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Michael Rubin’s Anti-Kurd Polemic
20.1.2008
By Sabah Salih
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Michael Rubin’s
Anti-Kurd Polemic. And Old Hand Tries and Fails to
be Relevant Again
January
20, 2008
Michael Rubin’s recent anti-Kurd polemic (circulated
widely on the web) titled “Is Iraqi Kurdistan a Good
Ally?” might as well have been titled “Are the Kurds
Reliable Puppets of the U.S.?”
I say puppets, because Mr. Rubin, as an old State
Department hand made irrelevant by political changes
in Washington and the Middle East, represents that
department’s traditional but dysfunctional way of
thinking about the Levant, which with regard to the
Kurds comes down to two equally unpleasant options:
Be an American puppet, that’s, don’t do anything
that might displease us or our Arab and Turk allies,
and we’ll think about leaving you with the leftovers
after everyone else has had his fill; or face the
cold-blooded consequences of an
exploitation-followed-by-backstabbing approach that
you seem to have forgotten.
Right from the start one can easily see that Mr.
Rubin is no friend of the Kurds. He says after WWII,
“the Kurds missed their opportunity for statehood
when other peoples gained their independence.”
Missed? Isn’t this really the traditional way by
which colonialism has come to describe its
injustices and aggressions against the people they
have forcibly colonized? As any school children can
tell you, Kurdistan is not independent because
British colonialism decided to dismember it in order
to create what’s known today as Iraq. Other nations
are independent, not because they are any smarter
than the Kurds, but primarily because colonialism
was on their side.
One of the consequences of the increasing
unpopularity of the Iraq war in the U.S. is that it
has allowed for a fair amount of racism against all
the peoples of Iraq to go unchallenged, mainly
because the racism is clothed in anti-war rhetoric.
So we often hear, mostly from people who otherwise
describe themselves as liberal and progressive, that
the real problem with Iraq is that there is no
comparable figure in that country to our Thomas
Jefferson. Rubin repeats this charge by faulting the
Kurdish leadership for not being like Nelson
Mandela. Now, why would any Kurd want to be like
Mandela or, for that matter, Jefferson? These men,
granted,www.ekurd.net
were great and useful
but they were great and useful in and for particular
contexts. The first was the product of the black
South African struggle against apartheid; the second
was the product of an America that was determined to
Americanize its European roots. What worked for
Jefferson could not have worked for Mandela. So why
expect Kurdish leaders to look up to Mandela as a
role model when their own history is full of great
(great for their context) figures already? Besides,
if Mr. Rubin had bothered to give the Kurdish
history a fair hearing, he would have quickly
learned that from the point of Kurdish politics
Mandela has never been an ally; in fact, if it had
been up to Mr. Mandela, today Saddam would still be
the Butcher of Baghdad and the oppressor of
Kurdistan.
No one can deny that the Kurdish peshmerga played an
important role in America’s effort at regime change
in Iraq. But Mr. Rubin’s mindset, being more or less
identical to the anti-Kurd mindset that defines and
feeds Turkish nationalism, allows him to describe
these brave protectors of Kurdistan as looters. In
one notably hideous and offensive sentence, he even
reduces the whole Kurdish nation into a shameless
bunch of willing ass kissers who, unlike the proud
and honorable Turks, are willing to sell their honor
to the Americans: “Few American diplomats like their
Turkish interlocutors. The Iraqi Kurds, in contrast,
shower visiting U.S. officials with hospitality,
arranging lavish banquets and, in a few cases, even
facilitating liaisons with women” (italics added).
So here you have it, the Kurdish people’s
neo-colonial ruler trashing a people and their way
of life and calling his words scholarship. Who said
liberal minds cannot be contaminated by the
poisonous rhetoric of colonialism.
After this line, one needs to read no further, for
by now the rest of the polemic becomes all too
predictable: the Turks are good, the Kurds are bad.
Virtually the whole world has come to loathe the way
the Turks treat the Kurds, and for good reason, for
what could be more inhuman than a state using its
enormous political and military powers to deny a
people their identity? And yet, Mr. Rubin has no
problem with that. Why?
This requires some explaining. American politics
works pretty much like an investment. At the end of
the presidential game, the contributors from the
winning side, depending on how big their
contributions were, get rewarded with
ambassadorships and thousands of other high-paying
jobs. But the real benefits come later, after these
people have left their jobs and started working as
lobbyists or semi-lobbyists. Their continued access
to government officials, members of congress, and,
of course, the media makes them a hot commodity in
Washington. In other word, we are talking about
people who are allowed, legally, to use their
contacts and influence to exploit the system. (And
you thought only in Kurdistan corruption is rampant.
At least there, as well as elsewhere in the region,
corruption (for complex cultural and political
reasons) is right in the open. Here it is concealed
beneath a thick layer of legality.) As early as
1912, Woodrow Wilson warned against the U.S.
government falling into “the hands of special
interests.” But that’s the way things are today--and
it’s perfectly legal!
Which brings me to Mr. Rubin’s sub-text in his
polemic. It is obvious that Turkish political and
military establishment is the beneficiary of his
piece; they have been raving about it. The piece,
therefore, can be seen as a lobbying effort by Mr.
Rubin on their behalf. While Mr. Rubin finds fault
with Kurdish schoolchildren voicing their desire to
see Kurdistan one day becoming independent,www.ekurd.net
it is very telling that
he has no problem with the jingoistic and racist
rhetoric hurled by Ankara daily against the
Kurdistan Regional Government and against virtually
every other aspect of Kurdish culture and politics.
Let us also not forget that Mr. Rubin is a big
supporter of Israel, whose all-powerful lobby in
Washington all too often tends to take the Turkish
side, especially these days following a high profile
visit recently to Ankara by the Israeli president.
No, Mr. Rubin, the Kurds do not need American pity,
or as you put it in your opening sentence, “On a
strictly emotional level, U.S. support for Iraqi
Kurdistan makes sense.” Kurds, like every other
people, understand quite well how to play politics,
and because the political situation in the region
and beyond has changed so much, taking the Kurds for
granted by anyone is no longer the option. Your old
ways of looking at the Middle East are no longer
relevant.
Dr. Sabah Salih is professor of English at
Bloomsburg University, USA.
kurdistanobserver servehttp.com
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