Tuesday, October 17, 2017

The Kurds Betrayed: Iraq Retakes Kirkuk with U.S. Backing


For some reason, people tend to assume that the status quo has been around for a very, very long time—that it enjoys the perk of longevity. To mess with it even in part is typically assumed to “upset the apple cart.” The fear is excessive. A century after World War I, the fact that many of the extant countries in the Middle East had been artificially crafted by Britain and France paled under the presumption that those countries had been around for much, much longer. Accordingly, the fact that the Kurds voted overwhelmingly in 2017 to secede from Iraq was ignored or dismissed not only by Iraq, but also by other countries in the region and the United States. “Baghdad and most countries in the region had condemned the vote, fearing it would fuel ethnic divisions, lead to the breakup of Iraq and hobble the fight against the Islamic State.”[1] I submit that the fear was overblown and mistaken.
Firstly, ethnic divisions had been crippling Iraq since the United States toppled Saddam Hussain. An independent Kurdistan in the northern third of Iraq would have relieved the pressure such that the Iraqi government would only have to deal with the Sunni-Shiite struggle for power.
Secondly, even if Iraq itself would break-up completely, even this outcome would not be so much to fear, as Iraq itself had been artificially formed by the British after World War I. Put another way, the salience of the ethnic divisions in Iraq can be taken as an indication of the sheer artificiality of the state itself. The very notion of a nation goes along with ethnic clusters rather than forcing such clusters to form one political culture (to say nothing of getting along).
Thirdly, the pesh merga forces of the Kurds had fought quite well against the Islamic State, so invigorating the Kurds by supporting the formation of their own state would have been in the interests of the United States. Betraying the Kurds by enabling the Iraqi forces to take Kirkuk and its valuable oil region could be expected to have the opposite effect. In ignoring the clear will of the Kurds as per the decisive result of the referendum for secession, the United States betrayed itself, moreover, given that country’s preachments on behalf of democracy, which entails the self-determination of We the People.
A century after World War I, the world had an opportunity to remember that victorious European powers redrew the political map in the Middle East without taking into account the ethnic clusters that are naturally so integral to having nation-states. That such states enjoy a monopoly of power in international relations—the international realm literally being inter-national—suggests that the crafting of coherent rather than artificial nations is very important. Hence, a century out from WWI, the world of nations need not simply assume that even the break-up of a Middle Eastern country would somehow be the collapse of something that has always been around and would therefore be catastrophic. Put another way, a country formed by a European power should not enjoy default status because the formation itself can be viewed as problematic, evidenced by the ensuing ethnic strife. Admittedly, this does not hold in every country formed by Britain or France (e.g. Jordan), but where a country is strife-ridden, the application of nation itself is problematic; ethnic pushes for independence should not have to face the inertia of the status quo in such a case.



[1] David Zucchino, “Iraqis Capture Key Kurdish City with Little Fight,” The New York Times, October 17, 2017.