Mick Hartley

Michael Totten, on Rex Tillerson's refusal to acknowlege the results of the Kurdish referendum:

Kurdistan is a nation in all but name while Iraq is a nation in name only. Iraq isn’t really even a country. It’s a map and a geographic abstraction. Baghdad, from the Kurds’ point of view, is a foreign capital home to terrorists, deranged militias, dictators and war criminals.

If Middle Easterners drew their own borders rather than French and British imperialists, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. (Nor would Syria, for that matter.) The yearning for an independent Kurdistan dates back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I, roughly the same time Arab and Turkish nationalisms were born. Back then, the League of Nations promised Kurdish autonomy, but they were cruelly shackled to Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, three of which went on to produce mass-murdering totalitarian regimes and terrorists armies. Of course the Kurds want out. Under what theory would they want to stay? Saying their referendum on the question isn’t legitimate, as Rex Tillerson does, is a despicable lie made doubly despicable by the fact that the Kurds are our friends.

Their enemies, predictably, are turning the screws. Iran ordered a fuel embargo, Iraq’s federal government is closing the borders with all flights into and out of international airports in Erbil and Suleimaniyah grounded by the Civil Aviation Authority. If you’re willing to visit or work in Iraqi Kurdistan because it’s far safer than the rest of the country (and it is), you’re out of luck. Now you’ll have to travel through Baghdad and risk a run-in with the head-choppers. Turkey has also halted fuel shipments, is threatening military intervention, and its deranged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says blocking Kurdish independence in Iraq is “a matter of survival.”

Iraqi Kurdistan does not threaten anybody’s survival. Iraq’s Kurds have never invaded anybody, have no interest in invading anybody, and have never supported terrorists or militias on anyone else’s territory, and especially not on their own.

No other group of people in the entire world gets blockaded this way for declaring independence—not the South Ossetians or the Abkhaz in Georgia, the Crimeans in Ukraine, the Albanians in Kosovo or anyone else. Only the Kurds get treated this way, because their part of the world is even more wretched than the post-Soviet space. They’re getting kicked in the stomach by their belligerent neighbors—again—and Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson are siding with the belligerents, none of which are true friends and one of which is an enemy….

Either way, the Kurds are far better friends of the United States than Turkey or Iraq ever have been or ever will be….

The White House almost certainly understands that a successful foreign policy rewards friends and punishes enemies, but the president can’t even get that right if he doesn’t know who his friends and enemies are.

Kurdistan is so unique in the Middle East that it almost seems to exist in some kind of alternate universe. It’s by far the most pro-American and pro-Western place in the region, even more so than Israel. (It is also, for what it’s worth, staunchly pro-Israel, which sets it even farther apart from its neighbors.) Over and over again I heard from its people, including government officials, that they want the United States to build permanent military bases there. I even heard, more than once, requests that Iraqi Kurdistan join the union as the 51^st state. These people are more reliable allies even than Europeans, yet because people and nations that don’t like us—even hate us—want the Kurds to be kept under the boot, we’re going along with it.

“I ask Americans not to leave us,” Kurdish Peshmerga Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen said to me in his office some years ago while most of Iraq was on fire. “From 1920 until now, we have been frustrated and disappointed by their pledges and promises. Eight times we have been disappointed. I ask the American people, do not make it nine.”

Sorry, Colonel. Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson and Mike Flynn just made it nine.