Time to end Washington’s Use and Abuse Policy towards the Kurds… by Gerald A. Honigman
President Trump’s recent decision to withdraw forces from Syria, along with a 21st century would-be Turkish Sultan, President Erdogan’s, apparent aim to re-create part of the Ottoman Empire, have quickly led to disturbing consequences. More are sure to follow…
Over a dozen Americans and allies were killed by ISIS on January 17th in response to President Trump’s plan. The aim was to further demoralize our troops and Kurds who’ve done most of the fighting and dying for us for a half century now.
The arena is largely part ofgeographical Kurdistan, mostly mountainous regions of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, where Kurds–as the Bible’s Hurrians; Gutian conquerors of Babylon; (probably) Medes; and others–pre-date Arab and Turkish imperial conquerors by millennia.
Kurds have had their language and culture outlawed by Arabs and Turks, while hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered.
In the wake of the collapse of empires in the early 20th century, while Arabs wound up with almost two dozen states (most forcibly Arabized from non-Arabpeoples), some 38 million Kurds remain stateless to date–frequently at others’ mercy.On September 9, 2018, The Jerusalem Post reported a precision Iranian ballistic missile strike on Iraqi Kurds. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was sending a message to others besides Kurds with this attack.
Like Tehran’s centuries’ old rivals–Turks and Arabs–the one thing all agree upon is denial of political (even basic human) rights to millions of Kurds who pre-date the latter two in their region by millennia.
Some twenty-three million Kurds in Turkey–about a fourth of the total population–have been renamed “Mountain Turks” by Ankara. Guess why?
Besides Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal Campaign in “Arab” Iraq in the 1980s, which took some 200,000 Kurdish lives (and many others years earlier), the title of the Kurdish scholar, Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf ‘Against The Kurds, says all one needs to know about how Syrian Arabs have also dealt with these people. The Kurds’ cousins, the Iranians, frequently make a point to hang Kurdish dissidents.
Please follow these excerpts from the JP report…
“The big picture is an Iranian missile threat throughout the region… US allies have technology to confront the threat. Israel has a layered system of missile defense…that’s why the IRGC decided to test its missiles by targeting defenseless Kurdish groups in northern Iraq.”
Note that very last line about “defenseless” Kurds. That’s the tie-in to the problem with Trump’s Syrian withdrawal decision.
So, now let’s really begin…
My work related to this subject pre-dates my doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs over four decades ago, In those days, if you mentioned Kurds, most folks thought of Little Miss Muffet. Rarely were they spoken of even experts in academia–for a variety of reasons…none good.
A major research project of mine became accepted, in much condensed form, by the heavily Nobel laureate-sponsored academic journal, the Fall 1982 Middle East Review…”British Petroleum Politics, Arab Nationalism, and the Kurdish Struggle for Independence.” From there it landed on the recommended reference list of Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politiques/Sciences Po…and so forth. Years later, the President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria wrote most of the Foreword to my book about the quest for justice by many peoples in the region–including, but notjust–Arabs.
Immersed in this truly stateless people’s ordeal for half century–and witnessing how they’ve been ignored by academics and others quick to demand a 22nd state for Arabs–I’ve thus called for a radical shift in American policy…Radical.
For too long we’ve let Turks, Iranians, Arabs, and Big Oil dictate our positions–no matter who else got shafted.
With President Erdogan’s Islamist-oriented government in Turkey, the important American Air Base at Incirlik is now all but useless to Washington.
To replace Incirlik in guarding American interests, I’m proposing constructing a major American base in adjacent Iraqi Kurdistan, situated among people who actually like America.
Next, add another major policy shift…
Instead of arming Kurds with the equivalent of glorified pop guns in comparison to what their enemies possess, America needs to do for Kurds–proven in battle, America’s most effective fighting force against ISIS and other jihadis as well–what it has done for their subjugators and executioners: train and equip Kurdish armored battalions, aircraft squadrons, special forces, and the like.
Washington armed the mostly Shi’a Arab Iraqi military with sophisticated weaponry only to see it abandoned to ISIS or shared with forces in bed with Iran…Say hello to the likely second Shi’a Islamic Republic in the neighborhood.
It’s time to treat allies who, despite shortcomings, share many of our own ideals and vision, and provide them with means to actually win–not just be a nuisance to–their/our enemies. We shamefully used and abandoned them in the ’70s (and later as well) when the Shah of Iran was fighting Saddam (yes, he was around that long). The late, great New York Times’ William Safire wrote a series of op-eds about this, “The Sellout of the Kurds.”
Worse, we repeated this behavior under President George H. W. Bush’s watch. Even President Trump, despite some recent positive actions in the region, gave less than sterling support when 90% of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence only to be subsequently subdued by American tanks. They lost the oil of historically Kurdish majority Kirkuk to Iraqi Arab forces while Washington, again, did nothing…The likely, long term winners? Iran’s ayatollahs.
Everyone next jumped on the Kurds, blaming them for their own misfortune.
“Timing was bad…you angered your non-Kurdish neighbors,” and so on. Again, keep in mind this occurred while Kurds were doing most of the fighting and dying in the fight against ISIS and other assorted jihadis.
Bad timing…really?
Just what time would have been “good” for Kurds, waiting almost a century, to finally receive a share of justice given the nature of those who’ve subjugated them all this time?
Blame the victim when you don’t have backbone to take on the oppressor. It’s much easier that way–and you won’t tick off assorted oil potentates and the Arabs’ American Big Oil partners in ARAMCO and such.
The Jerusalem Post article speaks of Iran’s choice to test precision missiles against “defenseless” Kurds. So…
Why not drastically change this situation, create another bulwark against the feared Shi’a Crescent (Hizbullah’s Lebanon, Assad’s Alawi Shi’a Syria, Iraq, and Iran) –nightmare of Sunni Arabs–and give American influence in a boost at the same time?
But, again, won’t this anger the regional powers that be?
Sure will…but that doesn’t mean such a radical shift in policy shouldn’t be done and isn’t morally correct…
Yes, Turks have been an important NATO ally, and they’re worried about how their own subjugated 23 million “Mountain Turks” will respond to happenings across the border.
But, my bet is that the Turks will remain allies. Ankara is doing lots of business with Iraqi Kurdistan and has access to its oil. A newly-independent or substantially autonomous Kurdistan is not about to do anything stupid to further provoke the powerful Turkish military.
With a powerful American base in the KRG region, and a better-equipped official Kurdish army, the Kurds’ “loose guns” will be better contained. But that’s also up to the Turks. If they continue to suppress “their” Kurds, it will be hard to convince groups like the PKK to ignore this. Furthermore, with Putin’s new Vladimir the Great’s Russia having visions of recreating a Russian empire, unless Ankara has amnesia, it will realize that it needs NATO and America more than it is needed.
Think of the eventual confrontation of the would-be 21st century Czar vs. the 21st century would-be Sultan.
An independent (or substantially autonomous) Kurdistan?
“Destabilizing!” critics complain…Yet, those same voices expecting tens of millions of Kurds to remain stateless, demand a 22nd Arab state, run by Mahmoud Abbas’s latter-day Arafatians or Hamasniks, both which openly state they’ll never accept a Jewish nation as a neighbor, regardless of size. Now, that aboveeventuality wouldn’t be destabilizing–would it? Can you spell H Y P O C R I S Y ?
Imagine what could be… American/Kurdish precision missile batteries as close to Iran as vice-versa, and so forth.
Recall that Kurds were promised independence in at least part of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia after WWI in the wake of the break-up of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Their hopes were shattered after London received a favorable ruling from the League of Nations in 1925, tying the oil of the heavily Kurdish north to their Mandate in the resolution of the Mosul Question.
The dream of Kurdistan was aborted by a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism, as a solely Arab-dominated Iraq was born instead in the entire territory–with the London assisting in suppressing the predictable Kurdish response. Repeated partitions and/or partition plans were okay for the smaller Mandate of Palestine, but not for Mesopotamia.
Powerful rulers in Turkey and Iran–Ataturk and Reza Shah Pahlavi–precluded Kurdish hopes in those areas, and with France imbedded in Syria as one of its two post-WWI Mandates, Mesopotamia (today’s “Iraq”) was thus the Kurds’ best hope.
With Syria currently in shambles, who knows what next might eventually happen–especially if an independent Kurdistan emerges next door in Iraq?
A partitioned or federalized Syria, into Sunni, Alawi Shi’a, and Kurdish autonomous states–as, perhaps, in Iraq as well?
Keep in mind Iraq is as artificial a state as Yugoslavia was in Europe—consisting of hostile groups put together mostly for others’ interests after the collapse of empires during the World War I era. When the glue that was Yugoslavia’s “Strong Man,” Marshal Tito, exited Planet Earth, Yugoslavia broke apart not long afterwards…Has anyone seen Iraq’s Saddam Hussein lately?
We live in potentially very pregnant times, indeed.
Long antagonistic groups should not be forced together if some insist on besting others. Where is it written that the time for the birth of new nations–especially ones which should have been born but were prevented–has come to an end?
As age-old ethnic and religious hatreds and rivalries doomed the unity of post-Tito Yugoslavia, similar if not worse problems between Sunni and Shi’a Arabs;both of the latter’s nasty policies towards Assyrians and Kurds; and Ankara’s use of Iraqi Turkmen to further its own interests in the oil-rich, predominantly Kurdish north, never did–and don’t–bode well for either a unified Iraq or Syria.
Rather than abandoning loyal allies yet again, which such a withdrawal from Syria would represent at this time, it’s long past due, instead, for an American foreign policy shift to occur, and that Kurds take their place among the family of nations
Comments are closed.
