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The second breakthrough grew out of that whole new constitutional order which the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 ushered in. Under it, the Kurds consolidated their already existing autonomy with broad new legislative powers, control over their own armed forces, and some authority over that mainstay of the Iraqi economy, namely oil.
From the outset, the Kurds had made it clear that they would only remain committed to the “new Iraq” if it treated them as equal partners, and not, as before, a subordinate minority.
It wasn’t long before this ethno-sectarian, power-sharing democracy began to malfunction, and to generate those disputes no amount of dialogue could resolve. And as these disputes deepened, they only intensified the Kurds’ yearning for independence — and their practical preparations for it. Openly or surreptitiously, they began accumulating constitutional, political, territorial, economic and security “facts on the ground,” designed to ensure that, if and when they proclaimed their new-born state, this entity would have the means and ability to stand on its own feet, to thrive and to defend itself.
So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their third, perhaps final, breakthrough, the great losers of Sykes-Picot about to become, 90 years on, the great winners of the Arab Spring? They themselves certainly hope so. “Not only is Iraqi Kurdistan undergoing an unprecedented building boom,” reports Joost Hiltermann in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, “its people are now articulating a once-unthinkable notion: that the day they will break free from the rest of Iraq is nigh.” And Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani often openly alludes to this possibility. “We have had enough,” he says, of the “the dictatorship in power in Baghdad” and of the Kurds’ participation in it.
It seems, however, that he awaits one last thing before taking the plunge, another of those game-changing events — such as the breakup of Syria — that can transform the whole geopolitical environment in the Kurds’ favor. But the quarter in which Kurds are actively looking to bring this change about is in Turkey. That they should even think of this is, historically speaking, extraordinary, considering that, of all the Kurds’ neighbors, Turkey probably has most to lose from independence-seeking Kurdish nationalism, and has brutally repressed it in the past. Considering, too, that ever afraid that Kurdish gains elsewhere may be a progenitor of Kurdish aspirations in Turkey, Ankara has long set great store on Iraq remaining united, with its Kurds an integral part of it.
But since 2008, in a complete reversal of earlier policy — which had once been to boycott Kurdistan altogether — the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pursuing “full economic integration” with Iraqi Kurdistan. Meanwhile, its relations with the Iraqi government have been relentlessly deteriorating, with the two now on opposite sides of the great Middle Eastern power struggle that pits Bashar Assad’s Syria, Shiite Iran, Maliki’s Iraq, and Hezbollah against the Syrian revolutionaries, most of the Sunni Arab states and Turkey itself.
Under pressures from this struggle, Turkey’s extraordinary courtship of Iraq’s Kurds has continued to bloom, and to move from the merely economic to the political and strategic as well. In fact it has moved so far — the Kurds believe — that Turkey might soon break with Maliki’s essentially Shiite regime altogether, and deal separately with those two other main components of a crumbling Iraqi state, the Arab Sunnis and, more importantly, the Kurds.
The allurements that an independent Kurdistan could proffer in return would include its role as a potential source of much-needed, abundant and reliable oil supplies, as a stable, accommodating ally and buffer between it and a hostile Iraq and Iran, and even — in a policy option as extraordinary as Turkey’s own — as a collaborator in containing fellow Kurds, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. Having established a strong presence in “liberated” Syrian Kurdistan, the PKK is now seeking to turn this territory into a platform for reviving the insurgency in Turkey itself.
It is even said that Erdogan has gone so far as to promise Barzani that Turkey would protect his would-be state-in-the-making in the event of an Iraqi military onslaught. However, presumably that would never come to pass if, adopting Plan-B, the Maliki regime really is contemplating the seismic step of letting the Kurds go of their own free will.
ArnoldHarris Said:
no problem, just a possible redrawing of maps. The euros drew them to “divide and conquer”.
ArnoldHarris Said:
Sorry, I meant Mediterranean. Possible links for pipelines to bypass Suez and persian gulf.
ArnoldHarris Said:
neither am I. It depends on how the Sunni/saudi/qatari/MB/jihadist/wahabbi relationships develop vs Israel. Sauds might be satisfied to build Sunni hegemony and they, with GCC are the main financing..
Bernard,
So what’s the problem with Iraqi and Syrian Sun’a Muslims uniting? Their attachment to a religiously-identified culture such as Sun’a Islam is more significant to them than their attachment to one or another countries whose borders sliced and diced, then re-assembled by the British and French imperialists after the Turkish Empire collapsed at the end of World War I.
As for your other comment, I cannot tell if “med” refers to mediation or to Mediterranean. They will mediate in any case, because the rulers of Mecca are sort of godfathers of all of Sun’a Islam. As for a connection to the Mediterranean Sea, that was predetermined when the Suez Canal was opened to commerce and warships in the 19th century. By the way: I am not certain all this would be bad for Israel, because the Sun’a monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Trans-Jordan are more fearful of Shi’a Islam than they are of Jews in general and Israelis in particular.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Perhaps the syrian and Iraqui kurdistan unite and the Iraqui sunnis and syrian sunnis unite. sunni areas of Iraq and syria provide saudi link to med.
“Iraqi military onslaught” against Kurdistan?
This sounds like some sort of joke. Iraqi state power, after the US conquest and the kind of debilitating governmental reforms that have been imposed on just about every foreign country in which we the USA has waged war in the past 60 years, has all but ceased to exist. In Baghdad the power is largely in the hands of an emboldened Shi’a Arab majority fucking over a shrunken Sun’a Arab minority, and mostly under the shadow of influence from neighboring Shi’a Iran.
The Kurds are a proud and defiant nation of hardy mountaineers. They never will subordinate their freedom to any Arabs or Turks. Which makes them the only nation in the Middle East who would be reliable allies of the Jewish nation and the Jewish state. And they would be a hell of a lot more reliable than any country in Europe, or for that matter, the United States of America, which is becoming nationally as unreliable as a ten-dollar bill printed in one’s own basement.
As for Israeli friendship with Turkey, that will last just until either their NATO allies or their Arab friends undercut any such relationship.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The real shocker here is the potential envisaged of Turkey accepting this, and maybe even playing a role in this! Long have I thought the positioning of northen Iraq would make it a good case, for an independent Kurdistan, for all the reasons you give, as it would have oil and also be a buffer against sudden Arab acts of aggression. But I understand that Turkey opposed it in the post for just those reasons, for fear it would inspire an irredentist separatist movement in its already restive Kurds, some of whom do indeed support the PKK, which is so much more militant, it appears, than the Iraqi Kurdish Democratic Party which is clearly very pro-Western, and the Party of United Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani. It would not be the first time, however, that a Kurdish group in one country was used to stop the independence moves of another Kurdish group in a neighboring country. But I think it would be common sense by now to make common cause with fellow Sunnis, in view of the strengthening of the Iranian-led Shi’ite bloc, and support the independence of the very reliable, brave and stable Kurds in the north of Iraq, who have enough oil to be self-supporting, as well as enough sense and abilities to be self-sufficient…
The Middle East landscape generated by the Treaty Of Sevres is breaking up.
Kurdish independence is an irreversible fact. It would take an enormous amount of bloodshed to suppress it and neither Iran, Turkey, Syria nor Iraq have the military means to extinguish it. They have too many problems of their own to deal with to pay attention to the Kurds.
An independent Kurdish state is going to be born by 2014 at the latest.