COUNTIN' ON THE KURDS?

Late in the 60s, into the 70s I spent a couple years driving through Asia in a VW camper van. Syria and Iraq, inhospitable to people with Jewish last names, were easy to avoid. You simply drove through eastern Turkey into western Iran, skirting northern Syria and Iraq. Except for who these four areas were ruled by-- a secular, western-oriented Turkish military dictatorship, a pro-western Iranian absolute monarchy, and a couple of proto-fascist Baathist dictatorships-- the 4 regions were very similar. Collectively they make up Kurdistan, the traditional homeland of the Kurds. I never met any of the Kurds ruled by Syria or Iraq but the Kurds under the thumbs of the Turkish military dictatorship and under the Shah's dictatorship, sure were nice, friendly people. Their wonderful code of hospitality more than made up for the backwardness of the areas they lived in. The roads, hotels and other facilities for travelers were sparse and primitive, sometimes nonexistent, but the people were welcoming and generous. I remember thinking the Kurds were good folks.

After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sevres provided for the creation of a Kurdish nation in what is now eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northeastern Syria. Ataturk created a reality on the ground that precluded that and the Kurds have been a mostly oppressed minority spread between the 4 countries. Needless to say, they have never given up their dream of a national homeland and despite being brutally stabbed in the back by this Bush's father after the first Gulf War, they have created their own reality on the ground in the form of a seemingly pro-western semi-autonomous republic in northern Iraq. Turkey, which has a serious simmering Kurdish war of independence on its hands, has pressured the U.S. to pressure the Iraqi Kurds to not declare an independent state, though it has functioned as one since 1992.

The Kurds have been tough fighters for their homeland and have one of the most effective military forces in Iraq. They will fight to the death to protect their villages and families and their hard-won autonomy. Part of Bush's ill-conceived and doomed "surge plan" is to transfer elements of the Kurdish Peshmerga to fight in the brutal civil war raging in Baghdad between Arab Sunnis and Arab Shi'a. Kurds want nothing to do with it and most would like nothing better than to see the two factions all kill each other.

"Kurdish soldiers from northern Iraq, who are mostly Sunnis but not Arabs, are deserting the army to avoid the civil war in Baghdad, a conflict they consider someone else's problem." Peshmerga members in the Iraqi army are loyal to Kurdistan and their only interest is in securing their homeland, not George Bush's plans for an Iraq they have always hated. "'The soldiers don't know the Arabic language, the Arab tradition, and they don't have any experience fighting terror,' said Anwar Dolani, a former peshmerga commander who leads the brigade that's being transferred to Baghdad from the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah... 'I can't deny that a number of soldiers have deserted the army, and it might increase due to the ferocious military operations in Baghdad,' he said."

The Kurds aren't going to fight Bush's war in Iraq and the last thing they want is to get between the Sunni Arabs and the Shi'a. According to today's Washington Post al-Maliki has been a pretty reluctant participant in Bush's latest harebrained scheme as well-- a harebrained scheme which is very dependent on him for even a modicum of success. "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national security adviser proposed that U.S. troops withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority." Bush rejected his proposal, something Bush's oil-rich Gulf state (Sunni) clients adamantly oppose, since they-- and everyone else except the clueless Bush-- see Maliki's Shi'a government as a cat's paw for Iran.


"From that early December meeting on, Bush was headed down a path that would result in his defying critics and the seeming message of the November elections by ordering 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq. A reconstruction of the administration's Iraq policy review, based on more than a dozen interviews with senior advisers, Bush associates, lawmakers and national security officials, reveals a president taking the lead in driving the process toward one more effort at victory-- despite doubts along the way from his own military commanders, lawmakers and the public at large." Otherwise discredited and consistently wrong neocons, plus the Bush family's Saudi business partners and two crazed and bloodthirsty senators (Lieberman and McCain) are behind Bush. Everyone else thinks he's off his rocker.

"He never seriously considered beginning to withdraw U.S. forces, as urged by newly elected Democratic congressional leaders and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. And he had grown skeptical of his own military commanders, who were telling him no more troops were needed. So Bush relied on his own judgment [oy] that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. When his generals resisted sending more troops, he seemed irritated. When they finally agreed to go along with the plan, he doubled the number of troops they requested."

Even after Stephen Hadley, Bush's plodding rubber stamp National Security Advisor, returned from Iraq with a grim assessment of the capabilities and perhaps even the intentions, of al-Maliki and his militia-infused government, Bush decided, like a drunken sailor, to throw the dice one last time. Listening to some of the Republican talking heads and shills on TV today, one gets the idea that it was the Democrats who prevented the Bush Regime from sending enough troops into Iraq in the first place, instead of the cocky Rumsfield, venal Cheney and detached, ignorant Bush themselves. They fired General Shinseki for telling Congress more troops were needed but now-- too late-- Bush is taking advice from a psychotic warmonger and former general named Jack Keane who dreams of sending hundreds of thousands of (nonexistent) American troops into Iraq to just kill everyone.

And what do Old School, visionless Democratic pols like Biden, Levin, Reid, Durbin and Schumer propose to counter this insanity with-- for the American people? A nonbinding, symbolic resolution. The U.S. has a severe leadership problem and it's becoming clearer and clearer why Americans don't like electing senators to the presidency. Richardson, Edwards, even Vilsack look a lot more realistic about the real world than Inside-the-Beltway bubbleheads like Biden, Clinton, Kerry, or even relative newcomer Obama.