Search Results for: kurdistan

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Iraqi Kurdish leaders are reportedly hinting that they’re on board with partitioning Iraq. That’s not surprising, as they’d get their own state out of such an arrangement: Kurdistan Democratic Party figure Abdul Salam Berwari said in a phone interview with Al-Hayat, “The Kurdish political leadership sees since the 1990s that the only solution for the survival of a unified Iraq is … Continue reading Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Kurdistan’s Moment?

Koplow insists that Turkey’s best course of action right now is to support an independent state for the Kurds in northern Iraq: The best way to neutralize ISIS as a threat is to strengthen the KRG, whose peshmerga already took Kirkuk in response to the ISIS takeover of Mosul, and can keep the conflict with ISIS in Iraq rather … Continue reading Kurdistan’s Moment?

Saving Kurdistan

Michael Totten makes the case for ensuring that, no matter what, a free Kurdistan will remain part of America’s legacy in Iraq. Money quote:

[I]t is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are. They are possibly more pro-American than Americans themselves. If Bill Clinton was America’s first "black" president, people in at least one part of the world say Bush is the first "Muslim" one: He is sometimes referred to in Kurdistan as "Hajji Bush" (meaning that he made the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca), an undeniably high honor for a Republican Christian from Texas. No, Kurdistan is not a "red state," and Kurds are not Republicans. Nor does it occur to most of them to prefer America’s conservatives over its liberals. Rather, their warm feelings of gratitude and friendship extend to all Americans and both political parties for having liberated them from the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein…

Save Kurdistan

Tom Friedman cautions against a semi-occupation of Iraq. He may well be right. The details of redeployment are what we now need to focus on. How we do it is in many ways more important than the fact of our failure in Arab Iraq. But it seems to me that there’s one policy around which we should all be able to unite: a commitment to protect the nascent Kurdish entity in the north. The Kurds had their civil war in the last century. They have a fledgling democracy. They love the US. They are Sunni Muslims. Hemmed in by Persians, Arabs and Turks, they need an external broker to defend and secure their achievement. One obvious option for US troops is to redeploy to Iraq’s territorial borders to deter an influx of foreign agents, but primarily to defend and police Kurdistan. In this, we need to hold Turkey’s hand very tightly and patiently. They too are a critical ally, deeply suspicious of Kurdish aspirations and critical to restraining the centrifugal frces of Iraq. The Turkish-Kurdish border needs NATO troops to keep it stable and prevent incursions from either side. If we are going to cut our losses among Iraq’s Arabs, and I see no alternative, then that is no reason to abandon the one clear success story of this entire gamble.