Kurdish Independence

The Christian Science Monitor has a new article about the aspirations of Kurdish independence. That the Kurds have long wanted a nation of their own is no secret; that they deserve one of their own is rarely in dispute, at least in the West. When the Western powers drew up the borders of the modern Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Churchill was one of those who argued for a sovereign Kurdish state. T.E. Lawrence was another.

When the U.S. created the no fly zone above their territory after the first Gulf War, we emboldened their aspirations for independence; now, for the first time, a Western power was affording them a degree of protection from their persecutors. When we demolished Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, we emboldened them even further by removing one of the major obstacles to their aspirations.

I have been called a cynic, a pessimist and a defeatist because I have said since 2002, when the Bush administration began making the case for an invasion of Iraq, that removing Hussein would make a Kurdish state inevitable. In contrast to my "pessimism" is the shockingly naive "idealism" of the Bush administration, which believes a nation as ethnically and religiously diverse as Iraq can raise a unified democracy from the ashes of a totalitarian state. Apparently the lesson of Tito's Yugslavia was quickly forgotten by anyone of consequence is the president's inner circle.

The Kurds have long shown all of the qualities that we dream about when we imagine a future Middle East; they are mostly secular, pro-Western and enterprising capitalists. When they eventually do demand a sovereign nation of their own, there will be many formidable obstacles in their path.

I hope our nation is not one of them.