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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (35180)	7/28/2002 5:46:30 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Kurds Savor a New, and Endangered, Golden Age nytimes.com On the subject of the Iraqi Kurds, this was on the NYT front page today. Given their history of being sold down the river by the US, I'd say they'd be pretty darn foolish to get involved in some lame-brained neocon Afghanistan redux campaign. Once you've been sold out by Henry Kissinger, I can't imagine the Wolfowitz crowd has any particular charm. Excerpt: The Iraqi Kurds' domain, at the meeting point of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, is a far cry from the Iraq controlled by Mr. Hussein. To enter that Iraq, south of the no-flight zone patrolled by American and British warplanes that have kept Iraqi troops and authority from the Kurdish region since 1991, is to encounter sullen warnings, the menace of border officials and the darkness that Mr. Hussein's 23-year rule has cast across the rest of the country. In the northern territory, a Switzerland-size crescent covering about a tenth of Iraq, the Kurds have come as close as ever to their centuries-old dream of building their own nation. Hemmed in by a longstanding resolve among Arabs, Persians and Turks to deny the 25 million Kurds of this region a state of their own, the Kurds of Iraq are savoring their freedoms, yet deeply uneasy about new political crosscurrents swirling across the territory. Never truly secure as long as their domain exists outside international law and is unrecognized by the Iraqi Constitution, the Kurds are faced now with a new problem growing out of President Bush's vow to oust Mr. Hussein. In effect, the American plan proposes to upend the Iraqi chessboard, and many Kurds fear that, whatever happens, they may lose much of the autonomy they now enjoy. Even leaving aside their history of betrayal by the US, given that the main usable US ally in an Iraqi operation would be Turkey, and what Turkey thinks of the Kurds, I'd guess the Kurds are properly circumspect. Maybe Perle could explain it all away, though. If the Kurds take the Dark Prince at his word, they deserve to be sold down the river yet again.