January 2008
Michael Rubin’s recent
anti-Kurd polemic (circulated widely on the web) titled “Is Iraqi Kurdistan a
Good Ally?” might as well have been titled “Are the Kurds Reliable Puppets of
the U.S.?”
I say puppets, because Mr.
Rubin, as an old State Department hand made irrelevant by political changes in
Washington and the Middle East, represents that department’s traditional but
dysfunctional way of thinking about the Levant, which with regard to the Kurds
comes down to two equally unpleasant options: Be an American puppet, that’s,
don’t do anything that might displease us or our Arab and Turk allies, and we’ll
think about leaving you with the leftovers after everyone else has had his fill;
or face the cold-blooded consequences of an
exploitation-followed-by-backstabbing approach that you seem to have forgotten.
Right from the start one can
easily see that Mr. Rubin is no friend of the Kurds. He says after WWII, “the
Kurds missed their opportunity for statehood when other peoples gained their
independence.” Missed? Isn’t this really the traditional way by which
colonialism has come to describe its injustices and aggressions against the
people they have forcibly colonized? As any school children can tell you,
Kurdistan is not independent because British colonialism decided to dismember it
in order to create what’s known today as Iraq. Other nations are independent,
not because they are any smarter than the Kurds, but primarily because
colonialism was on their side.
One of the consequences of
the increasing unpopularity of the Iraq war in the U.S. is that it has allowed
for a fair amount of racism against all the peoples of Iraq to go unchallenged,
mainly because the racism is clothed in anti-war rhetoric. So we often hear,
mostly from people who otherwise describe themselves as liberal and progressive,
that the real problem with Iraq is that there is no comparable figure in that
country to our Thomas Jefferson. Rubin repeats this charge by faulting the
Kurdish leadership for not being like Nelson Mandela. Now, why would any Kurd
want to be like Mandela or, for that matter, Jefferson? These men, granted,
were great and useful but they were great and useful in and for particular
contexts. The first was the product of the black South African struggle against
apartheid; the second was the product of an America that was determined to
Americanize its European roots. What worked for Jefferson could not have worked
for Mandela. So why expect Kurdish leaders to look up to Mandela as a role
model when their own history is full of great (great for their context) figures
already? Besides, if Mr. Rubin had bothered to give the Kurdish history a fair
hearing, he would have quickly learned that from the point of Kurdish politics
Mandela has never been an ally; in fact, if it had been up to Mr. Mandela, today
Saddam would still be the Butcher of Baghdad and the oppressor of Kurdistan.
No one can deny that the
Kurdish peshmerga played an important role in America’s effort at regime
change in Iraq. But Mr. Rubin’s mindset, being more or less identical to the
anti-Kurd mindset that defines and feeds Turkish nationalism, allows him to
describe these brave protectors of Kurdistan as looters. In one notably hideous
and offensive sentence, he even reduces the whole Kurdish nation into a
shameless bunch of willing ass kissers who, unlike the proud and honorable
Turks, are willing to sell their honor to the Americans: “Few American diplomats
like their Turkish interlocutors. The Iraqi Kurds, in contrast, shower visiting
U.S. officials with hospitality, arranging lavish banquets and, in a few cases,
even facilitating liaisons with women” (italics added). So here you have
it, the Kurdish people’s neo-colonial ruler trashing a people and their way of
life and calling his words scholarship. Who said liberal minds cannot be
contaminated by the poisonous rhetoric of colonialism.
After this line, one needs to
read no further, for by now the rest of the polemic becomes all too predictable:
the Turks are good, the Kurds are bad. Virtually the whole world has come to
loathe the way the Turks treat the Kurds, and for good reason, for what could be
more inhuman than a state using its enormous political and military powers to
deny a people their identity? And yet, Mr. Rubin has no problem with that.
Why?
This requires some
explaining. American politics works pretty much like an investment. At the end
of the presidential game, the contributors from the winning side, depending on
how big their contributions were, get rewarded with ambassadorships and
thousands of other high-paying jobs. But the real benefits come later, after
these people have left their jobs and started working as lobbyists or
semi-lobbyists. Their continued access to government officials, members of
congress, and, of course, the media makes them a hot commodity in Washington. In
other word, we are talking about people who are allowed, legally, to use their
contacts and influence to exploit the system. (And you thought only in
Kurdistan corruption is rampant. At least there, as well as elsewhere in the
region, corruption (for complex cultural and political reasons) is right in the
open. Here it is concealed beneath a thick layer of legality.) As early as
1912, Woodrow Wilson warned against the U.S. government falling into “the hands
of special interests.” But that’s the way things are today--and it’s perfectly
legal!
Which brings me to Mr.
Rubin’s sub-text in his polemic. It is obvious that Turkish political and
military establishment is the beneficiary of his piece; they have been raving
about it. The piece, therefore, can be seen as a lobbying effort by Mr. Rubin
on their behalf. While Mr. Rubin finds fault with Kurdish schoolchildren
voicing their desire to see Kurdistan one day becoming independent, it is very
telling that he has no problem with the jingoistic and racist rhetoric hurled by
Ankara daily against the Kurdistan Regional Government and against virtually
every other aspect of Kurdish culture and politics. Let us also not forget that
Mr. Rubin is a big supporter of Israel, whose all-powerful lobby in Washington
all too often tends to take the Turkish side, especially these days following a
high profile visit recently to Ankara by the Israeli president.
No, Mr. Rubin, the Kurds do
not need American pity, or as you put it in your opening sentence, “On a
strictly emotional level, U.S. support for Iraqi Kurdistan makes sense.” Kurds,
like every other people, understand quite well how to play politics, and because
the political situation in the region and beyond has changed so much, taking the
Kurds for granted by anyone is no longer the option. Your old ways of looking
at the Middle East are no longer relevant.
Dr. Sabah Salih is
professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.
