By: Dr. Sabah A. Salih

17 January 2004

In the recent anti-Kurd Wall Street Journal editorial there is more than that meets the eye: the editorial is part of a campaign, led by the Turkish and Israeli lobbies, to repair the damage in relations between Washington and Ankara resulting from the latter’s decision last February not to allow its territory to be used in the Iraq war. Others supporting the effort include a strange mix of disgruntled State Department and CIA officials all united in the belief that the Kurds need to be kept at the margins. Colin Powell himself seems to share this view. His most recent remarks emphasize not Kurdish political rights but cultural rights. Going many steps further, the editorial staff at Journal has decided the time has come to embark on a hatchet job against the Kurds. But we ought not be surprised in the least.

When it comes to news reporting, the Wall Street Journal is not all that different from America’s two other leading national newspapers, the semi-liberal New York Times and the centrist Washington Post. But when it comes to editorializing, the Journal is decidedly right wing, even more so than the other leading conservative publications, like the Washington Times, the National Review, and the New Republic.

Unwavering in its support for the military-industrial complex and almost always supporting Republican party candidates, the paper has in recent years become an outspoken critic of labor unions, women’s rights organizations, public education, welfare programs, the United Nations, environmental activism, debt-forgiveness to poorer countries—and, not surprisingly, the Kurds.

During the 1991 Kurdish uprising in Southern Kurdistan all the three national dailies advocated a hands-off approach to Saddam, arguing that a unified Iraq ruled by a cut-down-to-size Saddam was better than an Iraq divided along ethnic lines. But while the New York Times and the Washington Post did also express some concern for the Kurds, however muted, the Wall Street Journal chose to go after the victims, calling them a tribal and warlike butch, bent on tearing the country apart.

In the months leading to the American intervention in Iraq, the New York Times, echoing many in the State Department, spoke out against the invasion. Considering the Middle East to be largely an Arab preserve, the paper argued that an invasion would inflame the passions against the U.S. all across the Arab world and would distract attention from the region’s "real issue," the Arab-Israeli conflict. So for the Times the Kurds needed to be brushed aside.

The Washington Post came out in support of the war, arguing that rescuing the Kurds and the Shiites from Saddam’s tyranny was worth the effort and that a regime change in Baghdad might help in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. But for the Post concern for the Kurds was strictly humanitarian and cultural, not strategic or open-ended.

For its part, the Wall Street Journal threw all its editorial capital behind one goal: a limited regime change, something like Saddamism without Saddam, arguing that only dictatorship would work in Iraq. But sadly many in the Iraqi opposition, including some Kurds, heard a different message from the Journal’s drumbeat for war: not the replacement of one Saddam with another but a total democratic overhaul of the country.

Then, when powerful voices in Washington began to speak of the Kurds as "our allies," following the Turkish snub, which put Anatolia off limits to the U.S. military, the Journal went on the offensive against the Kurds. Exactly the very same trashy and racist criticism the Turks had been leveling against the Kurds now began appearing in the paper: not only were the Kurds unruly and undemocratic and tribal and uneducated but they were also bent on terrorizing the Turkmen. In an effort to delegitimize the very notion of Southern Kurdistan, the numbers for the Turkmen were inflated to a staggering two and a half million!

None of that should come as a surprise: When it comes to virtually anything Kurdish, the Wall Street Journal has always taken its cue from the Turks and their lobbying groups.

While the New York Times and the Washington Post have not shied away from criticizing Turkey for its human rights violations, the Wall Street Journal has been consistent in doing the opposite: robustly and vigorously promoting and defending the Turkish agenda—especially after Ankara and Tel Aviv joined together in a military alliance. Even after the Turks found themselves in hot water with the Bush administration back in February, the Journal continued reminding its readers why its was important for the U.S. to put Turkish interests before Kurdish and Arab interests.

And now, as it is becoming increasingly clear to the Bush administration that the Kurds of Southern Kurdistan are no pushovers and that on the issue of Kurdish statehood within a federal Iraq—with Kirkuk included—the Kurds are in mood for compromise, the Wall Street Journal has decided once again to join the fray against the Kurds—once again repeating word for word Turkish concerns and criticisms and fantasies and bigotries.

The paper’s 12 January editorial in a way is a classic example of neo-colonialism in action: ruling over a people, a history, a culture, a geography, a collective memory without making the slightest effort to give them a fair hearing. Its aim is to crush beneath its boots facts and realities that cannot be disputed, to stop forces that are no longer stoppable, to silence what can no longer be silenced.

That is why in another way the editorial is just a verbal exasperation, someone trying to let off some steam in the face of a liberation movement steadily gathering democratic capital that a superpower can neither manage nor control.

Dr. Sabah A. Salih is professor of English at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. <ssalih@bloomu.edu>