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.)