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Kurdistan or one Iraq ?

14:01 / 09.01.04

From the Washington Post

The United States faces the prospect of two governments inside Iraq -- one for Kurds and one for Arabs -- after so far failing to win a compromise from the Kurds on a formula to distribute political power when the U.S. occupation ends, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, twice met with the two main Kurdish leaders over the past week to urge them to back down from their demands to retain autonomy, according to U.S. officials.

But in a new setback for U.S. plans in Iraq, the Kurds have not budged. They insist on holding on to the basic political, economic and security rights they have achieved during a dozen years of being cut off from the rest of Iraq during Saddam Hussein's rule. Creation of an autonomous Kurdish region, with its own militia, represents one of the biggest fears about the ethnically diverse nation -- a problem that Washington thought had been averted before U.S. intervention.

But the two Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, are resisting U.S. pressure, in large part out of fear that the vulnerable Kurdish minority could once again be persecuted by a strong central government, as it was repeatedly by Arab regimes.

One possible compromise is deferring decisions on the final status of the Kurdish north, and its claim on regional oil fields, until the United States hands over power to a provisional Iraqi government. The Iraqis would then be left to sort it out. If this fallback option is adopted, U.S. officials say, they hope that a strong central government in Baghdad emerges, wins international backing and leads the Kurdish minority and Arab majority to come to a mutually accepted arrangement.

Turkey would also oppose autonomy for the Kurdish region, both because of its own large restive Kurdish community and because of the large Turkmen minority in northern Iraq. Other Arab governments are already warning of a dangerous spillover if ethnicity becomes a central factor in Iraqi government.

Will Iraq survive as a single country?

If there is a independent or autonomous Kurdistan, the Kurds won't have to fear persecution, but Turkey and Iran might decide to get involved in "stopping Kurdish terrorism" in a nasty cross-border fashion...

22:29 / 09.01.04

From my perspective, the obvious thing to do is to support one federal government with a strongly Presidential system and strongly prescribed state rights. It also seems like making several small states would be better than a few big ones, and each of these with its own state militia.

But whatever appears to be the obvious answer from without a conflict, in international relations or individual relations, seldom appears easy from within that conflict, and it would be foolish for the United States, U.K., etc. to force the issue, except to insist that Iraq remain unified, which is what we promised regional countries before and during the initial phase of the war in Iraq.

04:19 / 10.01.04

they hope that a strong central government in Baghdad emerges, wins international backing and leads the Kurdish minority and Arab majority to come to a mutually accepted arrangement.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....heheh...
heh...he-BWAH-hahahahahahaha....

thats a grrrrrrrrrrrreat policy.

i solved the irish troubles similarly by hoping that jesus is reborn in a manger in a muslim-owned stable on the border of the North and the Republic, declares the whole christianity thing to be a useful fiction that we no longer need, and then walks down the garvachy road naked.

with his hippy-hair covering his nuts obviously, so we can televise it. should be long enough by now, eh?

01:41 / 11.01.04

toksik, that's unfair, don't you think? What you quoted was just the goal of our government. I see nothing wrong with that goal, and it sounds like the right one to me.
thats a grrrrrrrrrrrreat policy
But it isn't, by itself, a policy at all, and I guarantee you that neither the U.S. nor the U.K. will have a policy that consists of nothing but hoping for an outcome. This is done through diplomacy, deal-making and so on. You point out that our goal is difficult (I assume that's the point of the analogy, and not that our goal is sacrilegious), but nobody ever said it would be easy. If you have a better plan, then please tell us. Or, if you don't, maybe it's still worthwhile talking about the difficulties we will face under the present plan.

05:07 / 11.01.04

That's a tough one. Of course Iraq is itself a fictional entity (as all nations are), but Iraq in particular- a falsehood perpetrated on the people of a certain geographical region by the western powers after the fall of the Ottoman empire. The long and short of it is that there was never an Iraqi identity, only separate allegiences. We see this today- in the far south, the Shi'ites, in the midregions, Ba'athist secular Arabs, nominally Sunni, and in the north, the Kurds, everyone's whipping boy due to a predilection for non-Islamic religious forms. And if it weren't for Israel, the Kurds would be the most hated people in the Mid-East.

To play s=ympathetic, if I were a Kurd, I'd be demanding my own state- they've been fighting for the right to do so in SE Turkey for almost a hundred years. Centuries of persecution will do that- again, look at Isreael.