According to Hersh, Israeli teams are training KAR commando units and running covert operations into Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. The ultimate objective is to expand the KAR into a base for Israeli-Kurdish operations against their common adversaries in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These adversaries might possibly include Turkey, whose Kurdish insurgent organization, the Kongra-Gel, has lately resumed anti-regime hostilities. The Kurdish population of these four states totals over 20,000,000. After 150 years of persecution, they are widely dispersed, but they maintain their historic claim on some 75,000 square miles of mountain fastness at the juncture of the four affected states. The Kurdish “Jerusalem” is Kirkuk, which commands Iraq’s immense northern oil field. After population transfers imposed by Baghdad in the past, Kirkuk’s Kurds are outnumbered by Arabs and generic Turks (locally known as Turkmen), but spontaneous Kurdish resettlement is underway, undeterred by Coalition disapproval. If the new government in Iraq does not accord the Kurds a high degree of autonomy, they may well secede. Secession would be consistent with Israel’s traditional strategy of building alliances with compatible communities—Lebanese Maronites, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, and Iranians before the fall of the monarchy. Secession would pose serious problems for the United States. The preservation of an intact Iraq is the stated objective of all its neighbors and of the United States, but if the Kurds were to pull out, Washington could not in good conscience go to war against the political entity it was instrumental in creating. Turkey could intervene, however, and probably would. The result: a bloody conflict involving two close American allies—three if Israel chose to assist the Kurds by, for example, providing air support. Military cooperation between Israel and Turkey has been a prominent element of the Middle Eastern power equation, but—as Hersh points out—it went a bit sour after Turkey opposed the invasion of Iraq. No such issues appear to cloud Israel’s relationship with the Kurds.
For America, a Kurdish state would be a nightmare. For Israel, which has gotten used to nightmares, it might offer an opportunity to break the fifty-year deadlock and possibly even generate a third expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine. Policymakers have to entertain worst-case scenarios such as these. We observers— as well as they—will continue to hope that moderation will prevail in Iraq, but we recognize that if Washington had not followed the counsels of zealotry to Baghdad, it would not have had to contend with such horrendous contingencies in the first place. June 2004 |
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Curt Jones, a retired senior U.S. Foreign Service officer, had a thirty-year career as a diplomat, most of it stationed in the Middle East or concerned with Middle Eastern affairs in Washington. He writes frequently for American Diplomacy.