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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Angry with the U.S. for betraying their dream of independence, the Kurds could ignite an Iraqi civil war.
Jul 22, 2004 | When I found out the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority had handed the governance of Iraq back to the Iraqis on June 28, two days earlier than planned, I was in the northern Kurdish city of Erbil eating a pizza. Though many hours had passed since the small ceremony in which CPA proconsul Paul Bremer handed the reins to the new Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the news took me completely by surprise. I had been up for hours, had driven across the city with a Kurdish driver and translator, and had made my way though half a pizza in a small but crowded restaurant called "Happy Time" without any sign that I had essentially been sleepwalking through a historic day in Iraq.
In a lot of ways, the lack of celebration shouldn't have shocked me in the least. For many Iraqis, a government headed by Allawi, who previously punched a time clock in the employ of both Saddam's early regime and later the CIA, has a distinct "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" ring to it. Then, too, the outgoing CPA had essentially scooched Allawi into power past U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi's own candidate. Before my trip to Kurdistan, I might have assumed that the Kurds, who have been the United States' best ally in Iraq since the invasion began, would welcome a government that would seem to represent U.S. interests. But as I learned during my visit, the Kurds do not trust either the United States or their Arab neighbors to the south, and so they do not even begin to trust a U.S.-backed Arab government. These days, the Kurds aren't celebrating much of anything. They are waiting to see what the new government will mean for them, and whether it was worth giving up the relative autonomy they've enjoyed over the last decade or so.
I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan around the middle of June, crossing the border from Turkey and making the five-hour drive to Suleymania in the east. Having spent close to nine months in Baghdad since Saddam's overthrow, I was interested in spending time in the Kurdish north during the transition to get a better sense of where the Kurds stand on the new Iraq. The road from the border switch-backed through mountains terraced into farmlands and dropped down into green and gold valleys where fat rivers rolled past villages and flocks of sheep. On a purely geographic level, Kurdistan has almost nothing in common with the rest of Iraq. In fact I had to remind myself I was in Iraq. A Kurdish man I met likened it to Switzerland. I'm pretty sure he had never been to Switzerland, but as comparisons go, it wasn't so far off the mark.
Suleymania is a midsize city, visibly untouched by the kind of violence that has marked just about every non-Kurdish city in Iraq. Like most of the Kurdish area, which became semiautonomous in 1991 when the U.S. implemented a "no-fly zone," Suleymania has proven to be quite safe for Westerners. It was the only place in Iraq I ever took a walk alone. (I met another American there, a privately contracted medic for the CPA, who told me he loved to walk around the crowded souk, or market, in shorts, in part as a way to encourage Kurds to wear shorts instead of the long pants that must be scorchingly hot in the summer. Probably a death sentence in non-Kurdish Iraq.) In Kurdistan, not a single U.S. soldier has been kidnapped or killed since the invasion. As far as I know, no Westerners at all have been kidnapped or killed in the region. Somewhere (the Army asked me not to tell where), tucked among the mountains, sits a modest resort hotel where soldiers get sent from other parts of Iraq for a few days of R&R.
The day after I arrived in Suleymania, the tiny CPA staff held a farewell press conference. I and the journalist I was traveling with represented the entire Western press corps. The press conference took place in a diminutive auditorium inside the soon-to-be-defunct CPA building. Before the conference began, I spoke with the press officer who told me he was worried that no members of the Kurdish press would show up. As it turned out, on the previous afternoon Paul Bremer had been in town for his own farewell moment, marked by a ceremony at the city's nicest hotel, the Suleymania Palace. But due to an apparent misunderstanding, the Kurdish press had become angry when they were shunted into a waiting room and denied what they considered appropriate access to Bremer.
As time went on and I met with Kurds in both an official and an unofficial capacity, I realized that what I came to think of as the "Bremer access incident" summed up the way the Kurds feel they've been treated by the CPA in general: stuck in one area, asked to be patient, denied access to the policymakers, and generally ignored.
This was all a bit of a revelation to me. I knew that the Kurds felt the United States had not been as good to the Kurds as the Kurds had been to it, but I had no idea just how pissed off they really are at the United States. They are really, really pissed.
On the day of the press conference, the Kurdish press did show up. One Kurdish reporter even asked, very politely, why the Kurds weren't getting more out of their friendship with the United States. (Another reporter was a bit more pointed, asking essentially, why the hell Muqtada al-Sadr, who's been nothing but trouble to the United States, had recently been invited to form a political party and participate in elections.) The almost-former head of CPA for Suleymania began with a reminder that the United States had gotten rid of Saddam -- the U.S. fallback answer to any question like that -- and then went on to enumerate a few pretty anorexic projects before launching into fallback answer No. 2: "In a democracy there are always compromises. Not everyone gets everything they want."
He was right. For strategic reasons, the United States could never have given the Kurds everything they wanted. But the Kurds still think that the United States has abandoned them. And they still can't believe it.
So the conference ended with politeness and even photo ops, but I felt acutely aware of the anger and frustration that pumped below the surface. The Kurds have been more open with their anger at the United States recently but they're not ready to show their cards yet, not ready to storm out of the press conference. They're waiting. With their long history of being stomped on, they are a very patient people.
