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In Which I am Unfashionably Unsympathetic to the Kurds
Posted by KTK

When did the Kurds become the big-eyed orphan children of the world? I’m sorry they get crapped on so much, but why is that our problem? And - at the risk of offending the puzzlingly large Kurd fan club - exactly what claim of mistreatment do they have, and to what does it entitle them?

As I understand it, the Kurds’ problems are two-fold: they don’t have a Kurd-only state of their own, and they got hammered by Saddam when they tried to claim one out of Iraqi territory in 1987 - specifically, that Saddam used chemical weapons in doing so. To the Kurds, certainly, these are overriding causes for complaint. And I am not offering a general defense of Saddam as other than a horrible, gratuitously and inhumanly violent person and a dictator of the worst sort. But I am not convinced that the Kurds’ complaints add up to a real case for support of their cause, or for the invasion of Iraq and (planned - now irrelevant) trial of Saddam. And I am concerned with the larger-scale implications of indulging the Kurds’ territorial ambitions, especially given the fragility of national identity in their region generally.

“Kurdistan”, if you will, is taken to be the territory inhabited by the Kurds, extending across roughly the northern prominence of Iraq, a large chunk of Turkey east of the Mediterranean, and maybe bits of Syria and Iran. Kurdistan is essentially whatever the Kurds want it to be, and nobody seems inclined to suggest otherwise. (This makes the Kurds the only oppressed and stateless minority in history that gets to just choose as much territory as they want from any country they want, and get taken seriously in doing so. Not even the Jews, after WWII, got that deal.) The reason that there should be a Kurdistan, and we should do what it takes to wrest the necessary land away from people who’ve already got it, is, again, that the Kurds are hard done by and want a state of their own.

I don’t regard these reasons as (a) very true, in the first case, or (b) very compelling, in either case. Everyone else wants to believe both of them, but nobody seems to want much to talk about why. Let’s talk about why.

The history of the Kurds in the 20th century is essentially one of rebellion and oppression (usually alternately, sometimes simultaneously). Like many peoples, they got the short end of the stick when the League of Nations handed huge chunks of the former Ottoman Empire to the British with the “mandate” to oversee them and establish permanent governments. The Brits went about this in typical pre-post-colonialist fashion, telling the locals what was good for them and acting surprised when they got shot at in return. In an attempt at pacifying the region, they appointed tribal chieftains to what had been clan-based societies, and established semi-arbitrary boundaries for eventual nation-states, in each case in favor of whoever they felt would be most agreeable to British interests. This resulted in peace in the Mid-east and a lifelong welcome for the millions of European Jews who flooded into this “land without a people” and were greeted warmly by the Palestinians who didn’t live there. The Kurds, however, enjoyed a somewhat less utopian outcome. Kurdish agitation for a separate state began even before the Mandate period, and continued until now, resurfacing basically whenever they could scrape together enough bullets to get their own asses kicked. There were multiple armed uprisings under British rule, and several more after the state of Iraq was proclaimed. All failed. But Kurds are nothing if not dedicated (and violent, and ungovernable). So, under Saddam, the Kurds continued the pattern of unsuccessful armed uprisings against their own recognized governmental authority that they had pursued for something like 70 years previously. And that brings us to their complaints against The Butcher of Baghdad.

The complaints are that he viciously suppressed their uprisings in both 1987-89 and 1991, and used chemical weapons both times in doing so. The first claim is certainly true; the latter is “true, but” for 1987, and simply a crock for 1991.

First let’s review what was actually going on in Iraq. Iraq was created and internationally recognized at the end of the British Mandate; from the beginning it included “Southern Kurdistan” (i.e., the Iraqi portion of the mythical Kurdish dream-state). Saddam came to power in 1979 and quickly launched the disastrous Iran-Iraq war - a devastating blunder, but that’s his problem. The Kurds, Iraqi citizens by fiat whether they liked it or not, were largely left alone at that time, until they tried to take advantage of the war to further their own interests by supporting Iran in opening a northern front inside Iraqi territory and making war on their own government (expecting to be given that territory if Iran won the war). Saddam drove back the Iranians and retaliated harshly against the Kurds. In 1987, the war was still going on, and the Kurds, strategists that they are, did exactly the same thing. Saddam - at this point badly weakened by continual warfare - used sarin and mustard-gas weapons against both Iran and the Iraqi town of Halabja, which had been taken by the Kurds. After the invasion of Kuwait and Gulf War I, Bush Sr. encouraged the Kurds to once more rise up against Saddam in order to destabilize his government and military during the American invasion; when that war was quickly won, the Kurds were abandoned. Saddam was left in power to stabilize the Iraqi religious factions, and given a free hand to clamp down on the Kurds yet again; at that time a US military intelligence report was published stating that Saddam had used “white phosphorous chemical weapons” against the Kurds.

So let’s take stock: The Kurds had staged armed revolts repeatedly throughout the history of modern Iraq, and had been put down each time. They staged not two but three separate revolts under Saddam, each one in wartime, in support of or in collusion with the armed forces of an invading country. And got crushed. In other words, they repeatedly engaged in armed attacks on their own, recgonized, sovereign government, and that government responded with force. Under Saddam, they had engaged in armed, organized, violent, mass treason in support of enemy forces in wartime! The government again responded with force, including chemical weapons.

Why are we sympathetic to the Kurds, here? Probably they’re nicer people than Saddam and his family - it would be impossible not to be. But you know, legally speaking, they haven’t got a leg to stand on. They tried to violently secede from their state, and took up arms against their own sovereign government in doing so; they fought alongside their state’s enemies three times. And no amount of military defeat seems sufficient to keep them from revolt or treason - after being beaten in a dozen or more revolts, they committed treason; after suffering reprisals for committing treason, they committed treason again; after being gassed while committing treason, they committed treason again. None of that proceeds from any inherent right.

Every sovereign nation - and Iraq, before and after Saddam’s ascension to power, has been a sovereign nation as long as it has existed - has the right to put down violent revolt. Every nation recognizes the right of other nations to do so - they need that power themselves to prevent their own overthrow. And it is a power grounded in long-established precepts of political philosophy - the “social contract” gives governments a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence precisely to prevent dissolution of the state that guarantees stability for all within it. (To be sure, it is also argued that “whenever a government becomes destructive of [the interests of the people], it is their right, it is their duty, to alter or to abolish it” - but the Kurds’ complaints against the Iraqi government seem to be almost entirely bound up with the fact that they themselves will not acknowledge that government. At the very least, the Kurds have so muddied their own legal and moral position vis ‘a vis their government that they cannot unambiguously position themselves as victims.) Within reason, the government has the right to use whatever degree of violence necessary to win a civil war. And it is hardly surprising that the force used against the Kurds tended to escalate - they proved over and over that minimal force doesn’t work against them.

As unappealing as it may be, it seems obvious to me that the Kurds had no right of revolt, certainly no right of treason - and that Saddam had the right, arguably the duty, to use whatever force was necessary to put a stop to their continual attacks on the state, and to prevent them recurring. Now, it is also true that much of Saddam’s tactics were beyond the pale (a curiously apt phrase here). The Kurds suffered not merely defeat but reprisal, and often brutally and involving simple mass murder. These are horrible crimes - but, strangely, they are not usually the crimes he is accused of, and it’s not clear they are crimes he could be convicted of in a non-rigged international tribunal. As mass killings, the sufferings of the Kurds are unconscionable, but as the rewards of a war they had no right to start in the first place, they are not exceptional. I don’t know about specific, individual events, but as for the overall level of violence used against the Kurds, it is not unique in that region and in that context. (Saddam is accused of causing 5,000 deaths in the worst incident, the gas attack on Halabja - in the context of a war that saw “human wave” attacks that killed up to a hundred thousand at a time.) And no fair tribunal could ask to look further than that. Certainly a government that regards torture, murder, and rape at Abu Ghraib as “boys being boys”, and persistently treats every Iraqi death as perfectly ordinary “collateral damage” is on a poor footing in demanding an accounting of every incident that occurred under the other side’s auspices. Similarly, the behavior of Bush I’s troops after the Kuwait invasion had ended - against Iraqis fleeing the war along the “Highway of Death” - makes Saddam’s reprisals in Halabja small potatoes.

The strongest complaints, however, are not the the Kurds lost their treasonous wars, but that Saddam used “chemical weapons” against them. This complaint is so weak that it was bolstered with lies even though it was true. It is widely acknowledged that Saddam used gas weapons against the Kurds in 1987-89. But it is also often claimed he did so in 1991. If using gas is a heinous crime, it hardly seems necessary to add more examples to the extensive ones that are already admitted. And the ‘91 claim is just absurd. The US intelligence report refers only to “WP” and “white phosphorous chemical weapons” and specifically denies that gas weapons were used. WP is a highly combustible element used in incendiary bombs and grenades. It burns like hell, and can’t easily be put out or removed if it touches human skin. It’s a “chemical weapon” in the sense that it’s a chemical used as a weapon, but by that standard every weapon is a chemical weapon, including the water used in Torture Boy Gonzales’s favorite hobby. Nobody has ever classed white phosphorous as a chemical weapon in the sense meant in arms-control treaties. It’s a staple of the US arsenal.

But, nonsensical fabrications aside, we are agreed that Saddam used real chemical weapons - poison gas - during at least one of the Kurds’ treasonous uprisings. That’s illegal, unforgivable, and a crime against humanity. Right?

Um, sadly, no. It was perfectly legal for Saddam to use such weapons, and in fact the US - like many nations - has in the past planned for their use and still claims the right to use them under certain circumstances.

There are no bans on any weapons except by international treaty. In the absence of any robust international law - a situation which exists in part because of the US’s continual insistence on exempting itself from any international legal accountability - the only way to create an obligation on any nation to do anything at all is to craft a treaty covering that subject and convince that nation to ratify it. (Even then, enforcement consists only of sanctions mandated by the UN - which means none at all for any US ally - and in the case of chemical weapons treaties maybe not even that.) There are many treaties governing types of allowable military weapons - going all the way back to a 19th-century treating banning poisoned bullets - but none of them are obligatory except on those countries which ratify them. There are two treaties governing chemical weapons. Iraq is a signatory to the 1925 Geneva Protocol governing the use of chemical weapons in warfare, but with a holdback provision which makes that ratification “On condition that the Iraq government shall be bound by the provisions of the Protocol only towards those States which have both signed and ratified it or have acceded thereto, and that it shall not be bound by the Protocol towards any State at enmity with Iraq whose armed forces, or the forces of whose allies, do not respect the provisions of the Protocol” - almost exactly the same condition imposed by the US, the UK, Israel, and many other states. It has never ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention banning the production of such weapons. (It also agreed to elimination of weapons stocks following the 1991 war, but that’s another matter.)

In short, Iraq has formally agreed to renounce chemical weapons usage against those states which take, and uphold, a similar pledge in return. It explicitly holds open the option of such usage against other states. It’s hard to imagine that a non-state entity, nominally under Iraqi authority to begin with, and engaged in violent insurrection in support of an enemy, does not fall within the scope of that exemption. And there simply is no other governing authority preventing states from using poison gas in war. Most of the nations involved in WWI did use such weapons; the United States has always maintained a stockpile of chemical weapons, and does so today. Until ratification of the CWC, the US maintained an active production line, and was actively developing not just new weapons but new classes of chemical weapons (”binary munitions”) under Reagan and Bush Sr. Iraq was equally within its legal rights to develop and use such weapons.

The bottom line - almost unbelievably, but, remember, it’s largely the Western power-brokers who set things up this way - is that there is no international legal authority that makes chemical weapons illegal for states that choose to have them; Iraq was not signatory to any convention that would have prevented its using chemical weapons in some circumstances (nor is the United States to this day); no convention, ratified or not, would have prevented Saddam using chemical weapons in an internal conflict; no consistent doctrine distinguishes between the forceful suppression of rebellion and illegitimate reprisals; no single act of reprisal on Saddam’s part approaches in magnitude the impact of violent acts outside the normal conventions of war on the part of Iraq, Iran, and the United States in their various conflicts; the Kurds were legally subjects of Saddam’s authority and had no right of violent revolt; and Saddam’s attacks on the Kurds in each case were in response to not merely disruptive but violently treasonous assaults by the Kurds on the Iraqi state itself, which Saddam had the responsibility to put down.

Yet there is an entire industry of people, mostly right-wingers, carrying water for the Kurds’ revanchist pipe-dream. It simply boggles me why. Granted Saddam was a bastard, but nobody in his position would have put up with the Kurds’ treasonous antics. (Turkey certainly is not doing so, and is actively working to quash any “Kurdistan” nonsense because they don’t want to give up a third of their territory to the Kurds any more than Saddam was willing to give up far less of his.) The Kurds were useful dupes for Bush Sr.’s murderous double-cross, but on its merits their case is not very compelling, and has contributed much to the instability of that corner of the Middle East; they remain part of the problem (though not the largest part) in Iraq today.

Support for the Kurds is sometimes pitched not as recognition of a legitimate territorial claim on their part, but as a realpolitikal move to break up Iraq and create a pro-American base in the region (either by itself or as part of a sectarian division of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions). This makes even less sense.

For one thing, there’s no reason to think it would work. The Kurds - against all odds, after Bush Sr.’s betrayal - do seem reasonably amenable to American interests. But the Kurds have proven beyond any question - and not unreasonably so - that they have only one interest: that of the Kurds. American interests will be Kurdish interests only so long as Kurdish interests are American interests, which coincidental fact is likely to fluctuate as rapidly as the price of oil. (Given that the current US administration doesn’t regard American citizens as among its interests - ask anyone from New Orleans - I would hate to be a citizen of “Kurdistan” hanging my security on America’s willingness to act on my behalf.) And the speeches of US-aligned Kurdish exiles are likely a poor demonstration of how things will actually turn out on the ground once we start mucking them up. Remember that the Bush administration’s expectation was that all of Iraq would be a stable, democratic, US ally. Regarding neocon assurances that “Kurdistan” will be now what greater Iraq, inexplicably, is not . . . well, consider the source.

But there are more important reasons not to go simply shuffling nations around to satisfy self-interested ethnic troublemakers. The sovereignty of nations - regarded by realpolitikers as diplomatic eltism and squeamishness - is more than just an arbitrary courtesy between overlords. It is the foundation of civilization. Every nation exists as the product of the social contract among its citizens. That contract - the willingness to accede to the demands of civilization and renounce violent self-defense in favor of a sovereign government - establishes the government as both obligated and privileged authority: only the government can wield authority over its citizens, and the government must wield authority in preservation of their liberties. Outside interference in violation of the sovereignty of a local government undermines both aspects of this grant of authority. That, no government can allow, and thus, no government can accept on principle the claim that any government has the right to meddle in any other government’s sphere of authority. (To be sure, there are horribly bad governments, which either fail at or violate their own obligations to their citizens. But other governments still remain loath to violate the privileges of governmental authority even when those privileges are badly used. They will intervene in “failed states” - ones which have no real government - because doing so does not threaten the sovereignty of governments generally. But they are very slow to intervene in merely bad states. This explains the woeful slowness to act that was seen in Bosnia, Somalia, the Sudan, and such states, and its terrible consequences - but it avoids establishing the principle that one state may determine how another state’s business is to be conducted, and then interere by force if its government does not agree.) The contract encompasses only the citizens and their own governments. There is no contract between governments, and note that the same right-wingers who are so eager to interfere in other governments’ powers are hysterical in their allergy to any form of “world government”. There is no ground for preserving each government’s local autonomy without recognizing the sovereingty of every legitimate government, which means states cannot be broken up just because it seems like a good idea to do so.

For an example in the alternative, consider Ralph Peters’s truly loony single-handed re-drawing of the map of the entire Middle East. He takes as a general principle that disaffected ethnic minorities are entitled to their own states - apparently for no other reason than that they want them.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia, but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

The map (follow the link, and click “Next” on the map to see Peters’s imagined utopia) includes a few minor changes: Peters grandly carves the bravely-named “Free Kurdistan” out of parts of Iraq and Syria, all of Turkey east of a line between the tips of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and most of Iran northwest of Tehran. (Sure thing! Who could object?) There’s also the brand-new Sunni state in what was northwest Iraq, and the “Arab Shia State” in what was central Iraq. (Why not? As long as you’re giving warlike religious factions their own countries, go ahead and specify a repressive theocratic government as well!) Saudi Arabia loses its entire Persian Gulf coastal area,  and gives up a huge chunk of its Red Sea coast to become the free-standing “Islamic Sacred State” encompassing both Medina and Mecca. (Why would the Saudis mind?) Be sure not to miss “Free Baluchistan”, cobbled together from huge territories previously belonging to those easy-going and cooperative nations Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (What could go wrong!?) He also specifies a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders, but admits that it won’t solve anything. (”So let us set aside this single overstudied issue . . . .”)

Peters shares the traditional iron-fisters’ sneering contempt for “sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by . . . diplomats” (you know, that old “sovereign authority” business - I mean, how could having sacrosanct boundaries possibly contribute to stability more than, say, letting a potted ex-Lt. Col. simply tell you how big your country is going to be?). He has a point that it is these various ethnic factions’ discontent that breeds incessant territorial war in the Mideast and Balkans. But it’s exactly this breeziness about sovereingty that makes it impossible to make having a state mean anything. If we don’t care about states like, say, Turkey, why should anyone care about “Free Kurdistan”? If we did turn on our (nominal) ally and create such a pre-fab paradise out of the ass-end of Turkey without their permission, why shouldn’t the Turks simply take it back? And if they tried to do so, which side should we support, and why? (You’d be hard-pressed, in that situation, to argue that either result contributes more to stability, since the loser in either case will obviously simply bide their time to make another attempt. We know that about the Kurds, and it would be foolhardy to expect less of the Turks.) Voiding sovereignty literally voids international stability - it voids any valid claim any nation might make to aspire to, expect, and be entitled to defend its own stability. And not incidentally, since the US is the only country in a position to go rampaging around the world “adjusting borders” in this fashion, and likely the only one dumb enough to, Peters blithely and not-so-subtly enthrones the US as arbiter of the fate of nations while simultaneously disenfranchising every sovereign government around the globe. Over-reach much, Ralph?

Finally, why, again, do we care? Oh, right: we want to “redress the wrongs suffered by cheated population groups such as the Baluchis, Ismailis, and Naqshbandis”. Ri-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght. This is starting to make an old-fashioned war for oil look like a good idea. And isn’t it the neo-con right that’s constantly fulminating against “identity politics”? What is this at all but religious and ethnic identity politics taken to an absurdly literalist extreme? Affirmative action for disadvantaged minorities? Hell, no! A ready-made nation-state for Baluchis in the middle of the world’s most unstable region? Well, if making it real means we’ve got to carve up (a) a violence-prone nuclear power governed by a weaselly and treacherous military dictator, (b) our own ready-made failed state including the current Taliban stronghold in Pakistan, and (c) the region’s largest country which also happens to be our longtime enemy and a nascent nuclear power in its own right, well, hell, Free Baluchistan deserves no less! (”Free Baluchistan”? W . . . T . . . F?)

The world’s an ugly and unstable place. Ethnic and religious tensions surely contribute to making it so. But we have nations, and governments, precisely to deal with that fact. Vacating the very notion of nations as sovereign guarantors of stability in favor of an eternal game of “Risk” with the US as the only player is beyond asinine. It is literally uncivilized. And with that in mind, and with sympathy for the poison gas, I say thumbs-down on “Kurdistan”.

January 9th, 2007 General, Politics, Religion, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Iran | 7 comments