Category Archives: Kurds

Greetings from Kurdistan

Posted on by
4
arbil.jpg
The city of Arbil from a fortress on a hill (© 2002 Christo­pher Allbritton)

Last week I sent an email to Karzan Taher Aziz, a young Kurd I met in Arbil last sum­mer. He and I became friends, and he helped me with trans­la­tion when I didn’t want to deal with the KDP’s offi­cial min­der and trans­la­tor. I asked him about the mood in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan toward the Turks and the Amer­i­cans, con­sid­er­ing the alleged plans to have Turkey invade when war comes. Today he replied. The only changes I’ve made to this email were to remove his email address (for his pro­tec­tion) and cleaned up some punc­tu­a­tion and a touch of gram­mar here and there.

From: Karzan Aziz
To: Christopher Allbritton
Date: Mon Mar 10, 2003 01:23:24 PM EST
Subject: Greetings from Kurdistan
Dear Christopher:
How are you dear friend? How are doing? I was thinking about you. I hope this e-mail finds you in a good health. thank you very much for your e-mail. How things are going in NY? I hope your country all the best.
I'm so sorry that I could not reply [to] you soon, but I'm v. busy these days, but any way i tried to reply you the internet line was not working properly.
dear friend, concerning your questions... regarding Turkey, we feel that we're betrayed by them. i think you know about the demonstration against the Turks, people have got very worried here because of Turkey. As far as i'm concerned i do believe that turkey will face problems if invaded Kurdistan, as i have met so many people they all repeat the same thing "as we have been fighting against Saddam from many decades, we are ready to fight Turkey some more other decades." i don't feel betrayed by America because you know the coming stage will decide whether we will be betrayed or not. though we, unfortunately, as kurds are used [to] wars but this time is entirely different from ever since -- people are scared here and they are afraid of chemical or biological war.
if you are asking about me i'm just fine, thank you very much, and you asked me whether i have met any journalists or not!!!!! yes i have and i'm working as a translator with some scandinavian journalists and i'm going to be getting a translation-job with a German TV. And if you wanted to ask me any thing, any information, please just feel free to e-mail me. O.K.??
With The Best Of Wishes
YOURS MOST FAITHFULLY
KARZAN TAHER

Karzan’s a smart guy and he has a lot of con­nec­tions, and I believe him when he says the Kurds are will­ing to fight the Turks should they invade. Whether they win or not is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent ques­tion, but Karzan’s report meshes with talks I’ve had with oppo­si­tion mem­bers who say they will fight to pro­tect what they’ve built in the north.
An inter­est­ing note, how­ever. The Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, based in Suleimaniya in the south near the Iran­ian bor­der, has agreed in prin­ci­ple to a fed­eral Iraqi gov­ern­ment with the regions based on geog­ra­phy instead of eth­nic­ity. The Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party, how­ever, con­tin­ues to hold out for fed­er­ally pro­tected eth­nic divi­sions. (You can read the orig­i­nal pro­posed con­sti­tu­tions given to me by KDP Deputy Prime Min­is­ter Sami Abdul­rah­man here and here. The first is the fed­eral con­sti­tu­tion and the sec­ond is for the Kur­dish entity within a fed­eral Iraq.) The PUK’s sup­port for geo­graphic divi­sions is a neat diplo­matic sleight-of-hand, since the north­ern three gov­er­nances are pre­dom­i­nantly Kur­dish any­way with a pop­u­la­tion of between 4 mil­lion and 5 mil­lion. The KDP’s con­tin­ued sup­port for an ethnic-based con­sti­tu­tion isn’t sur­pris­ing. The KDP authored the con­sti­tu­tions, it’s older and more con­ser­v­a­tive than the Marxist-inspired PUK and has its roots in Kur­dish eth­nic­ity. The activ­i­ties of its founder, Mustafa Barzani, went a long way toward chang­ing Kurds’ loy­al­ties from the fam­ily and clan to the idea of a Kur­dish nation as a whole. To back down on eth­nic­ity as the defin­ing nature of the Kur­dish entity in the north would be to repu­di­ate every­thing Mustafa Barzani stood for. And the cur­rent pres­i­dent of the KDP, Masoud Barzani, Mustafa’s son, isn’t about to do that.
In other news, French Pres­i­dent Jacques Chirac made it plain that a French veto is forth­com­ing at tomorrow’s (?) vote/smackdown at the Secu­rity Coun­cil. This is not a big sur­prise, since France has been say­ing it wouldn’t “allow” a new res­o­lu­tion autho­riz­ing war, implic­itly or explic­itly, for a while now, but it is an attempt to avoid being the lone veto if the United States man­ages to round up nine votes on the coun­cil. France’s pub­lic voic­ing of its inten­tions is to buck up Rus­sia, which has also said it opposes any res­o­lu­tion that might be inter­preted as autho­riz­ing war, but com­mon wis­dom is that Rus­sia would abstain rather than veto a res­o­lu­tion. With France def­i­nitely in the “non” col­umn, Rus­sia will have more cover to say, “nyet.“
[UPDATE: Strat­for is report­ing that Pak­istan Prime Min­is­ter Zafarul­lah Khan Jamali said today that his coun­try will abstain on the vote. “We will do what is best for our coun­try,” Jamali said after a ses­sion of Par­lia­ment. “It is not best for my coun­try to sup­port war against Iraq.”]
This means, obvi­ously, the res­o­lu­tion is kaput, and the United States has no rea­son to wait until March 17. The world could be fac­ing war as early as this week, although it’s likely the United States will wait a few days to give inspec­tors and other for­eign nation­als time to flee Iraq and to attempt some sem­blance of tac­ti­cal sur­prise. The dark nights over Bagh­dad grow short and the heat of April is stalk­ing closer. The U.S. war machine won’t wait much longer, nor, from a tac­ti­cal stand­point, should it. Why give the Iraqis more time to posi­tion their forces or stage a pre­emp­tive strike of their own on Amer­i­can troops? That’s the dan­ger of ignor­ing the U.N. Not only does it free the hands of the U.S. mil­i­tary, but it removes any rea­son for the Iraqis to hold their fire, too. Sad­dam no doubt feels that war is com­ing regard­less of what the Secu­rity Coun­cil decides, so it might be bet­ter to strike first and inflict as much dam­age as pos­si­ble. Of course, he would then unite the Secu­rity Coun­cil –behind– against him, but if he plans on turn­ing Bagh­dad into Stal­in­grad on the Tigris, what does he have left to lose?

Did the Turkish vote signal a more sinister agenda?

Posted on by
4
03cnd-span-kurds.2.jpg
In Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled north­ern Iraq, thou­sands protested against Turk­ish plans to move into the region dur­ing an American-led inva­sion of Iraq.
 (© 2002 Getty Images)

This week­end, the Turk­ish par­lia­ment rejected the United States’ offers of bil­lions of dol­lars in loans and grants for host­ing up to 62,000 troops to be used in a north­ern front in the upcom­ing inva­sion of Iraq. The vote, 264−250−19, was a squeaker — but four shy of the absolute major­ity needed to pass.
At the time, I said that if the Turk­ish mil­i­tary stayed out of this polit­i­cal process, it might be a good sign that the world was wit­ness­ing the begin­ning of a more mature Turk­ish democ­racy, one that isn’t held hostage to the threat of a mil­i­tary “inter­ven­tion” by the gen­er­als who are leery of irri­tat­ing the United States.
But dis­turb­ing reports from Strat­for (Paid reg­is­tra­tion req.) indi­cate there may have been a more omi­nous rea­son for the vote. British intel­li­gence, accord­ing to Strat­for, believes the vote was engi­neered by the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party lead­er­ship when mem­bers were allowed to “vote their con­science.” As it stands, Par­lia­ment, rather than the exec­u­tive branch of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, is respon­si­ble for reject­ing U.S. troops. This allows the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to ease the pres­sure from Wash­ing­ton by claim­ing inno­cence in the mat­ter — “What can we say, my friend? We are a democ­racy.” And if U.S. troops are denied the north­ern route, Turkey will have a free hand when war breaks out.

The strat­egy is to cause U.S. forces to invade Iraq from the south only — leav­ing the Kur­dish north at Turkey’s mercy in the event of war. If the United States attacks, Turk­ish forces — claim­ing to act in the inter­est of pre­vent­ing anar­chy — would launch their own action against Kur­dish areas in the north. Within sev­eral days, sources say, the Turks would crush the Kurds; mean­while, U.S. bomb­ings would weaken Iraqi forces in the north. Once the regime in Bagh­dad and the army began to weaken, Turk­ish forces would fall upon Iraqi gar­risons — and paint their own actions as proof of Turkey’s alliance with the United States. [From Stratfor]

With U.S. forces tied up in the south and the Kurds paci­fied, Turkey would move between 250,000 and 300,000 troops to encir­cle the rich oil-fields of Kirkuk and Mosul, allow­ing them to then say to the world and to the EU — to which Turkey aspires for mem­ber­ship — that it has pre­vented Amer­ica from occu­py­ing the entirety of Iraq.
Back­ing up this hypoth­e­sis are media reports from the Turk­ish press. The Turk­ish paper Cumhuriyet reported yes­ter­day that Chief of Gen­eral Staff Gen. Hilmi Ozkok “cau­tioned Prime Min­is­ter Abdul­lah Gul against any adverse devel­op­ments that could emerge in north­ern Iraq and threaten Turkey?s national secu­rity in the event of a war.” Meet­ing with Gul on Sun­day, Ozkok report­edly told the pre­mier that con­sid­er­ing the sit­u­a­tion after Parliament?s refusal of the pro­posal, “urgent mea­sures should be taken in order to pre­vent the estab­lish­ment of a Kur­dish state in the region.” Also, Turkey’s For­eign Min­is­ter Yasara Yakis said the Iraqi Kurds’ burn­ing of the Turk­ish flag in protest of a pos­si­ble Turk­ish inva­sion was “a provo­ca­tion.“
Amer­ica could be fac­ing a dread­ful choice: Inter­vene in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan and north­ern Iraq — and gain the oil-fields — by engag­ing Turk­ish forces on Iraqi soil or stand down and accept a par­tial vic­tory?
The thought of NATO allies Turkey and the United States actu­ally com­ing to blows is almost incon­ceiv­able. Most likely, some kind of deal would be worked out, allow­ing the Turks a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the oil rev­enue from the region. But the treat­ment of the Kurds would be more wor­ri­some.
I’ve been assured by Kur­dish friends and sources that if the Turks come into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, they will have a fight on their hands. The recent demon­stra­tions tend to back that up. But despite my friends’ promises of a “slaugh­ter” and a guerilla cam­paign, I sus­pect 250,000 heav­ily armed Turks with NATO train­ing would be able to quell 70,000 pesh­merga light infantry the Kurds cur­rently field. (Let’s give them 150,000 to account for new recruits.) How quickly the Turks would pre­vail is open to con­jec­ture, how­ever. The last Kur­dish war lasted from 1984 – 1998, and Iraqi Kur­dis­tan is even more moun­tain­ous than south­east Turkey.
(Already the Kurds are cir­cling the wag­ons. The Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment announced that that the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan and the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party would form a Joint Higher Lead­er­ship coun­cil that would coor­di­nate polit­i­cal, mil­i­tary, admin­is­tra­tion and for­eign and domes­tic pol­icy. KDP pres­i­dent Mas­soud Barzani and PUK secretary-general Jalal Tal­a­bani will chair the coun­cil.)
Addi­tion­ally, an extended cam­paign by the Turks in the north would cause the Ira­ni­ans to move in to pro­tect their inter­ests in the region, too. (The Aya­tol­lah Sayed Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakim’s Badr Brigade of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq has already moved in.) With­out the Amer­i­cans to play ref­eree, every­thing north of Bagh­dad and Tikrit will fall into bloody civil war.
Now we see why those ships are still idling off the Turk­ish coast and the United States is hop­ing to per­suade Turkey to allow U.S. troops. A chaotic north­ern Iraq isn’t in anyone’s inter­ests. But I won­der if any amount of cash would be enough to per­suade the Turks, because if their plans do include seiz­ing the north­ern Iraqi oil-fields (cov­eted for years,) they won’t need the Amer­i­cans’ money.
ASIDE:I’ve writ­ten sev­eral times about Turkey’s plans for Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, includ­ing here, here and here. At one point, back in Octo­ber, I said, “Keep watch­ing the Turks. They hold the key to all of this.” Seems I was right after all…
ASIDE II:By the way, why has the United States and Europe still refused to pro­vide gas masks or pro­tec­tive gear to the Kurds in the case of chem­i­cal attacks, since they’ve been attacked with chem­i­cal weapons before? Could it be that Turkey has effec­tively sealed the bor­der, mak­ing it extremely dif­fi­cult to get human­i­tar­ian sup­plies into the region?

Some emails from the front and what the hell is happening with the opposition?

Posted on by
2
iraqmap.jpg

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.

U.S. to conquered Iraqis: Pay up

Posted on by
Reply

You know, every night I go to sleep think­ing that the events of the day had pissed me off to such an extent that there was no way I could get more dis­grun­tled at the venal­ity of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. And every morn­ing I get up, read the news­pa­pers and wires and I’m inevitably proven wrong.
The White House has said Iraq’s oil wealth will be used to pay for its own recon­struc­tion fol­low­ing a U.S. inva­sion.
“Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a rather wealthy coun­try,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher. “Iraq has tremen­dous resources that belong to the Iraqi peo­ple. And so there are a vari­ety (of) means that Iraq has to be able to shoul­der much of the bur­den for their own recon­struc­tion.“
Iraq has tremen­dous resources that belong to the Iraqi peo­ple. Yes, and why should the Iraqis be forced, in effect, to pay for the bombs that will soon rain down upon their heads? And this nugget from Fleis­cher: “It is, of course, the inten­tion of the United States gov­ern­ment to make cer­tain the peo­ple of Iraq are not the vic­tims in a war that would have been started by their lead­ers.“
I stand, mouth agape, at the audac­ity of the empha­sized quote. Last time I checked, Bush was argu­ing for “pre-emptive defense,” which sure sounds like a ratio­nale for start­ing a war.
But I digress. “Fleis­cher also pointed out that once Iraq is dis­armed and Sad­dam is out of office, there will be no rea­son to con­tinue to impose eco­nomic sanc­tions on Bagh­dad and trade will be reopened with Iraq.“
What he actu­ally said was, “Once sanc­tions are lifted from Iraq, that pro­vides a lot more means for the rebuild­ing and the recon­struc­tion of Iraq.“
This is a exactly what the Iraqi oppo­si­tion does not want. As Feisal al-Istrabadi, a found­ing mem­ber of the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy said last Mon­day at Colum­bia, the U.N. should not lift the sanc­tions but instead sus­pend them. The ulti­mate lift­ing of the sanc­tions is the incen­tive for Iraq to truly democ­ra­tize.
Note that Fleis­cher didn’t say “sus­pend;” he said “lifted.” And the give and take of the press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, at which all of this came about, leaves one with the impres­sion that the White House is all about lift­ing the sanc­tions as opposed to sus­pend­ing them. This is a cru­cial point, obvi­ously, because the sanc­tions allow for the United Nations to man­age the finances of Iraq as a trust. While Sad­dam has man­aged to squir­rel away bil­lions, by and large the national bud­get is not fully con­trolled by his gov­ern­ment.
Istra­badi wants to avoid mak­ing the pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ment, pre­sum­ably headed by financier Ahmed Cha­l­abi, “pro­vi­sional” in the Iraqi sense of the word — i.e., in power for years and years. (Since 1968, the con­sti­tu­tions gov­ern­ing Iraq have been pro­vi­sional con­sti­tu­tions and not per­ma­nent. Thus, there is no per­ma­nent rule of law.) By lift­ing the sanc­tions imme­di­ately, you grant a tem­po­rary gov­ern­ment access to bil­lions in oil rev­enues, pre­sum­ably to do with what they will.
“You can­not hand over the purse strings of Iraq,” Istra­badi warned. “Sad­dam did not imme­di­ately rule by fear. He co-opted the elite dur­ing the 1960s and ?70s by drown­ing them in cash.“
So let’s look at the smoke sig­nals from Wash­ing­ton and other places:

  1. Cha­l­abi is in Iraq and pre­pared to declare a pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ment in Erbil;

  2. The Kurds (and oth­ers) are under the impres­sion that there will be no democ­racy imme­di­ately forth­com­ing; (Peter W. Gal­brait has his thoughts on this sub­ject here. He basi­cally blames the Turks);
  3. Fleischer’s advo­cacy for lift­ing the sanc­tions, in order to get the Iraqi oil wells online quickly so that Iraq can pay for its own recon­struc­tion, will deliver the funds pre­cisely to the peo­ple with a shady his­tory finan­cial his­tory and a high stake in reman­ing in power since they’ve been in the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for 20+ years (in the case of Chalabi.)

Fleis­cher deftly side­stepped just this ques­tion of oil money and Iraqi gov­ern­ments in this exchange:

Q If the Iraqi peo­ple are going to largely be respon­si­ble for pay­ing for their own recon­struc­tion, will they be given a lot of free­dom, in terms of how that recon­struc­tion is going to be car­ried out? Or are we going to kind of guide them and tell them what needs to be done?
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, I think what’s going to emerge will be a gov­ern­ment of the Iraqi peo­ple that comes from both inside Iraq and out­side Iraq. There are no short­age of peo­ple who are ded­i­cated to a dif­fer­ent route for Iraq. And I think also one of the great issues that will be seen — if this does come to war — is how, when peo­ple have the abil­ity to be free, they exer­cise that right to be free. The Iraqi peo­ple have lived under tyranny and under dic­ta­tor­ship. And as the nations of East Europe have shown us just recently, when the yolk of dic­ta­tor­ship is removed, people’s God-given rights to free­dom emerge. And the Pres­i­dent believes that that will be the case in Iraq.

Fleischer’s dodge and the pre­vi­ous points add up a weak pup­pet gov­ern­ment eas­ily con­trolled, depen­dent upon the United States and democ­rac­tic in name only. Hardly the bea­con of free­dom to the rest of the Mid­dle East that the White House claims Iraq can become. But then, a bea­con of free­dom and self-determination doesn’t fit neatly with the administration’s plans for the region.

U.S. extends betrayal of Kurds to entire Iraqi people; no democracy.

Posted on by
4

Kur­dish men buy ice creams in the Mazi super­mar­ket in Dohuk. The super­mar­ket was opened two years ago and is seen as a tes­ti­ment to Iraqi Kurdistan’s inde­pen­dence. (Photo by Andrew Testa)

North­ern Iraq is get­ting a bit crowded. About 5,000 Iraqi oppo­si­tion troops, backed by Iran, have entered the PUK’s ter­ri­tory in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan osten­si­bly to secure the bor­der when war breaks across the region. Its real pur­pose, how­ever, may be to repel attacks by the People’s Mujahideen Orga­ni­za­tion (MKO), an anti-Iranian group based in Iraq and strongly backed by Sad­dam Hus­sein. The Iran­ian troops are part of Aya­tol­lah Sayed Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakim’s Badr brigade, which is made up of Shi’ites opposed to Sad­dam Hus­sein. Hakim is the head of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI), a mainly Shia Mus­lim group that fought in the failed 1991 upris­ing against Bagh­dad in south­ern Iraq. More recently, SCIRI has taken part in talks between the Iraqi oppo­si­tion and the U.S.. Accord­ing to the Web site for the SCIRI, “Hakim has an his­tor­i­cal and warm rela­tion with the Kur­dish Move­ments in Iraq since his father gave a reli­gious decree (Fatwa) which for­bade the Iraqi army from fight­ing against the Kurds in Iraq. A mutual agree­ment as been signed by SCIRI with the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan (PUK) headed by Jalal Tal­a­bani to work against Saddam’s regime. A sim­i­lar agree­ment was signed with the Kur­dish [sic] Demo­c­ra­tic Party (KDP) headed by Masood Barzani sev­eral years ago.“
This might be true, but one of the rea­sons the United States didn’t sup­port the 1991 Iraqi intifada that started in Basra was because it was mainly a Shi’ite move­ment with heavy back­ing by Iran. (The oppo­si­tion in the north was, of course, an effort led by the Kurds, who had been wait­ing for an oppor­tu­nity to rebel since the 1990 inva­sion of Kuwait.) Kuwait and Saudi Ara­bia, alarmed at the prospect of Iran­ian influ­ence expand­ing to their bor­ders and fig­ur­ing a weak­ened Sad­dam was prefer­able to the aya­tol­lahs, agreed with the United States that no sup­port to the mainly Shi’ite rebels would be given.
How the Badr brigade fits into the polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary intrigues of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan remains to be seen. Not only does the region play host to the PUK and the KDP, but also to var­i­ous Islamic par­ties, Ansar al-Islam, U.S. spe­cial forces, sev­eral thou­sand Turk­ish troops (with more soon to come) the MKO and now the Badr brigade. I hon­estly don’t know what’s going to hap­pen, but it can’t be good for U.S. plan­ning.
Or per­haps it doesn’t care. One of the biggest sto­ries yet to be car­ried by the main­stream Amer­i­can press is the appar­ent aban­don­ment of democ­racy in Iraq post-Saddam. Kanan Makiya, author of “Repub­lic of Fear: The Pol­i­tics of Mod­ern Iraq” and a lead­ing Iraqi dis­si­dent, penned a sav­age crit­i­cism of the Bush administration’s plans to replace Sad­dam and his cronies not with demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment but with Amer­i­can gen­er­als and sol­diers where Ba’ath func­tionar­ies once sat. “The plan, as dic­tated to the Iraqi oppo­si­tion in Ankara last week by a United States-led del­e­ga­tion, fur­ther envis­ages the appoint­ment by the U.S. of an unknown num­ber of Iraqi quis­lings palat­able to the Arab coun­tries of the Gulf and Saudi Ara­bia as a coun­cil of advis­ers to this mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment.“
“We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab and Mid­dle East­ern brethren, over and over again, that Amer­i­can mis­takes of the past did not have to be repeated in the future,” writes Makiya. “Were we wrong? Are the ene­mies of a demo­c­ra­tic Iraq, the ‘anti-imperialists’ and ‘anti-Zionists’ of the Arab world, the sup­port­ers of ‘armed strug­gle’, and the uphold­ers of the pol­i­tics of blam­ing every­thing on the U.S. who are dic­tat­ing the agenda of the anti-war move­ment in Europe and the U.S., are all of these peo­ple to be proved right?“
Most omi­nously:

We, the demo­c­ra­tic Iraqi oppo­si­tion, are the nat­ural friends and allies of the United States. We share its val­ues and long-term goals of peace, sta­bil­ity, free­dom and democ­racy for Iraq. We are here in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan 40 miles from Saddam’s troops and a few days away from a con­fer­ence to plan our next move, a con­fer­ence that some key admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have done every­thing in their power to post­pone.
None the less, after weeks of effort in Tehran and north­ern Iraq, we have pre­vailed. The meet­ing will take place. It will dis­cuss a detailed plan for the cre­ation of an Iraqi lead­er­ship, one that is in a posi­tion to assume power at the appro­pri­ate time and in the appro­pri­ate place. We will be opposed no doubt by an Amer­i­can del­e­ga­tion if it chooses to attend. Whether or not they do join us in the com­ing few days in north­ern Iraq, we will fight their attempts to mar­gin­alise and shunt aside the men and women who have invested whole life­times, and suf­fered greatly, fight­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein. (Empha­sis added.)

But unless the oppo­si­tion can seize the oil­fields from the Amer­i­can gov­er­nors, they stand lit­tle chance of suc­cess in wrest­ing the des­tiny of their coun­try away from their new mas­ters because they’ll have no money. There is no bud­get in the State Depart­ment for the Iraqi oppo­si­tion groups next year.
“We don’t feel it’s nec­es­sary to fund it any longer,” said Christo­pher Burn­ham, assis­tant sec­re­tary for resource man­age­ment.
In fact, the war has not been bud­geted at all! No one seems to know very much at all about what the war will cost, what will come after Sad­dam and how to man­age the damn place after the shoot­ing dies down a bit.
“Con­querors always call them­selves lib­er­a­tors,” said Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime min­is­ter of the Kur­dish admin­is­tra­tion, in a ref­er­ence to Mr. Bush’s speech last week in which he said U.S. troops were going to lib­er­ate Iraq.
Mr. Abdul-Rahman said the U.S. had reneged on ear­lier promises to pro­mote demo­c­ra­tic change in Iraq. “It is very dis­ap­point­ing,” he said. “In every Iraqi min­istry they are just going to remove one or two offi­cials and replace them with Amer­i­can mil­i­tary offi­cers.“
Last sum­mer, I inter­viewed Mr. Abdul-Rahman. He gave me the copies of the two Kur­dish con­sti­tu­tions the Kur­dis­tan regional gov­ern­ment had drafted. At the time, he could not have been more gra­cious and hope­ful, assur­ing me, the skep­ti­cal reporter, of America’s good inten­tions. The irony should be obvi­ous.
The cyn­i­cism should be as well. Tony Blair made what many felt was the clear­est moral case this week­end for remov­ing Sad­dam, for “lib­er­at­ing” the Iraqi peo­ple. In his State of the Union address in Jan­u­ary, Bush said, “I have a mes­sage for the brave and oppressed peo­ple of Iraq: Your enemy is not sur­round­ing your coun­try, your enemy is rul­ing your coun­try. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your lib­er­a­tion.“
By not sup­port­ing a demo­c­ra­tic Iraq, by appoint­ing a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure such as Ahmed Cha­l­abi as pro­vi­sional leader, by invit­ing Turks to occupy Iraqi Kur­dis­tan and pro­mot­ing some gauzy ill-thought-out vision of a demo­c­ra­tic Mid­dle East imposed by force of arms, the Big Idea ide­al­ism, which never rested com­fort­ably on the shoul­ders of a pres­i­dent who detests com­plex­ity, comes off as cal­low, cyn­i­cal and … what are the words? Oh, yes: “Absolute bull­shit.” The ideas and prin­ci­ples upon which the United States was founded — “lib­erty,” “free­dom,” “jus­tice for all” — and for which we allegedly fought and won two world wars and the Cold War, have become mere words, talk­ing points and awk­wardly mouthed slo­gans used to make a case for a war that no one except for a small junta in Wash­ing­ton wants.
Peo­ple in the pro-war camp often scoff at the “peaceniks” and “appeasers” of the ant-war crowd, call­ing them na�ve and say­ing they are con­sign­ing the Iraqis to oppres­sion if they are opposed the war. But who are really the na�ve ones, I won­der, if the hawks believe this is a war of lib­er­a­tion?
(By the way, read­ers can find a piece I wrote back in Novem­ber on the mixed sig­nals given by the United States regard­ing democ­racy in Iraq here.)