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How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood is
Shaping Iraq and the Middle East
12.8.2008
By Joshua Partlow-
Book Review
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August
12, 2008
In journalistic accounts of the Iraq war, the Kurds,
if they are mentioned at all, tend to be used as a
counterexample. Kurdistan is a place of relative
calm amid chaotic violence. Its construction boom
highlights the economic wasteland elsewhere. Its
politicians are stalwart partners of the United
States in a country bristling under U.S. occupation.
A Kurdish public relations campaign describes the
region simply as "the other Iraq."
In "Invisible Nation," the first thorough,
book-length chronicle of the Kurds' recent history
and their role in the war, BBC reporter Quil
Lawrence doesn't deny these differences. But his
brisk and engaging narrative makes clear just how
tenuous -- and anomalous -- is this period of
relative peace and prosperity for the Kurds of Iraq.
They endured a genocidal campaign by Saddam Hussein
and have been pushed to the corners of the four
nations they primarily inhabit: Iraq,www.ekurd.net
Turkey, Iran and Syria.
With a population of about 25 million, Lawrence
notes, the Kurds may be the largest ethnic group in
the world without an independent homeland.
"So in a dearth of good news, why isn't the United
States crowing about this one great achievement in
Iraq?" Lawrence writes. "Because Kurdistan's success
could be cataclysmic. Like no event since the 1948
creation of Israel, a declared Kurdish state within
the borders of Iraq will unite the entire region in
opposition, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf."
Facing such a hostile neighborhood, the Kurds who
live in Iraq's three northern provinces have tried
to carve out a niche of near-autonomy just on the
safe side of independence. Lawrence, who writes a
sympathetic but balanced portrait of the Kurds,
describes their leaders' gradual transition from
guerrilla fighters to statesmen, including how they
were betrayed by their ostensible allies (such as
Henry Kissinger and the shah of Iran,www.ekurd.net
who effectively handed
over the Kurds to Hussein in 1975) and how they
often squandered their best opportunities. For
example, the belated U.S. creation of a no-fly zone
over Kurdistan after the Gulf War helped protect the
Kurds from Hussein -- "Washington unwittingly had
become the midwife to a de facto Kurdish state,"
Lawrence writes -- only to have the two leading
Kurdish parties slug it out for years in sporadic
civil war.
"Invisible Nation" briefly traces the ancient
history of the Kurds but really begins in earnest
with their struggle for survival during Hussein's
vicious campaign against them in the late 1980s. The
book continues through the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq and into the time of the subsequent occupation,
trailing off in 2006. The now-familiar themes of the
Iraq war echo in the Kurds' story as well. The
intelligence, for one thing, rarely panned out.
Before the invasion, the Bush administration claimed
that al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants were
operating in Kurdish territory inside Iraq. But
Lawrence shows those claims were riddled with errors
and mostly wrong. While the militant group Ansar
al-Islam operated in Kurdistan, for example, no
links to Hussein or al-Qaeda were proved. |
Invisible Nation by Quil Lawrence
Quil Lawrence is the Middle East correspondent for
BBC/ PRI’s The World, and has spent much of the last
seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan.
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And the opening
airstrike of the war, a failed attempt to kill
Hussein in southern Baghdad, was the result of an
elaborate but often ineffectual
intelligence-gathering operation based in Kurdistan
and led by CIA informant Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Karim
al-Kasnazani, a Kurd and Sufi leader who was paid
millions for his followers' work as spies.
In Kurdistan, as elsewhere in Iraq, faulty U.S.
planning had unintended consequences. Sometimes this
benefited the Kurds. The Bush administration's
inability to persuade Turkey to allow a ground
invasion of Iraq from the north prevented thousands
of Turkish troops from accompanying U.S. troops and
may have averted guerrilla war between the Turks and
Kurds -- something that "may go down in history as
the luckiest thing that happened to America
regarding Iraq," Lawrence writes.
The partnership between Americans and Kurds was far
from easy, and many Kurdish officials have expressed
exasperation over the years. Lawrence recounts how
Iraq's current foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari,
couldn't even walk through the State Department
doors as a Kurdish emissary during the Gulf War. On
a visit to Washington in 1991, the best he got was a
cup of coffee with junior staffers at a cafe around
the corner from the State Department's C Street
headquarters. After the 2003 invasion, Lawrence
says, there was considerable Kurdish frustration
with Gen. David Petraeus, then a division commander
in northern Iraq. Many Kurds were upset because
Petraeus was working with their Sunni Arab enemies
in Mosul and not giving Kurdish soldiers more
control in what they saw as their territory.
Lawrence, who has reported extensively in Kurdistan
over the past eight years, dwells less on how the
Kurds have governed their territory in the later
years of the war. He only alludes to the darker side
of Kurdish rule: the seemingly unlimited power of
the rival Barzani and Talabani clans over the
population, the allegations of corruption among
government officials, the mistreatment of Arabs
living in Kurdistan.
But he succeeds in drawing lively portraits of the
Kurds who have worked against terrible odds for the
rights of their people. Their stories remind us how
many of Iraq's top politicians -- President Jalal
Talabani, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih,
Foreign Minister Zebari, to name just a few --
endured prison torture, assassination attempts and
long years of war on behalf of Kurdistan and against
the country they are now helping to govern. "There
are short- and there are long-term deals," Talabani
says at one point in the book. And it is not
entirely clear which kind the Kurds have entered
into with Iraq.
Hardcover
ISBN: 0-8027-1611-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-8027-1611-8
Price: $25.95
288 pages
Size: 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
April 2008
Quil Lawrence is the Middle East correspondent for
BBC/ PRI’s The World, and has spent much of the last
seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan. He has reported
for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times,
and the Christian Science Monitor, and has won
various awards for his journalism, including the
Harry Chapin Media Judges Award and the Judges Award
from the National Conference of Community
Broadcasters. He lives in Jerusalem, and this is his
first book.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, ,
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