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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The U.S. plan to send 10,000 Turkish troops to Iraq has Kurdish leaders outraged -- and analysts of all stripes incredulous at its folly.
Oct 14, 2003 | America has rarely lost an opportunity to betray the Iraqi Kurds, but this time was supposed to be different. Their suffering under Saddam Hussein served as one of the war's justifications, and in the war's aftermath they've been America's most grateful and enthusiastic allies in an otherwise restive region. After selling them out in the '70s, '80s and '90s, the United States owed the Kurds justice, and it was finally going to make things right.
It didn't take long, though, for other American interests to take priority. Thus despite protests from Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister -- indeed, despite the increasingly ardent objections of the Iraqi Governing Council and the Iraqi Kurdish leadership -- the United States plans to bring 10,000 troops from Turkey into Iraq.
The Turks are an implacable enemy of the Kurds. They have viciously repressed their own Kurdish population and oppose the Iraqi Kurds' ambitions for autonomy. The two sides are already threatening each other -- in the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, members of the Peshmerga, or Kurdish militia, were quoted saying they'd attack the Turks. On Monday the Turks warned that if they were attacked, they'd fight back.
So besides alienating the Kurds, the Turkish deployment seems likely to bring new instability to northern Iraq, the country's most peaceful region. In the last few days, Kurdish leaders have been traveling to cities worldwide to make the case against Turkish troops. But with the American military stretched thin, an election year approaching and critics on both left and right clamoring to internationalize the occupation and bring U.S. troops home, the Kurds find themselves, as they so often do, an inconvenient people lacking leverage among the powerful.
"Calling in Turkish troops for sheer political expediency with an election looming is nothing short of a betrayal of the Kurds," says Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer and author of the new book "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace." Peters is an Iraq hawk and a fierce critic of those who see only failure and quagmire there, but now he says, "We're making a mockery of many of our promises to the Iraqi people by shoving the Turks down their throats. It's shameful and outrageous and unworthy of our country."
Peters, a columnist for the right-wing New York Post, finds himself in the unusual position of being in agreement with longtime leftist Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary of international development. Even as she traveled to Washington to argue that the occupation needs to be internationalized, she told Salon last week, "It's better not to have Turkish troops there, because there's too much complex politics and history. It's a further destabilizing development."
With virtual unanimity, analysts, scholars and veterans from across the political spectrum say that, moral issues aside, introducing Turkish soldiers into an already volatile ethnic and sectarian situation is counterproductive. "The decision is a very bad one, for Turkey and for Washington," says Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA during the Reagan administration and author of "The Future of Political Islam." Fuller, like many others, believes Turkish troops will further fracture the region, causing tensions in the north, spurring other neighboring governments, especially Iran, to step up their involvement in Iraq, and, if things go wrong, potentially weakening America's important strategic relationship with Turkey. On Tuesday, a car bomb exploded outside the Turkish embassy in Baghdad, killing two and suggesting that anti-Turk sentiment has already ignited in Iraq.
"Iran will see this as an effort by Turkey to create a foothold in Iraq," Fuller says of the planned Turkish deployment, and will be likely to send more of its own proxies into the country. He also dismisses the American hope that shared religion will lead to Turkish rapport with the Iraqis in the fractious Sunni triangle. "My sense is that Turkey will be treated as the functional equivalent of Americans," he says. "This business of being fellow Muslims will have no relevance. Indeed, you could argue that Turkey has baggage from being a former colonial power."
"I see very little positive about this, except maybe they can send 10,000 American troops home as a result," says Fuller.
For most politicians, Democrat and Republican, that's enough. There's simply no domestic upside to opposing the Turkish deployment. Bush partisans hope that bringing in troops from a Muslim country will add a bit more legitimacy to the occupation while easing the pressure on American troops. Bush's opponents, who have called for the U.S. to get other countries involved in Iraq's rebuilding, aren't in a position to object.
"What politician can stand up and say we need to keep 12,000 reservists in Iraq?" asks Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "These are guys with small businesses, mortgages that they're not able to make their payments on. They vote, they give money to political campaigns -- it's very hard for a U.S. politician to try to keep the Turks out and continue to Shanghai these poor reservists."
But critics like Peters argue that it's a shortsighted, politically expedient fix that will backfire. "It's going to make the security situation in Iraq worse," he says. "The only thing we get out of it is the chance to bring back a few American troops, but we wind up sacrificing all that those troops have gained. This is an act of electioneering folly. I've supported President Bush all through the war, the buildup and the aftermath, but I just find this despicable and foolish."
Despicable, perhaps, but not very surprising, given the Kurds' unhappy history. "The Kurds have been like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football, with America playing Lucy," says Cole. "America always pulls the ball out at the last minute, and the Kurds land on their backs." They've been sold out so many times that in 1979 exiled Iraqi Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani asked in despair, "Have the Kurdish people committed such crimes that every nation in the world should be against them?"
The world's largest population of stateless people, the Kurds, who currently number around 25 million, were denied their promised independence by the British and French officials who cavalierly redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I. Instead, they were shunted into Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, all of whom have regarded them as a threat to their national identity and have oppressed them to various degrees.
The Kurds' friendlessness has made them easy for the U.S. to use and abandon. In the early 1970s, anti-Baath Iraqi Kurdish insurgents were supported by Iran, Israel and the CIA. In 1975, though, the Shah, an American client, reached an accommodation with Saddam, and thus aid to the Kurds was cut off. Saddam proceeded to deport tens of thousands of Kurds from northern Iraq in an attempt to Arabize it. "Once they were dropped, they had no defenses, and the Baath came in and mopped them up," says Cole. As America's erstwhile allies were ethnically cleansed, Henry Kissinger sneered, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
In the 1980s, while Saddam gassed the Kurds -- the genocide that was often invoked as a rationale for the current war -- the Reagan administration, which had embraced Saddam's regime because it feared the Ayatollah's Iran more, fought efforts to impose sanctions. In her 2002 book "A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide," Samantha Power quoted an internal administration memorandum, "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq."
That changed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Following Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf War, the Kurds, like the Iraqi Shia, heeded the first President Bush's call to rise up and overthrow their dictator. But the support they expected from the Bush administration never came, and Saddam, under the terms of the war's cease-fire, was permitted to use helicopter gunships against the rebels. Once again, Kurds were slaughtered, and up to 2 million of them fled into the mountains.
