The Disintegration Of Iraq And The Birth Of An Independent Kurdistan

After World War I, as the British and French were divvying up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, it looked, for a while, that the Kurds were finally about to get their own homeland. As we saw last week, Kamal Atatürk quickly dashed those hopes-- and the Kurds have been split up between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Today, Iraqi Kurdistan is on the verge of an independence supported by Israel and acquiesced to by Turkey-- which has always been the stumbling block. The U.S. still seems committed to an unrealistic and incoherent urge to keep British-created Iraq together as one country. As Belgan Middle East expert Koert Debeuf explained this week, too late for that. "R.I.P. Iraq," he wrote. "The country is no more. Iraq has ceased to exist." He claims that the "soon-expected declaration of independence by the Iraqi Kurds… will prove irreversible." The U.S. should well understand the reasons the Kurds have had it with the American dream of holding crumbling, dysfunctional and nearly dystopian Iraq together.

Few paid attention two weeks after the parliamentary elections of 30 April 2014 when Masoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, threatened to boycott a new government led by Iraqi PM Nuri Maliki. Barzani said he had enough of the authoritarian way in which Maliki has governed.

The dispute between Erbil and Baghdad dates back a long time. One elements is that the referendum on disputed areas such as Kirkuk, promised in the constitution of 2005, never came to be. The referendum was to determine if these areas would be part of Kurdish Iraq or not.

Since the end of 2013 the friction between the two capitals has seriously aggravated.

In November 2012, Erbil signed a historic agreement with Ankara to use the Turkish pipeline to the port of Ceyhan. Baghdad claims the Kurds have no right to do it independently. This reaction is comprehensible as one third of Iraq’s oil reserves are located in Kurdistan.

On top of that, new gas resources have been found and might soon be ready for exploitation. The Kurds insist that the constitution gives them the authority to exploit and sell their own hydrocarbons. They already exported crude oil secretly by trucks to Iran and Turkey. But a pipeline is a different matter.

Maliki reacted furiously and cut the monthly budget transfer to Erbil. The Iraqi constitution stipulates that Baghdad should allocate a share of 17 percent of the budget to the Kurds. Falah Mustafa, the foreign minister of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), told me that Baghdad never allocated more than 11 percent anyway. But in January 2014 Maliki blocked the whole thing.

The consequences have been disastrous. With 70 to 80 percent of Iraqi Kurds working for the regional government in one way or another, all of them stopped getting paid. The KRG had to take loans from Turkey in order to restart paying a part of people’s salaries in March. It only served to deepen the resentment of the Kurds to the central government in Baghdad.

This resentment, together with the sectarian and authoritarian rule of Maliki, prompted Kurdish president Barzani to make his harsh comments in May 2014. “Those who cut the budget of Kurdistan are going to pay the price of that decision,” he said at that time.

Barzani and his fellow Kurds knew there would be no support for their demand for more autonomy, not to speak of independence. But all that changed drastically and suddenly on 10 June 2014, when the extreme jihadists of the Islamiq State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) captured Mosul and a great part of the province of Nineveh.

The Kurds had predicted trouble. They warned Baghdad that Baathists, people linked the former regime of Saddam Hussein, and extremist groups were forming an alliance to organise a Sunni Muslim revolt.

The Shia Muslim Maliki has not only neglected the Kurds, but all the more so the Sunni population of Western Iraq. He also changed the US-trained “inclusive” Iraqi army into a Shia militia loyal to himself. At the time of the ISIS attack, just 5 percent of Iraqi soldiers were Sunni and 2 to 3 percent were Kurdish.

Selected on sectarian grounds instead of merit, these soldiers saw no reason to die to defend a Sunni region against Sunni fighters. Small wonder the Iraqi army let the ISIS-led alliance capture Western Iraq without resistance.

The events have transformed the mood in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Peshmerga, the Kurdish forces, captured Kirkuk, cheered on by every Kurdish person. Kurds everywhere declared their readiness to join the force and to fight for Kurdish territory and independence.

A Kurdish journalist told me that being a soldier in the Peshmerga is now considered the most prestigious job in Kurdistan. He said that for people who haven’t been paid for months by Baghdad “it is more honourable to be a fighter, than a doctor or an engineer."

The KRG believes it has a window of opportunity.

Rudaw, a media centre funded by Kurdish PM Barzani, is feeding the independence movement. It recently interviewed constitutional experts from Quebec, a separatist province in Canada, who advised Kurds to break away immediately.

Barzani also formed a new coalition government on 19 June. All the Kurdish parties agreed to put aside their differences to work together for the same goal.

It should have caused little surprise when he told CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour on 23 June that: “The time is here for the people of Kurdistan to determine their future and the decision of the people is what we are going to uphold.”

...All the Kurds I spoken to on my visit, from artists and journalists, to diplomats and KRG ministers, gave the same message: this is our moment and we will not let it pass.

Everything seems to be in place.

With the oil up and running, they have stable revenue. With Kirkuk, they have their disputed territory back. All the parties are united in one government. The Peshmerga is highly motivated and unchallenged by Iraqi forces.

The one question that remains is what will be Barzani’s strategy?

Government sources told me a decision has not been made yet. One of the main reasons is the question of international support. But now that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and officials in the Turkey’s ruling AKP party have endorsed Kurdish independence, there is little to stop the Kurds from going ahead.

While the world talks about what to do with the Islamic State, we might well see a Kurdish State emerge sooner than we thought.

In 2011 Ali Khedery, an Exxon Mobil executive, negotiated that company’s entry into Iraqi Kurdistan. Before that, starting in 2003, he had been the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of U.S. Central Command. This week he penned an important article for the Washington Post about how the Bush-Cheney Regime got stuck with Maliki. In some ways, it is a mea culpa and he makes it clear from the first sentence that Maliki is at the heart of the disintegration of Iraq as a nation-state. Khedery admits that it was he who started the Maliki ball rolling in Washington.

My colleague Jeffrey Beals and I were among the few Arabic-speaking Americans on good terms with the country’s leading figures. The only man we knew with any chance to win support from all Iraqi factions-- and who seemed likely to be an effective leader-- was Maliki. We argued that he would be acceptable to Iraq’s Shiite Islamists, around 50 percent of the population; that he was hard-working, decisive and largely free of corruption; and that he was politically weak and thus dependent on cooperating with other Iraqi leaders to hold together a coalition. Although Maliki’s history was known to be shadowy and violent, that was hardly unusual in the new Iraq.

With other colleagues, Beals and I hashed over the options with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who in turn encouraged Iraq’s skeptical but desperate national leaders to support Maliki. Leading a bloc with only a handful of parliamentarians, Maliki was initially surprised by the American entreaties, but he seized the opportunity, becoming prime minister on May 20, 2006.

He vowed to lead a strong, united Iraq.

Never having run anything beyond a violent, secretive Shiite Islamist political party, Maliki found his first years leading Iraq enormously challenging. He struggled with violence that killed thousands of Iraqis each month and displaced millions, a collapsing oil industry, and divided and corrupt political partners-- as well as delegations from an increasingly impatient U.S. Congress. Maliki was the official ruler of Iraq, but with the surge of U.S. forces in 2007 and the arrival in Baghdad of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, there was little doubt about who was actually keeping the Iraqi state from collapse.

…One of the biggest breakthroughs of this era was the Awakening movement, in which, thanks to long negotiations, Sunni Arab tribal and Baathist insurgents turned their guns away from U.S. troops and pointed them toward al-Qaeda, thereby reintegrating into the Iraqi political process. Initially hostile to the idea of arming and funding Sunni fighters, Maliki eventually relented after intense lobbying from Crocker and Petraeus, but only on the condition that Washington foot the bill. He later agreed to hire and fund some of the tribal fighters, but many of his promises to them went unmet — leaving them unemployed, bitter and again susceptible to radicalization.

…By 2010, however, I was urging the vice president of the United States and the White House senior staff to withdraw their support for Maliki. I had come to realize that if he remained in office, he would create a divisive, despotic and sectarian government that would rip the country apart and devastate American interests… Vital U.S. interests were on the line. Thousands of American and Iraqi lives had been lost and trillions of dollars had been spent to help advance our national security, not the ambitions of one man or one party.

…Our debates mattered little, however, because the most powerful man in Iraq and the Middle East, Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, was about to resolve the crisis for us. Within days of Biden’s visit to Baghdad, Soleimani summoned Iraq’s leaders to Tehran. Beholden to him after decades of receiving Iran’s cash and support, the Iraqis recognized that U.S. influence in Iraq was waning as Iranian influence was surging. The Americans will leave you one day, but we will always remain your neighbors, Soleimani said, according to a former Iraqi official briefed on the meeting.

After admonishing the feuding Iraqis to work together, Soleimani dictated the outcome on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader: Maliki would remain premier; Jalal Talabani, a legendary Kurdish guerilla with decades-long ties to Iran, would remain president; and, most important, the American military would be made to leave at the end of 2011. Those Iraqi leaders who cooperated, Soleimani said, would continue to benefit from Iran’s political cover and cash payments, but those who defied the will of the Islamic Republic would suffer the most dire of consequences.

…America stuck by Maliki. As a result, we now face strategic defeat in Iraq and perhaps in the broader Middle East.

Khedery, whose loyalties lie with the Bush-Cheney team, lays the blame totally at Obama's feet. The demise of a dysfunctional, fictional Iraq, though, isn't in anyone's longterm best interests and an independent Kurdistan-- which exists all but on paper already-- plus a Shia south and a Sunni west us rapidly becoming a forgone conclusion.