Over the week­end, I heard from a cou­ple of friends in the region about goings on there. The first is from a jour­nal­ist buddy based in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan work­ing for a major news­magazine. (I don’t want to scotch his access, so I won’t print his name.) The sec­ond is from Aykut Uzun, my dri­ver, trans­la­tor and fixer when we were being tailed by the Turk­ish police south of Diyarbakir.
My journo buddy tells me that I’m “not miss­ing much so far.” Also, the Kurds are over­whelm­ingly pro-war. “Talk to the Kurds about the reck­less geopo­lit­i­cal games W is play­ing and you are met with a blank stare and a story about Hal­abja,” he writes. “Ask the KDP, PUK or INC about the same thing and you get a lec­ture about the nefar­i­ous inter­ests of the French.“
He also pro­vides good logis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion and some alarm­ing news. The Syr­ian and Turk­ish bor­ders are closed right now, which I knew, but the route through Iran is open — for freak­ishly huge bribes. (He men­tions $5,000.) There’s also a rumor that Turkey is about to open the bor­der, but that is, as yet, just a rumor.
Aykut in Ankara is more pes­simistic. He works mostly as a tour guide, for which he got a four-year degree and it’s usu­ally good money, since tourism is the biggest indus­try in Turkey. Not now.
“Due to this fuc…g war, tourism busi­ness is very bad in Turkey now,” he writes. “So I can’t say that per­son­ally I am doing well.” He does men­tion the rumor that Turkey will open the bor­der, but it may be only for five days. Then he comes to the Turk­ish prepa­ra­tions for war and America’s deal-making.
“I don’t give any chance to the pos­si­bil­ity of Turkey’s rejec­tion of U.S. troops,” he writes. (Well, it looks like he’s right. Mon­day may see the deal con­sum­mated.) “If she [Turkey] doesn’t allow, the eco­nomic pro­gram that has been con­tin­ued with IMF after the last cri­sis in 2001 will be dam­aged very badly. As every­body knows, the U.S. is very effi­cient [he means influ­en­tial] with the IMF, and Turkey needs the help of it.“

It seems Turkey is about to over­es­ti­mate U.S. patience, but still I believe U.S. needs Turkey for this war. The other pos­si­bil­i­ties are much more expen­sive and dif­fi­cult… Some ana­lysts claim that U.S. can do the oper­a­tion with­out Turkey, but this would cost 40 or 50 bil­lion dol­lars more to her. So you see we are fair. We want half of this… Turkey is dri­ving such a hard bar­gain, because we took a big les­son [I think he means “loss”] from the first Gulf War. U.S. had promised us to reim­burse our losses which would occur after the war. You are the one who knows Turkey’s losses. You talked with the peo­ple in south­east Turkey. Now the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment wants a “writ­ten agreement.”

After he wrote this email, the Turks and Amer­i­cans seemed close to an agree­ment that would give Turkey $5 bil­lion grants and $10 mil­lion in loans, with a bridge loan imme­di­ately avail­able to help pump the Turk­ish econ­omy once the shoot­ing starts.
It’s worth not­ing that the cash fig­ures men­tioned in the Times story are less than were being reported ear­lier this week. And the story never comes out and says a deal for Iraqi Kur­dis­tan is in the works, but con­sid­er­ing the quotes from Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Yasar Yakis, it’s pretty obvi­ous that’s what’s hap­pen­ing.
“A Kur­dis­tan should not be set up,” Yakis said. The Times also heav­ily reports Turk­ish con­cerns regard­ing Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Two con­cerns were that U.S. weapons don’t fall into Kur­dish hands and that Turk­ish troops be under Turk­ish com­mand (This is a big one, and con­tra­dicts reports from ear­lier this week that Turk­ish troops would be under Amer­i­can com­mand.)
Things are quickly get­ting nasty in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.

“No one wants another fight, of course,” Hoshi­yar Zebari, spokesman for the Kur­dish Demo­c­ra­tic Party, one of the two main Kur­dish polit­i­cal groups, told reporters in Arbil on Sun­day.
“But if there’s a forced incur­sion, done under the pre­text of ‘I’m going to give you forced aid’, then believe me there will be uncon­trolled clashes,” he said.
“And it will be bad for the image of the United States, Britain and other coun­tries who want to help Iraq, to see two of their allies, Turkey and Kur­dis­tan, at each other’s throats.“
In Tehran, Iran­ian Kurd par­lia­men­tar­i­ans also voiced con­cern about Turk­ish inten­tions in Iraq and accused Ankara of seek­ing to con­trol Kirkuk and Mosul, once part of the Ottoman empire.
The 22-strong Iran­ian Kur­dish par­lia­men­tary fac­tion wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Euro­pean Union lead­ers and Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Moham­mad Khatami.
“Who in the world does not know that Turks have a desire for Kirkuk oil and annex­a­tion of Kirkuk and Mosul to their soil?” the let­ters said. “Autho­riz­ing a Turk­ish mil­i­tary pres­ence in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan means autho­riz­ing geno­cide and ter­mi­na­tion of Iraq’s ter­ri­to­r­ial integrity.”

And as things get nas­tier in Kur­dis­tan, Iraqi National Con­gress front­man Ahmed Cha­l­abi is get­ting increas­ingly bit­ter over what looks to be a rapidly decreas­ing role for him­self and his orga­ni­za­tion.
Two weeks ago, the White House said Cha­l­abi will be leader of a tran­si­tional coali­tion gov­ern­ment that will take over from Gen. Tommy Franks when the shoot­ing stops. How­ever, the Wash­ing­ton Post reported a few days ago that “Once secu­rity was estab­lished and weapons of mass destruc­tion were located and dis­abled, a U.S. admin­is­tra­tor would run the civil­ian gov­ern­ment and direct recon­struc­tion and human­i­tar­ian aid.” Cha­l­abi is, pre­dictably, dis­tressed by this turn of events. In an op-ed for Daily Tele­graph, he wrote, “The lead­er­ship and gov­er­nance of Iraq is, with­out excep­tion, an exclu­sive right of the Iraqi peo­ple … There must be no gap in the sov­er­eignty over Iraq by Iraqis. We reject notions of for­eign mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment or United Nations admin­is­tra­tion for Iraq.“
He con­tin­ues and writes that his tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment should assume sov­er­eignty “the moment” Sad­dam is removed, but admit­ted that his gov­ern­ment would be will­ing to work with the U.S. mil­i­tary to estab­lish order, secure the bor­der, etc. He dis­misses the idea of Iraq as an Arab Yugoslavia as a “myth” borne of the “con­ve­nient pre­con­cep­tion that fits the West­ern image of unruly and war­ring tribes.“
“There is no record in the his­tory of our land of a Shia vil­lage attack­ing a Sunni vil­lage or an Arab quar­ter attack­ing a Kur­dish quar­ter,” he writes. (Yes, but there is a lot on record about Kurds attack­ing other Kurds when the PUK and the KDP warred over smug­gling tar­iffs in 1995 – 96.)
It should be noted that the Guardian story reports him as angry over the instal­la­tion of a mil­i­tary gov­er­nor, pre­sum­ably Franks. If the Iraqi oppo­si­tion objects to a mil­i­tary gov­er­nor post-Saddam, they likely will be even less happy with a U.S. civil­ian admin­is­tra­tor as a fur­ther step to be taken before the coun­try is handed over to the INC.
Aya­tol­lah Moham­mad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Iran-backed Supreme Coun­cil of Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI), who recently ordered 5,000 SCIRI troops into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, said Iraqis would resist, per­haps vio­lently, any attempt to impose a gov­ern­ment on them.
“If the Amer­i­cans do this, they will dis­cover this is a mis­take,” Hakim said.
So what’s the White House’s game? Why are these “plans” and “blue­prints” get­ting leaked espe­cially when the media reports of the plans are send­ing the Iraqi oppo­si­tion into a grand mal tizzy?
The Iraqi oppo­si­tion, divided as it is, doesn’t appear qual­i­fied enough to run a taco stand, much less run a coun­try that’s been dev­as­tated by two, com­ing up on three, wars and 12 years of sanc­tions since 1980. And that’s pretty much been the State Department’s objec­tion to the Iraqi oppo­si­tion all along. Fur­ther­more, Cha­l­abi is dis­trusted by the Depart­ment of State, the CIA and most of the rest of the for­eign pol­icy estab­lish­ment. He seems a bit too eager, for some­one con­victed in Jor­dan of finan­cial fraud and sen­tenced to 22 years of hard labor, to get his hands on the levers of power — and the purse strings — of oil-rich Iraq. But the civil­ian hawks run­ning the war plan­ning, such as Paul Wol­fowitz and Richard Perle, are big-time back­ers of Cha­l­abi. Could the leak­ing of the rebuild­ing ideas be part of the ongo­ing war between Colin Pow­ell at State and Rums­feld, Wol­fowitz at the DoD and Perle at the Defense Pol­icy Board? Since the admin­is­tra­tion of Iraq would, pre­sum­ably, fall to the State Depart­ment after the mil­i­tary is done with it, per­haps the goal may be to dis­credit the INC — and Cha­l­abi in par­tic­u­lar — so that State, which never wanted this headache to begin with, can have a freer hand in run­ning the place with­out hav­ing to deal with the INC.