The Path of the Kurds: Lessons going forward

A couple of posts back I updated my post on the Kurds with a link to Alex over at Inactivist. Alex made a good point in a comment there:

FWIW, I actually admire the Kurds, for the most part. Or at least the Iraqi Kurds. They found a way to build a more or less liberal society in a very rough neighborhood. They are also one of the few real success stories of American intervention: Without our protection their enclave of self-rule would not exist.

What’s instructive, however, is the limited scope of our intervention. We didn’t send ground troops, we didn’t topple a govenment, we didn’t seize territory, we didn’t even defeat an army. All we did is declare that Saddam Hussein could not use his air force in northern Iraq, and we enforced it with our air power. The Kurds managed it from their, they won their own independence, they had their own civil war (regrettably), and they reached a situation that might not be genuine peace but is surely more peaceful, more stable, more liberal, and more prosperous than the situation in the rest of Iraq.

Now, I would be quite willing to believe that we gave them more support under the table, but the fact remains that it was a very minimal intervention, and a very successful one. I think there are lessons to learn there.

Along those same lines via Instapundit I found this:

Meanwhile, the north is so peaceful that Western journalists, and just about anyone else, can move about freely, without fear of attack. How can this be? Well, for one thing, the Kurds have tight controls on their borders, and any Arabs entering are checked carefully. Arab Iraqis are welcome to visit, and many do, for vacations from the violence in the south. When asked, Kurds attribute their peaceful neighborhood to the fact that Kurds are not Arabs. But this is not the main reason, for the Kurds have, in the past, been as factious and violent as the Iraqi Arabs are now. But during the 1990s, when the U.S. and Britain agreed to keep Saddam’s forces out of the north (to prevent another large scale massacre of Kurds), the Kurds sorted out their differences and learned the benefits of cooperation and law and order. In effect, the Kurds had a ten year head start on the rest of Iraq, in the “how to create peace and democracy” department. The Iraqi Arabs, Sunni and Shia, who come north on business, or for a vacation, note this. The Arabs believe they are superior to the Kurds (“a bunch of hillbillies,” to most Arabs), and find it irritating that the Kurds have made things work, while down south, especially in central Iraq, things are still a mess. Given another seven years, the Iraqi Arabs will probably catch up. But this is not a popular solution to the “Iraq problem,” and no career-conscious journalist is going to talk about it.

Please read the rest.

This leads to two points worth considering, not that they are the answer or a prediction, just worth considering.

The first is that with patience the Iraqi’s may solve this themselves in a relatively positive fashion if we continue to support the government. Whether that means increasing the troops or just waiting it out as we build up the Iraqi army and police we may eventually get the progress we need. Most likely it will be quite a while.

The second point, referencing Alex, may apply to other places we hope to avoid invading, such as Iran. In my interview with Michael Ledeen he described what he had hoped we would have done instead of invading Iraq, or at least beforehand:

I thought, and think still, that our greatest weapon in the war against the terror masters is political, not military: it is the desire of their oppressed peoples to be free. So I want to support those people, just as we did in the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, and all over Latin America, and in the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia…and here and there in Africa. I basically believe that democratic revolution is the most lethal weapon against the tyrants of the Middle East and elsewhere.

In the specific case of Iraq, I thought the Iraqi people would distrust us because another American president named Bush had betrayed them in 1991, and I advocated steps to show them, and the other peoples of the region, that things would be different this time. I proposed to transform the “no fly” zones in the north and south into “free Iraq” areas, defend them against Saddam, and have the Kurds and Shi’ites create free governments. Then we could say to the rest of the Iraqi people, “look, you don’t have to die for this man. Go north, go south, live like free men and women, and we will work together to bring down the monster.”

Maybe some military something would have been necessary even so. I don’t know. But it would have done two things: demonstrated out basic mission was to spread freedom, and concentrated our minds on the political side of things, which I still believe is paramount.

I don’t believe Iraq is doomed as many do, but I do believe that all of us whether we supported the invasion or not, need to concentrate our minds upon the future in Iraq and elsewhere. Looking back shouldn’t be about mostly, though partly, finding people to blame but looking at what has worked and what might work. Putting the priority in the other order may be politically satisfying but it won’t help us much going forward or help the people of Iraq. I think Alex and Ledeen are onto a path that might help us in the future. Iran will have to be grappled with, mostly because Iran will not stop funding Terror or attempting to find ways to expand its role in the Middle East. In a vein similar to this more political approach to regime change I of course suggest reading the entire interview with Ledeen as a starting point if you haven’t already. Ultimately this is a political and ideological struggle and bringing more to bear on these issues earlier rather than later can help us avoid useless UN dithering, cruel sanctions on the primary victims of these regimes and hopefully having to involve ourselves in as many or as protracted military operations.

I think one thing should be made clear however, I repeatedly hear this issue discussed as if negotiations and political means can be used instead of military force. The term carrots and sticks is often used. It doesn’t work that way. The pressure, whether it is no fly zones or other measures to protect the Kurds or enforce sanctions or whatever path we take in future conflicts only works if we have a stick such as our military and the will to use it and use it decisively. Saying we are unlikely to use military force is a pretty good way to ensure that the only way to succeed is to use it. The antics of Saddam, North Korea and Iran should have demonstrated that by now.

[tags] Kurdistan, Kurds, Iran, Michael Ledeen, Middle East, Iraq, Shia [/tags]