes in a homogeneous Sunni region have aligned
effectively with US forces to fight Al-Qaeda. But
the real success story ? and the great unsung
achievement of the West for the past 15 years ? is
the emergence of a relatively peaceful, increasingly
prosperous, largely democratic Kurdish region in the
north. It’s a success story we have no reason to
turn into a failure.
The Kurds, of course, were in effect liberated from
Saddam’s butchery after the first Gulf war by the
US-UK nofly zone. They had their civil war in the
1990s and a stable polity emerged. The Kurdish
peshmerga have been the only seriously competent
force in Iraq since the fall of the Ba’athists and
the disbanding of the army.
More important: they are Sunni Muslims. They have a
fledgling democracy. And they love the US. If the US
can salvage a democratic, peaceful Kurdistan from
the wreckage of the Iraq occupation, the war will
not have been entirely in vain. I don’t mean
independence. I mean an effective soft-partition
that keeps the Kurdish dream alive.
Yes, there are many issues remaining: the status of
Kirkuk and Mosul, potential ethnic clashes and rogue
Kurdish terrorists. But they are certainly more
manageable than keeping the lid on the entire
country of Iraq in the absence of a central
government.
One obvious postsurge option for US troops is
therefore to redeploy to Iraq’s territorial borders
to deter an influx of foreign agents, but primarily
to defend and police the territorial integrity of
Kurdistan. In this, Washington needs to hold
Turkey’s hand tightly and patiently. It too is a
critical ally, a Muslim democracy and essential to
restraining the centrifugal forces of Iraq.
But the Turks are deeply and understandably
suspicious of Kurdish aspirations. The
Turkish-Kurdish border therefore badly needs Nato
troops to keep it stable and prevent incursions from
either side.
The benefits of rescuing Kurdistan include a
positive and constructive narrative for the next
stage of the war. Americans do not like losing and
they need to be reminded that the sacrifice of
thousands of young soldiers has not been for
nothing. But protecting Kurdistan has profound
strategic advantages as well.
It would create a democratic buffer against Arab
extremism from Israel through Turkey to Kurdistan.
That arc points directly at Iran, a country in the
grip of spiralling inflation, public unrest and a
brutal crackdown on dissent. Iran too has a Kurdish
population, and a free Kurdistan under US protection
could act as a focus for Kurdish unrest in Iran’s
north. Persians are not Arabs. Many of them love the
West and are potentially a great ally against
Wahhabist insanity. If the next few years are about
rattling Tehran’s cage, a free, stable Kurdistan
would help.
It’s also worth remembering that some things are
true even if George W Bush believes them. One of
those truths is that the Middle East should not be
consigned to Islamist fundamentalism or secular
dictatorship for eternity. If we are going to win
the long war against Islamo-fascism, some models of
democracy in the region are essential.
There are encouraging global precedents. In Asia,
for example, Taiwan followed Japan’s capitalist,
democratic path, and the domino effect eventually
brought China and Vietnam into the global economy.
Even in the Gulf, Dubai is showing that freedom and
capitalism are not impossible for Arab states. But
they cannot be imposed by force. They can rather be
defended by force, protected, nurtured and then held
up as role models. If part of Iraq succeeds in this
way, what better example for the other parts? Or for
the region as a whole?
It’s also, it seems to me, far too soon to give up
on Afghanistan. It is not a hopelessly divided
sectarian mess like Mesopotamia. It is rather a
hard-to-govern wasteland that has nonetheless come a
long way since liberation from the Taliban.
The problem in Iraq is that there is no real
government, no central entity that can unite the
country’s sects and control its warring militias.
Afghanistan is nowhere near as hopeless.
Am I being naively optimistic? I hope not. I still
believe that removing Saddam was a morally and
strategically defensible act. For the Kurds it ended
a hideous chapter in a long history of oppression
and violence. They remain grateful. They want to be
a solid ally in the region and an oasis from
Islamist terror.
Like the Jews, they have endured centuries of
persecution in other people’s lands with no home of
their own. They have one now and the West helped
give it to them. We should do all we can to ensure
nobody takes it away.
There are many things left to fight for in Iraq.
Kurdistan is one of them.
timesonline co.uk
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