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Baker and Hamilton, or Why the Time for
Double Crossing is Long Passed
By: Sabah Salih
29 December 2006
James Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the
Iraq Study Group, are the very same Washington insiders who in 1991 played a
leading role in persuading George Bush senior to stand aside and let the Kurds
and the Shiites be slaughtered by Saddam only weeks after the broccoli-hating
President had called upon these people to take matters into their own hands and
push the dictator aside. At the time, the men were central foreign-policy
figures, Baker a secretary of state, Hamilton a ranking democrat on Foreign
Relations Committee. They and the president justified the callous betrayal in
the name of realism, which in the lexicon of American politics is a euphemism
for doing something morally reprehensible, as was obviously the case here. The
good news was that in the wake of the Iraq intervention, George W. Bush had
given his ironclad promise not to allow America’s name to be tarnished again by
double-crossing policies of any kind; foreign policy was now to be guided by
democratic principles, not backstabbing tactics.
As men well groomed in politics of a different
kind, however, Baker and Hamilton were not pleased, and now, thanks to a
war-weary and shortsighted America desperate for a quick solution to the Iraq
conflict, the duo are back once gain at their game, and once again it is
principally the Kurds they want America to double cross. But the good news is
that this time around the odds are overwhelmingly against them, not the Kurds.
It is not so much what these men have put into
their report that should anger the Kurds; it is, rather, what they have decided
to exclude, for it is often through the politics of exclusion that
double-crossers reveal their true intentions. In the report, exclusion has made
it possible for Baker and Hamilton to put the Kurds under a verbal embargo: We
hear about them but not from them. We know what the Turks, the Iranians, the
Syrians, and the Saudis, the Sunni Arabs think but not what the Kurds think. We
are told why the U.S. needs to listen to all these and why their points of view
should matter, but we are made to feel that the Kurdish point of view is either
non-existent or not worth listening to. We are told that Iraq is in a broken
state, and that to fix it, outsiders must have a voice, but not the Kurds. In
other words, we don’t need to read between the lines to realize what this duo
are up to: the past, not the present, is their model for fixing Iraq, and we
all know what that has always meant for the Kurds: Subjugation to Arab rule.
I said this time around the odds are against
the Baker-Hamilton scheme. First, developments in Iraq since 1991 have rendered
the country’s recent past irrelevant for solving its current problems. As times
goes by, Kurdistan’s separation will deepen, not lessen. Indeed, for the Kurds,
Iraq as a term designating a sense of belonging to a country and a language and
a flag and a national anthem has already become defunct. Kurdish identity has no
place for it anymore, except as a series of distant nightmares steadily fading
from collective memory.
Second, the linguistic gap between Kurdistan
and Iraq, which is already fairly deep, will grow deeper. When I was a high
school student in the early 1970, we had no choice but to study everything in
the Arabic that had been imposed upon us. Kurdish was the language of our
senses, but our initiation into the worlds of politics, history, music, global
understanding, and deep thinking was through Arabic. But now, even for people
of my own generation, Kurdish has returned to us in an act of linguistic
vengeance to demand intellectual parity with our oppressor language. For the
generation coming of age now, though, Arabic has become largely irrelevant. It
is largely through Kurdish and to some extent English that this new generation
defines itself and experiences the world. Think about it, how much even deeper
this linguistic divide will be for the generation to come.
Third, in an ironic way, Iraq’s civil war has
been a catalyst in strengthening Kurdish separation, for it has rendered the
idea of Iraq as a unitary state impossible. The continuing slaughter and mayhem
has given each side plenty of reasons to look inward and reeducate themselves
about who they are in terms of culture and politics and why thinking nationally
has to give way to thinking locally. Call it a ghetto mentality, but the fact
of the matter is when you break a people’s nationalism, as Bernard Shaw put it
nearly a century ago, they can thinking of nothing else. Already, all
indications are most of the Shiites are determined to go the Kurdish way. The
Sunni Arabs can fume all they want, but in the end they have no other choice but
to come to terms with an Iraq divided three ways. The dynamics of division are
already in place, and for a long, long time to come they will be the determining
factors in shaping things to come. If it took the Europeans nearly two centuries
to get where they are now, it will most likely take as long, if not longer, for
a similar arrangement to be worked out for Iraq.
So, let Baker and Hamilton pontificate all they
want about how they want to fix Iraq the old-fashioned way: This time around
they are in no position to impose anything on the Kurds.
Dr. Sabah Salih is
Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.
