In his eagerness for the approval of the Shiite religious leader -- and driven by desperation to get yesterday's unanimous UN resolution in time for the G8 meeting -- US President George W. Bush may
be double-crossing the Kurds, our most loyal friends in Iraq.
Not a single US soldier has been killed in the area of northern Iraq patrolled by the pesh merga, the army of Kurdish Iraqis who have brought order to their region. Savaged by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's poison-gas attacks in the 1980s, Kurdistan
was abandoned by former president George Bush to Saddam's vengeance after the first gulf war. When our conscience made us provide air cover in the 1990s,
the Kurds amazed the Middle East
by creating a free, democratic
mini-state within despotic Iraq.
These Kurdish Sunni Muslims -- an ancient ethnic group, neither Arab nor Turk -- are one-fifth of Iraq's population. They cheered our arrival and set aside old dreams of independence, asking for reasonable autonomy in return for participating enthusiastically in the formation of the new Iraq.
In February, the Iraqi Governing Council, which included all religious and ethnic groups, hammered out its only memorable work: a Transitional Administrative Law, which laid the groundwork for a constitution to be adopted later by elected officials in a sovereign state. Most important for Kurds, who have long been oppressed by an Arab majority, it established minority rights within a federal state -- the essence of a stable democracy.
But as the UN resolution supporting that state was nearing completion, the Shiite grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, suddenly intervened. He denounced the agreed-upon law as "legislated by an unelected council in the shadow of occupation." He decreed that mentioning it in the UN resolution would be "a harbinger of grave consequences."
The US promptly caved.
Stunned Kurds protested in a letter to Bush that "the people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq." If the law guaranteeing minority rights was abrogated, Kurds would "have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan."
Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leaders, appealed to Bush's sense of loyalty: "We will be loyal friends to America even if our support is not always reciprocated ... If the forces of freedom [do not] prevail elsewhere in Iraq, we know that, because of our alliance with the United States, we will be marked for vengeance."
I ran this pained appeal past John Negroponte, who will move from his post as our UN representative to be our ambassador to the new Iraq, at his farewell lunch yesterday. He pointed to a line in the preamble to the UN resolution welcoming an unspecified commitment "to work towards a federal, democratic, pluralist and unified Iraq, in which there is full respect for political and human rights."
Fine "preambular" words, but outside the action section of the resolution. That eviscerates the protective law, just as Sistani demanded.
Why do we take our proven allies for granted? The conventional White House wisdom holds that the Iraqi Kurds have no place else to go. It's an article of faith that if the Kurds tried to break away and set up an independent Kurdistan, with oil-rich Kirkuk as its traditional capital, Turkey, on its border, would never permit it -- lest murderous separatists among its own Kurdish population of 12 million get a new lease on death.
Iraqi Kurds blundered last year in letting old grudges prevent Ankara from sending 10,000 troops south to help the coalition police Iraq. But since then, Kurdish leaders have gone all out to establish economic and political relations with "our friends to the north."
A Turkish construction company is building a US$40 million airport in Sulaimaniya, and Kurds have been steering contracts to Turkish engineers to study sports stadiums and tunnels through the mountains. Despite grumbling from some anti-Kurdish generals, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been responsive. The influential Ilnur Cevik of the Turkish Daily News urges "more attention to Iraqi Kurdish sensitivities," and asks: "Do the Arabs realize what they are getting into?"
Our Kurdish allies will do their bit to hold Iraq together. But in appeasing the south, don't push the north too far.
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