On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Dennis Perrin wrote:
> The only good thing one can say about US intervention in Iraq right now
> is the protection of the Kurds, who are, as we've seen, blossoming in a
> way unimaginable if Saddam were left alone. And that's really the
> question for the "antiwar" crowd: What is your solution? If you say US
> out of Iraq and End the Sanctions, then what becomes of the Kurds?
If economic sanctions on Iraq were lifted the Kurds would probably stay exactly as they are now. Saddam has no interest in attacking them.
You have to realize that the area that the Kurds are flourishing in is actually a little smaller than the area Saddam agreed to give them in 1970, and which they accepted, and which they flourished in for their first golden period, from 1970-1974. And which they then disastrously decided to give up because they thought they could do better by returning to guerrilla war.
It is also pretty much the area he offered to give them in negotiations the two sides held after the Gulf War, and after their failed uprising after his defeat. Again, they turned him down because they thought they could do better, this time under our umbrella, and they took a couple of towns -- most notably Sulaimaniyah -- before we made them stop. That's what led to the current set-up, where Saddam placed an economic embargo on them, and we let both sides smuggle oil across Kurdistan to Turkey so the Kurds could make up the losses in "taxes" on each truck.
The sticking point in negotiations both times was that the Kurds demanded Kirkuk and a larger division of its oil revenues. That's been the sticking point ever since Iraq was created in 1922. It's why the Brits originally sold them out. And it's no mystery why -- until the late 70s, Kirkuk accounted for the majority of Iraq's tapped oil.
But, not coincidentally, the Kurds don't have Kirkuk under the current set-up. Nor will we ever support their getting it so long as Turkey is our ally. So if the Kurds accept what they've got, there is no reason to think the status quo would change. The sticking point is gone.
Of course this faith in people following their interest would be backed up by planes we have permanently stationed at Incirlik and extensive monitoring devices. But I think it is interest that would prove the strongest bond. I would actually be more afraid of the Kurds attacking Kirkuk to draw us in than of Saddam attacking them unprovoked. But if we made it clear that was out of the question, and we got a third party to broker negotiations between both sides, I see absolutely no reason why a formal agreement couldn't be struck and abided by.
One reason to think so: Sulaimaniyah has never been protected by the no-fly zone. But Talabani, one of the two main Kurdish leaders, has felt safe enough there to make it his capital.
[Note because for some reason I feel this will be necessary: none of this is meant to excuse or ignore all the horrible things Saddam did to the Kurds from 1975-1991. All counterinsurgency wars are horrible, but there were several ways in which his was particularly, even uniquely, horrible.]
I think if you want a different slogan than End the Sanctions it should be End the Economic Sanctions.
(In actuality it's slightly more complicated than that. End All Economic Sanctions means keep the military ones, which have been very effective. Previous military sanctions (e.g. aginast Angola, or South Africa) were hopelessly porous. What the Iraq example has shown is that you can have a watertight military sanctions regime if you have a complete import regime. This of course would mean that, technically, not all elements of the economic sanction regime would be lifted. But if you automatically waved through everything except for a narrowly scheduled list of proscribed items, and allowed the free export of all goods including oil, and all investment and financial transactions, then the effect would essentially be to lift economic sanctions and retain the military ones at their current high level of effectiveness. But for a slogan that fits on a sign, End All Economic Sanctions is close enough. And personally I think that's what most people mean when they say end the sanctions.)
> what about Saddam's quest for the bomb?
What about it? He's way farther behind then he was in 1991. We took away all his enriched uranium and destroyed all his enrichment facilities.
Nuclear weapons are the easiest of the WMD to monitor. If that's your main fear, that threat seems eminently preventable through monitoring and military sanctions.
All we anti-war types are asking you to do is give up on chemical and biological weapons as being worth a war. By give up, I don't mean we would help him. I just mean accepting that those are things a pure military sanctions regime can't prevent -- but that we can afford to wait until he uses such things before attacking him. Biological weapons of mass destruction are so far largely a fiction. And chemical weapons don't kill more people per attack than conventional weapons can. In both cases, deterrence seems like a perfectly reasonable logic to put one's faith in.
Michael