OLEAN -- By the time you read this, American troops are likely to be in Baghdad. As I write, the vanguard divisions are only 150 miles out and are advancing at four times the speed that lead troops mustered in Gulf War I before they were halted when Bush the Elder lost his nerve.
But when you write for a weekly, you have to be forward-looking in your approach. So I want to bring up something the 500 or so "embedded" journalists in the war have given scant attention -- the Kurds.
Most Americans probably think the word is a reference to new cheese, but the more successful the current war, the bigger the headache the Kurds are for Bush administration planners.
The Kurds are members of what is thought to be the largest indigenous ethnic group without a country on the face of the planet. They almost had one after World War I. They were promised a nation in a couple of peace treaties, but they got screwed out of it. If their area of dominant population -- usually referred to as Kurdistan -- were a sovereign state it would be bigger than France.
There are about 30 million of them, and they mostly live in a singular area -- but in mountainous terrain that covers four countries: Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. About half of them live in Turkey. There are maybe 4.5 million Kurds in northern Iraq. Most are Muslims -- some Sunni, some Shiite.
They originally came down out of the Caucasus many centuries ago, and many have fair skin and blue eyes. Their history in the 20th century is one long tale of travail and of getting the political shaft. Pump the words "Kurds" and "cheated" into any capable search engine on your computer, and it will come back with 1,000-plus hits.
Some say the post-World War I hosing came at the hands of a drunken British surveyor who was supposed to map out Kurdistan but simply forgot to include them when he sat in his tent drawing the borders of the modern state of Iraq. Of such whimsy is history bricked.
It seems more likely that British colonial officials -- under pressure from Turkey to provide that emerging state the largest remnants of the crumbling Ottoman Empire -- either left the Kurds out on purpose, or simply out of demographic ignorance, when the 1920 mapping was done.
In his authoritative work on that period, "A Peace to End All Peace," author David Fromkin wrote: "It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces."
Other historians found the British colonialists who were letting loose of Iraq to be contemptuous fools. One found a 1919 letter of disastrous advice from British political officer W.P. Hay, who wrote his superiors in Baghdad: "The Kurds have the mind of a schoolboy. He requires a beating one day, and a sugar plum the next."
This brilliant diplomatic thinking is coming back to bite western culture in the rump. It may go a long way toward explaining the stout -- if unpopular -- support British Prime Minister Tony Blair is lending Bush the Younger in his signature war on Iraq. Blair may feel collective ancestral guilt.
In 1970, Saddam Hussein -- come to power two years before -- promised the Kurds autonomy and even placed that promise in the new Iraqi constitution. Ha ha. Saddam was just kidding. He reneged. What a joker, that Saddam.
Far from acting like "schoolboys," the trod-upon Kurds have shown themselves quite a capable race -- one much more deserving of self-government than about 90 percent of the countries that have achieved nationhood in recent decades.
And against great odds. The Kurds, you will recall, only 15 years ago this month were on the deadly end of Saddam's hideous helicopter-delivered nerve gas attack against his own citizens.
With the United States clandestinely backing the tyrant in his war against Iran (more hated by Washington than Iraq because of the 1979 hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran), Saddam was peeved that the Kurds seemed to be tilting toward fighting with Iran. He ended up killing about 5,000 citizens of Halabja with the poison gas -- men, women, children, infants.
A dozen years ago this spring, as a Washington reporter, I covered Bush the Elder as he publicly encouraged -- goaded is a better word -- the Kurds to revolt against a weakened Saddam Hussein in the wake of Desert Storm. It seemed like a good bet for the Kurds at the time.
Bush the Elder's rousing speech was filled with implied promise the United States would be right behind them in their valiant quest for nationhood. We were about 11,000 miles behind them.
What the rebelling Kurds didn't know is Dubya's generous dad had given the Republican Guard return of their attack helicopters and several other modern instruments of war. The Kurds were cut to pulp and millions made starving refugees as they hid in the mountains of Turkey and Iran. We did nothing. Several veteran CIA agents quit in disgust over the sellout.
Perhaps out of guilt more than strategy, the United States and Great Britain -- at a shared cost currently nudging about $10 billion -- established and enforced a "No-Fly Zone" over Kurdish territory in northern Iraq as Saddam slowly regained his power and rambunctious inclinations. Under this protective cover, in just a decade, the Kurds have done more for their own unrecognized society than Baghdad has managed for its tattered culture in eight decades. On their own, the Kurds have in 10 years:
They have done all this despite a double layer of trade sanctions -- one under the United Nations embargo from Gulf War I, the other from a punitive Saddam.
Some of this striking progress has been financed by resourcefully shaking down the drivers of Saddam's oil tankers smuggling crude to Turkish borders in the north -- an extraction of "transit fees" that brings in about $1 million a day to the Kurds.
Now comes Operation Iraqi Freedom. As you watch the babbling "embed" reporters describe over and over the glory of American military might driving northward from Kuwait in the south, recall that just a few short weeks ago they were telling you of a second "pincer" invasion from the north, out of Turkey. Never happened.
That's because our proven and trusted ally Turkey so hates the prospect of Kurdish independence its parliament voted to disallow American troops their invasion platform, and even gave up $6 billion in U.S. aid -- some say bribes -- to go along with the launching site plan. Last week a new government in Turkey opened up its airspace to American jets attacking Iraq, but too little too late. The $6 billion aid package is no longer on the table, and Turkey has pretty much lost any chance of serious influence in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Turkey has even sent 1,500 of its own troops southward across the border into Iraq -- and not to help the Americans either. They are there to protect the Turkish homeland. This has led to much head-scratching at the Pentagon and State Department. There are two main factors involved.
One is oil. About a third of the mammoth oil reserves in Iraq are in the Kurdish sector, much of it under Kirkuk, which is the intended capital of the new nation of Kurdistan. It's all there in black and white in a proposed "draft constitution" presented to the Bush administration by Kurdish nation-backers last week, but treated with perfect silence by White House and Pentagon officials.
If you don't think oil is a driving factor here, consider this. When the Marines secured the immense Rumaila oil field in the south last Friday, the stock market shot up 235 points, capping the best week for the Dow industrials since 1983. The insiders know that cheaper oil means a rejuvenated American economy.
The second is fear. Ankara has already threatened war over anything that has a chance of morphing into Kurdish independence, and -- according to the informative expatriate Kurdistan Observer -- Syria, Iran and Turkey all "fear that the merest suggestion of autonomy for the Iraqi Kurds would inflame the nationalist yearning of more than 20 million Kurds who live unhappily within their borders."
So, does President Bush -- who famously yearns for a working model of democracy in the Middle East -- go with the one demanded by history and justice, the best chance of avoiding yet more hypocrisy on the part of the West?
Or does he opt for a try at forging the first Islamic democracy on the planet out of all Iraq itself, a country whose devout Muslim citizens seem to hate all things American and all things western -- a prospect that could turn into a bloody and extended occupation resembling Vietnam?
This is indeed global risk-taking on an unprecedented scale.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 25 2003 |