A Tragedy Waiting to Happen

By Barry Gewen

The hour of the Kurds has come round again. They are the great success story of the Iraq war, what the Bush administration always hoped for across the entire country. They have a functioning, popularly supported regional government. Their economy is booming. Religion has little retrograde or divisive influence on their public institutions. Women are respected (there have been many important female leaders in Kurdish history) and Israel is viewed approvingly. Terrorism is generally unknown in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. What’s more, the Kurds are ready to defend themselves and what they have achieved. Anyone who wants to understand the future of Iraq and the Middle East in general has to take them into account.

Two new books help us to do just that. Actually, one of them isn’t new. “Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History” by the photographer Susan Meiselas first appeared in 1998 and is now being reissued in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press. It’s an extraordinarily handsome volume. In a labor of love, Meiselas spent six years combing libraries, archives and family collections for old photographs, postcards, documents, newspaper clippings, whatever, to produce a visually stunning montage designed to prick the conscience of the world. Quil Lawrence’s “Invisible Nation” is a more orthodox work by a journalist who knows his subject well; its richly informative narrative tells the story that stands behind Meiselas’s photos and clippings.

 It’s not a pretty story. Any notion of history as an inevitable march of progress comes a cropper here. The 20-25 million Kurds, spread out across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own, and their nationalist aspiration has been thwarted ever since they were promised a homeland at the end of World War I. They have been betrayed by the British, who bombed them during the 1920s, by the Turks, who have denied the very existence of a Kurdish identity, by the Shah of Iran when he got the chance, then by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and at least twice by the Americans. (In Kurdish minds, Henry Kissinger is as much an arch-villain as George W. Bush is a liberating hero.) Saddam Hussein, employing measures that approached genocide, destroyed their villages and massacred them with poison gas.

So with their current prosperity and stability, does the Kurds’ grim history at last have a happy ending? Both of these books suggest the answer is no. The Kurds are a tragedy waiting to happen — again.

The Kurds want a state of their own, and justice is on their side. But reality isn’t. They live in a land-locked territory with enemies all around and potential friends — the United States first among them — far away. As Lawrence writes, “a declared Kurdish state within the borders of Iraq will unite the entire region in opposition, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf.” Turkey in particular, with its 14 million Kurds, sees an independent Kurdistan as an existential threat, and you can be sure that in a face-off between Kurd and Turk, Washington would end up siding with its important ally Turkey. As one former Turkish air force officer put the question baldly to Lawrence: “Do you want the Turks as allies or as enemies?”

Similarly, should a conflict arise between Iraq’s Kurds and the struggling central government in Baghdad over the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk (understood by many as a key to Kurdish economic independence), it wouldn’t take a Henry Kissinger to perceive where America’s interests lie. Gen. Petraeus has already clashed with the Kurds over their claims to Kirkuk.

The Kurds’ more seasoned leaders grasp these realities, but the people they are supposed to lead may not. In 2005, 2 million out of 4 1/2 million Iraqi Kurds participated in an informal election and only 2 percent said they wanted to remain in Iraq — even though thousands of Turkish troops have been massed along the border. Moderation, compromise and gradualism are clearly the best ways to deal with the Kurdish problem, though that probably requires a bit of dissembling and hypocrisy on all sides (see under: Taiwan).

How likely are we to get restraint and compromise? It’s anyone’s guess, but as Meiselas and Lawrence remind us more than once: this is the Middle East we are talking about.

The New York Times