No Friends But the Mountains

By Michael J. Totten

A visit to Kurdistan reveals an autonomous people ready for an alliance with America and Israel.

It may also serve as a lesson on what happens to those who don’t cooperate with the United States. After all, the Sunni Triangle and Iraq’s Shia south could have followed Kurdistan’s lead; the choice was theirs alone to make. Sadly, both the innocent and the guilty alike will likely suffer the terrible consequences of that decision. Let Middle Easterners beyond Iraq’s borders pay heed: If they wish to experience a less convulsive transition of power when their tyrants are deposed, Kurdistan will stand as the model to emulate. Arab Iraq will be the anti-model, the warning: If you prefer bullets to ballots, you will be left to your fate.

Fifteen million Kurds live in eastern Turkey, and the separatist war between the government and the PKK has raged there, at varying degrees of intensity, for decades. In the all but impassable mountains on Iraq’s northeastern border with Turkey, the PKK has dug in its heels. Its guerillas launch hit-and-run-attacks against soldiers—and sometimes civilians—in Turkey, then retreat into their Iraqi valleys and caves. The Turkish military shells the redoubt from its side of the border, crosses the frontier in hot pursuit of the terrorists, and threatens to launch a major invasion if the Kurdistan regional government won’t militarily shove the PKK back into Turkey.

Why won’t the Kurds of Iraq evict the PKK? Why do they give Turkey an excuse to invade? Colonel Mudhafer was tired of that question. He impatiently unscrolled a map when I met with him in his office. “That’s where we lived when we fought against Saddam Hussein. We chose that place for a reason. It was impossible for Saddam to flush us out there, and it’s impossible for us to flush out the PKK now.”

If only it were that simple. The Kurdistan regional government could work with the Turks to prevent this from exploding into a larger, international struggle. But the Kurds are torn. Kurds in every country have a terrible history of fractious, internecine war. After Saddam was ejected from Iraqi Kurdistan, and before he was removed from power in Baghdad, Iraq’s Kurds fought a pointless civil war over resources and power. The results were devastating, but at least they learned an important lesson from the experience: When surrounded by enemies, don’t go fighting each other.

As their inaction in dealing with the PKK shows, however, the Kurds may have learned that lesson too well. Like both Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, the PKK arguably harms Kurds and their interests far more than their enemies do: It brings increasingly destructive reprisals down on their heads and makes a diplomatic solution to their problems all but impossible.

“Fighting is not a solution,” one Kurd told me. Nor do the Iraqi Kurds want to fight, he continued, because the reason for the PKK’s terrorist activity is that the Kurdish people in Turkey don’t have rights.

Now, apologists for Palestinian terror say much the same thing. The analysis is partly persuasive, though, because it isn’t entirely wrong. Kurds in Turkey really do have legitimate grievances, just as stateless Palestinians do. But those grievances can’t be addressed by exploding bombs in Tel Aviv and Istanbul.

Iraq’s Kurds know better, but they are locked in a holding pattern. They are pulled in one direction by their political morality, and in another by ethnic solidarity. They’ll need help if they are to avoid an all-out war with Ankara.

And make no mistake: The Turks may say their problem is the PKK, but they have also threatened to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan should the people there dare to declare independence. After all, Turkey fears a Turkish Kurdish unraveling of its own—not to mention an emboldened PKK—should an independent Kurdish state exist anywhere.

Certainly these are legitimate fears, not to be dismissed. But they don’t change the fact that nations inconvenient to Turkey have a right to exist. The United Nations can’t—or won’t—act as an honest broker between the two sides: It’s too weak and uninterested. But the United States can. Indeed, Americans are the only people in the world who consider both Turkey and Kurdistan allies. The Turkish-American alliance is strained, to be sure, but it is still an alliance. American soldiers could flush out Iraq’s PKK terrorists on the condition that Turkey’s relationship with its Kurdish minority is properly liberalized. And they should.

On the matter of Iran and Syria, however, the United States should make no such deals. Both these countries have restive Kurdish populations of their own—and both also sponsor insurgencies against the United States, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. Surely, they don’t deserve insurance against insurrections of their own.

The Americans are learning that a violent insurgency against conventional state forces works. And the insurgency’s sponsors—Tehran and Damascus—are learning it, too.

The Kurds of Iran and Syria would like nothing more than American assistance in launching anti-regime insurgencies of their own. An American-guaranteed Kurdish state in Iraq would serve to make such insurgencies only more likely, even withoutAmerican help. Of course, the United States should never sponsor, or threaten to sponsor, an insurgency that isn’t morally just, or that’s merely temporarily useful. The Kurds of Iraq were used this way once before, with terrible and shameful results. Yet a Kurdish insurgency in Iran and Syria could be both a useful weapon and a just cause, so long as the moral corruption from the likes of the PKK can be neutralized.

Some critics would no doubt accuse Americans of imperialism were they to support Kurdish resistance in these countries. Yet it can more plausibly be argued that such support demonstrates the very opposite. Take the case of Iran: Almost half the country isn’t even Persian. That’s because Iranian territory is, in fact, what remains of the Persian Empire, which includes not only Persia but also Kurdistan, Western Azerbaijan, Balochistan, and the Arab region of Khuzestan. Iran, much like Iraq, is thus a nation state in name only. If Palestinians, Tibetans, and Chechens (to name just three examples) should have the right to self-determination, so should Kurds, Azeris, Balochis, and Iranian Arabs. True, there may be a case for the preservation of what’s left of the Persian Empire. But so long as Tehran is ruled by clerical tyrants, the case for American-supported Kurdish resistance may be the stronger one. Therefore a large presence of American troops between Turks and Kurds may be the only military force in the world that can prevent a bloodbath.

Terrorism works. Up to a point. That is the tragic lesson of recent history in the Middle East. The Palestinians aren’t the only people in the world who seek and deserve a homeland of their own. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The Kurds do not receive billions of dollars in Western aid. The Kurds do not receive endless media attention. There are no rallies on Western campuses demanding their freedom, nor does the United Nations Security Council require that a state be created for them, although—unlike the Palestinians—they fought honorably against their enemies and have already carved out a moderately prosperous, free, and functional de-facto state of their own. They are America’s allies, but most Americans know nothing about them.

One could argue—and thank God the Kurds of Iraq don’t—that waves of suicide bombers would surely attract world attention and garner sympathy for their cause. After all, the international community has long acted as an enabler of violent national liberation movements, not because terrorism is acceptable but because appeasing it is the path of least resistance for the conflict-averse. Meanwhile, liberal and moderate groups that seek the same goal but do not employ terrorism are shunted aside. The way of reason and morality, it would seem, is bound to go unrewarded.

If the Kurds of Iraq get their state before the terrorists in Turkey and Palestine get theirs, it will be the great reversal the Middle East desperately needs. Terrorism will have proven to be the less effective tactic. And who knows? Perhaps others who seek independence will take note. Palestinian terror groups like Hamas won’t, of course, but Kurdish terrorists in Turkey just might. And the Kurds of Iran and Syria are even more likely to do so.

But the real moral case for an American-guaranteed Kurdistan is simpler than that: They’ve earned it. They fought alongside the United States in Iraq and built a decent society there. They don’t start wars, they don’t terrorize people, and they don’t deserve to be bullied and lorded over by others. America owes them. Everyone owes them.

“I ask Americans not to leave us,” Colonel Ameen said to me at the Ministry of Peshmerga. “From 1920 until now, we have been frustrated and disappointed by their pledges and promises. Eight times we have been disappointed. I ask the American people, do not make it nine.”

Michael J. Totten is an independent journalist who has traveled regularly to Iraqi Kurdistan. He blogs at www.MichaelTotten.com.

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