A WORD FOR THE KURDS

Paul Greenberg


It's an old saying: Be careful what you wish
for; you just might get it. In spades. The latest
illustration of that adage is provided by our
own vice president, for Joe Biden is finally
getting his wish. He made it back in 2006,
another time when Iraq was falling apart in a
swirl of blood and explosions. He was Sen.
Biden back then but already fancied himself
some kind of foreign-policy guru, and his
response to Iraq's collapse that year was
simplicity itself: Just go ahead and let it fall
apart -- one part for each of its ethnic/
religious components: Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds.
The old Iraq would be balkanized, all would
get what they wanted, and peace would reign!
Problem solved.
Now, headline after headline, we're seeing just
how the Biden Plan would have played out as
Iraq slides into the same kind of bloody chaos
that was rampant in 2006 -- before a president
and commander-in-chief named George W.
Bush woke up, fired his secretary of defense,
and got himself a general with a new and this
time effective strategy.
That president's 180-degree turnabout saved
the day -- and Iraq. The new commander in the
field would be David Petraeus, who had pretty
much written the book on what's called
counterinsurgency warfare, and his strategy
was nicknamed The Surge. It proved
surprisingly successful in a surprisingly short
time -- with a surprising minimum of
American casualties. The result: Iraq held
together. Till now.
But this new president and nominal
commander-in-chief decided to abandon Iraq
by 2011, and abandoned it was -- right on
schedule. And right on schedule it's now fallen
apart. Although it might have taken only a
modest American force to keep it together and
stabilized. The same kind of American force --
it's called a deterrent -- that has stood guard in
Europe and on the Korean peninsula for years,
for decades.
Anyone who knew anything about the Middle
East, even a little, could have foreseen what
leaving the Iraqis to their own deeply divisive
devices would lead to: bloody chaos. Which is
just where it now has led.
Welcome to Obamaland, where a president's
fondest dreams can come true -- and be
revealed as cruel illusions.
Barack Obama seems to assume that the world
is the simple place he wants it to be, and not
as it sadly is -- full of treacherous dangers that
defy simple "solutions." His has been the
familiar isolationist dream and lure: All that
America has to do is withdraw from the world,
and we'll live happily forever after. That's not
a foreign policy; it's a fairy tale. And one that
Americans have regularly paid a high price
for. At least since the isolationist Thirties led
predictably enough to the ferocious Forties and
the greatest war in history.
Now, five years into Barack Obama's reset of
American foreign policy, his dream world has
turned into a nightmare scenario -- see
Ukraine and what has happened in Crimea,
and is still happening in Syria and Iraq and
Afghanistan and ... anywhere else this
president has chosen to ignore. A world
without American involvement, it turns out, is
a world without peace.
The whole Arab Spring, once so full of bright
hope, has shriveled and turned into darkest
winter. At this juncture in the creation of
Barack Obama's not so brave new world, it is
too late to restore the old Iraq; not all the
king's men and all the king's armored divisions
can put it back together again. By now it has
broken into at least three parts, each of which
may splinter soon enough.
Told to choose between Sunni and Shi'a in
Iraq, I'd take the Kurds. They've been betrayed
time and again in their tragic history -- at least
since they were promised independence after
the First World War and then denied it by a
succession of imperial, and imperious, world-
shapers. From our own Henry Kissinger,
master of unreal Realpolitik, to both the shah
of Iran and Iraq's late and unlamented Saddam
Hussein. Let's not betray the Kurds yet again.
Now is finally the Kurds' time. Having sided
with a succession of dictators in the Middle
East, why not finally ally ourselves with a long
oppressed people who have built a homeland
of their own where democratic principles are
increasingly honored instead of being trashed
-- including a decent respect for women's
rights, the rule of law and private property.
Even the Turks, the Kurds' old oppressors,
now see the wisdom of supporting them. Why
don't we?
One of the persistent tragedies of modern Arab
history has been that, whenever a budding
moderation has been challenged by the latest
form of Arab fanaticism, the fanatics have a
way of winning out. That fatal flaw in the
nomadic character was noted by the still
redoubtable T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), the
Englishman who adopted, maybe even
invented, Arab nationalism. Col. Lawrence
would diagnose that trait in his magnificent,
romantic, poetic, consistently amusing, and
still deeply insightful history of the Arab
Revolt he led with such success, not to
mention élan. He called his book "Seven
Pillars of Wisdom," and here is one of them:
"Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a
cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their
minds made them obedient servants. None of
them would escape the bond till success had
come, and with it responsibility and duty and
engagements. Then the idea was gone and the
work ended -- in ruins.
"Without a creed they could be taken to the
four corners of the world (but not to heaven)
by being shown the riches of earth and the
pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this
fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who
had nowhere to lay his head and who
depended for his food on charity or birds, then
they would all leave their wealth for his
inspiration. They were incorrigibly children of
the idea, feckless and color-blind, to whom
body and spirit were forever and inevitably
opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full
of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule,
but with more of ardor and more fertile in
belief than any other in the world. They were
a people of starts, for whom the abstract was
the strongest motive, the process of infinite
courage and variety, and the end nothing."
All around the Middle East, minorities on its
periphery wait to rise and escape the latest
wave of Arab fanaticism, which sweeps over
what used to be Iraq even now as the "Islamic
State of Syria and the Levant" overflows out of
the long-neglected chaos in Syria, and
threatens to swamp not just the unsteady
regime in Baghdad but neighboring Jordan and
everything else in its violent wake.
Christian Maronites in Lebanon and Copts in
Egypt, Jews in Israel and, yes, Kurds in a
reborn Kurdistan are but a few of the groups
that make up the periphery of peoples around
the Arab heartland, and that offer the one
thing the state formerly known as Iraq always
lacked: cohesion. And hope, even the hope of
reasonable rule. Why not give them all a
fighting chance not only to survive in that
dangerous neighborhood but to thrive?