← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 19475 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2005-08-07
2005-08-07 13:17 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/middleeast/07iraq.html?ex=1123992000&en=4c4f2281d3f0f035&ei=5070&emc=eta1]New York Times[/URL] August 7, 2005 Kurds Vow to Make No Concessions in Iraq Political Talks By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 6 - On the eve of a national political summit meeting to hammer out terms of a draft Iraqi constitution, a top Kurdish representative warned Saturday that the Kurds would withdraw from the government if negotiators did not meet their "basic demands."
Azhar Ramadan Abdul Raheem, a member of the National Assembly and the committee writing the constitution, said that at a special meeting of the Kurdish parliament on Saturday, delegates agreed that the Kurdish bloc should make no concessions in the negotiations. Among the Kurdish demands is a constitutional guarantee of regional autonomy.
Some of the country's top political leaders are set to gather Sunday to try to move the talks ahead.
"This is a last resort," Ms. Raheem said in a telephone interview. "Iraq is on the edge of a volcano, and we hope that we can reach a settlement in the meeting tomorrow."
The Kurds, at least publicly, have adopted a hard line in the negotiations, and with her comments, Ms. Raheem appeared to be trying to establish a bargaining position.
The Kurdish demand for autonomy has support from some Shiite leaders, but is strongly opposed by Sunni Arabs, who fear they would be left with territory that produces little or no oil.
The bloc has also called for the constitution to guarantee the quick repatriation of Kurds deported from Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein, and after that, a vote in Kirkuk on who should govern the city. On Saturday, witnesses said, Kirkuk officials distributed parcels of land to returning Kurdish families despite the objections of Turkmen who said the land had been confiscated from them by Mr. Hussein's government. Local government officials declined to comment on the Turkmen claims. The constitutional committee has an Aug. 15 deadline to present a draft to the National Assembly, and a national referendum on the draft is set for mid-October.
The American military said Saturday that it had squelched a simultaneous four-pronged offensive by insurgents against Iraqi and American troops in a town south of Baghdad on Friday, killing 6 rebels and capturing 12. One Iraqi soldier died in the attacks and another was wounded, the military said.
The American command has been trying to recover its military and political footing after a series of guerrilla attacks that killed at least 22 soldiers this week in the Euphrates River corridor in Anbar Province.
On Saturday, in the third day of a major offensive, 800 marines and nearly 200 Iraqi soldiers swept river towns believed to harbor insurgents.
But according to military news releases on Saturday, American troops made no major gains in their hunt for insurgents, discovering only two small caches of weapons and disabling three car bombs and two roadside bombs. Officials also said they had detained 24 suspected insurgents since the start of the operation.
The military announced Saturday that an American soldier was killed during an insurgent attack in Mosul on Thursday, but provided no further information.
The coordinated guerrilla assault on Friday came against several different Iraqi Army posts in Yusifiya, about 10 miles south of Baghdad, and involved rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, small-arms fire and two suicide-vehicle bombs. The military casualties occurred when one of the suicide bombers drove a truck into an Iraqi Army checkpoint. An American and Iraqi quick reaction force, including helicopters, tanks and ground troops, responded.
Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.
2005-08-07 19:14 | User Profile
I wonder if this surprises anyone? It doesn't surprise me in the least.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis][url="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/middleeast/07iraq.html?ex=1123992000&en=4c4f2281d3f0f035&ei=5070&emc=eta1"]New York Times[/url] August 7, 2005 Kurds Vow to Make No Concessions in Iraq Political Talks By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 6 - On the eve of a national political summit meeting to hammer out terms of a draft Iraqi constitution, a top Kurdish representative warned Saturday that the Kurds would withdraw from the government if negotiators did not meet their "basic demands." [/QUOTE]
2005-08-08 05:56 | User Profile
If these talks for the new Constitution fail, then we might be looking at a total meltdown over there. Civil war. The breakup of Iraq.
In my layman's opinion, of course.
What do you think?
I see little chance of the Iraqis actually working things out.
2005-08-08 07:57 | User Profile
One of the sticking points not mentioned in the article is that the Kurds are refusing to disband their militia (the Peshmerga), and are envisaging a very loose federalism where each region maintains it's own separate military force under independent command, which hardly seems conducive to national unity or stability. They are also refusing to accept any constitution that explicitly proclaims the identity of Iraq as either an Arab or an Islamic nation. I can't see how either the Iranian-backed Shi'ite Islamists or the Sunni Arab nationalists will have a bar of this.
Website of the "Patriotic Union of Kurdistan": [url="http://www.puk.org"]www.puk.org[/url]
Just speculating, but perhaps the Kurds are driving such a hard bargain because they have received some kind of behind-the-scenes guarantee of assistance from Israel in the event of civil war? (in return for Israeli access to the Kirkuk oilfields should they become the exclusive property of an independent and sovereign Kurdistan). A story was floated a couple of months back in Ha'aretz about how genetic research done in Israel has shown that the Kurds are the closest relatives to the Jews of all the ethnic groups in the Middle East. Natural allies?
2005-08-08 13:40 | User Profile
[url]http://www.barzan.com/kevin_brook.htm[/url]
The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews"
by Kevin Alan Brook
Kurds are the Closest Relatives of Jews
In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested. The researchers sampled a total of 526 Y-chromosomes from 6 populations (Kurdish Jews, Kurdish Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazic Jews, and Bedouin from southern Israel) and added extra data on 1321 persons from 12 populations (including Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Berbers, Portuguese, Spaniards, Arabs, Armenians, and Anatolian Turks). Most of the 95 Kurdish Muslim test subjects came from northern Iraq. Ashkenazic Jews have ancestors who lived in central and eastern Europe, while Sephardic Jews have ancestors from southwestern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. The Kurdish Jews and Sephardic Jews were found to be very close to each other. Both of these Jewish populations differed somewhat from Ashkenazic Jews, who mixed with European peoples during their diaspora. The researchers suggested that the approximately 12.7 percent of Ashkenazic Jews who have the Eu 19 chromosomes -- which are found among between 54 and 60 percent of Eastern European Christians -- descend paternally from eastern Europeans (such as Slavs) or Khazars. But the majority of Ashkenazic Jews, who possess Eu 9 and other chromosomes, descend paternally from Judeans who lived in Israel two thousand years ago. In the article in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University of Israel wrote that this new study revealed that Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean (Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians) than to populations in the southern Mediterranean (Arabs and Bedouins).
A previous study by Ariella Oppenheim and her colleagues, published in Human Genetics in December 2000, showed that about 70 percent of Jewish paternal ancestries and about 82 percent of Palestinian Arabs share the same chromosomal pool. The geneticists asserted that this might support the claim that Palestinian Arabs descend in part from Judeans who converted to Islam. With their closer relationship to Jews, the Palestinian Arabs are distinctive from other Arab groups, such as Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, and Iraqis, who have less of a connection to Jews.
A study by Michael Hammer et al., published in PNAS in June 2000, had identified a genetic connection between Arabs (especially Syrians and Palestinians) and Jews, but had not tested Kurds, so it was less complete.
Many Kurds have the "Jewish" Cohen Modal Haplotype
In the 1990s, a team of scientists (including the geneticist Michael Hammer, the nephrologist Karl Skorecki, and their colleagues in England) discovered the existence of a haplotype which they termed the "Cohen modal haplotype" (abbreviated as CMH). Cohen is the Hebrew word for "priest", and designates descendants of Judean priests from two thousand years ago. Initial research indicated that while only about 3 percent of general Jews have this haplotype, 45 percent of Ashkenazic Cohens have it, while 56 percent of Sephardic Cohens have it. David Goldstein, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford University, said: "It looks like this chromosomal type was a constituent of the ancestral Hebrew population." Some Jewish rabbis used the Cohen study to argue that all Cohens with the CMH had descended from Aaron, a High Priest who lived about 3500 years ago, as the Torah claimed. Shortly after, it was determined that 53 percent of the Buba clan of the Lemba people of southern Africa have the CMH, compared to 9 percent of non-Buba Lembas. The Lembas claim descent from ancient Israelites, and they follow certain Jewish practices such as circumcision and refraining from eating pork, and for many geneticists and historians the genetic evidence seemed to verify their claim.
However, it soon became apparent that the CMH is not specific to Jews or descendants of Jews. In a 1998 article in Science News, Dr. Skorecki indicated (in an interview) that some non-Jews also possess the Cohen markers, and that the markers are therefore not "unique or special". The CMH is very common among Iraqi Kurds, according to a 1999 study by C. Brinkmann et al. And in her 2001 article, Oppenheim wrote: "The dominant haplotype of the Muslim Kurds (haplotype 114) was only one microsatellite-mutation step apart from the CMH..." (Oppenheim 2001, page 1100). Furthermore, the CMH is also found among some Armenians, according to Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan (Head of the Institute of Man in Yerevan, Armenia), who has studied genetics for many years. Dr. Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin wrote: "The suggestion that the 'Cohen modal haplotype' is a signature haplotype for the ancient Hebrew population is also not supported by data from other populations." (Zoossmann-Diskin 2000, page 156).
In short, the CMH is a genetic marker from the northern Middle East which is not unique to Jews. However, its existence among many Kurds and Armenians, as well as some Italians and Hungarians, would seem to support the overall contention that Kurds and Armenians are the close relatives of modern Jews and that the majority of today's Jews have paternal ancestry from the northeastern Mediterranean region.
The Jewish Kingdom of Adiabene in Ancient Kurdistan
In ancient times, the royal house of Adiabene and some of the common people of Adiabene converted to Judaism. The capital city of Adiabene was Arbela (known today by Arabs as Irbil and by Kurds as Hawler). King Izates became closely attached to his new faith, and sent his sons to study Hebrew and Jewish customs in Jerusalem. His successor to the throne was his brother Monobazos II, who also adopted Judaism. In her 2001 study, Oppenheim references the kingdom of Adiabene, but suggests that while Adiabene's conversion to Judaism "resulted in the assimilation of non-Jews into the community... This recorded conversion does not appear to have had a considerable effect on the Y chromosome pool of the Kurdish Jews." (Oppenheim 2001, page 1103). Some of the Jewish Adiabenians may have eventually converted to Christianity.
Conclusions
Research has just begun into the ancient ties between Kurds and Jews. It would be interesting to see if the various Jewish groups have as strong a family tie to Kurds in the maternal lineages as they do in the paternal lineages. Preliminary studies indicate that Jewish populations in eastern Europe and Yemen have maternal origins that contain much more non-Israelite ancestry than their paternal origins. Despite this admixture with other groups, the Jewish Judean people ultimately began their existence in an area within or nearby Kurdistan, prior to migrating southwest to Israel. This exciting research showing that Kurds and Jews may have shared common fathers several millennia ago should, hopefully, encourage both Kurds and Jews to explore each others' cultures and to maintain the friendship that Kurds and Jews enjoyed in northern Iraq in recent times (as chronicled in Michael Rubin's recent article "The Other Iraq"). As Rubin indicates, the Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani once visited Israel and met with Israeli government officials. Rubin refers to the Iraqi Kurds' "special affinity for Israel" and writes that "In the safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Jews and Israel are remembered fondly, if increasingly vaguely." Let us hope that this relationship can be renewed and strengthened.
Bibliography:
Brinkmann, C., et al. "Human Y-chromosomal STR haplotypes in a Kurdish population sample." International Journal of Legal Medicine 112 (1999): 181-183.
Brook, Kevin A. The Jews of Khazaria. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999.
Hammer, Michael F., et al. "Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests." Nature 385 (January 2, 1997): 32.
Hammer, Michael F., et al. "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) 97:12 (June 6, 2000): 6769-6774.
Oppenheim, Ariella, et al. "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews." Human Genetics 107(6) (December 2000): 630-641.
Oppenheim, Ariella, et al. "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East." The American Journal of Human Genetics 69:5 (November 2001): 1095-1112.
Rubin, Michael. "The Other Iraq." Jerusalem Report (December 31, 2001).
Siegel, Judy. "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." Jerusalem Post (November 20, 2001).
Thomas, Mark G., et al. "Y Chromosomes Traveling South: the Cohen Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba -- the 'Black Jews of Southern Africa'." American Journal of Human Genetics 66:2 (February 2000): 674-686.
Traubman, Tamara. "Study finds close genetic connection between Jews, Kurds." Ha'aretz (November 21, 2001).
Travis, J. "The Priests' Chromosome? DNA analysis supports the biblical story of the Jewish priesthood." Science News 154:14 (October 3, 1998): 218.
Zoossmann-Diskin, Avshalom. "Are today's Jewish priests descended from the old ones?" HOMO: Journal of Comparative Human Biology 51:2-3 (2000): 156-162.
2005-08-08 13:50 | User Profile
PINR: Power and Interest News Report
[url]http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_printable&report_id=188&language_id=1[/url]
26 July 2004 ''The Uncertainty of Iraq's Transition'' The form of a future Iraqi state is uncertain primarily because of the conflicting aspirations of the three major political communities in that country. The majority Shi'a will be satisfied only if they play the dominant role in the new Iraq, the Kurds are determined to hold on to the autonomy they have gained since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, and the Sunni Arabs are struggling to regain the power that they had before the fall of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime.
The ways in which the three communities move to fulfill their aspirations will be the major determinants of whether Iraq becomes a strong federation, a weak confederation or a set of mini-states. Which sides will bargain for compromise and at what points, and which sides will draw bright lines in the sand and where is as yet unclear. That basic uncertainty is compounded by resource issues and external powers with interests in the country.
Oil
Although the Iraq war was fought mainly for strategic reasons -- to achieve a decisive foothold in the Middle East for the United States -- it also aimed at putting Iraqi oil resources more securely in the service of Western economic interests for influence over pricing and the particular benefit of American and British oil companies. As is the case for America's other war aims, its resource objectives are unlikely to be met in great part. Plans to privatize Iraq's oil industry were set back by the announcement in June by its oil minister that the transitional regime would move to revive the country's National Oil Company, created by the Ba'athist regime in 1972.
It is to be expected that any regime or regimes that succeed the transition will seek jealously to guard the country's oil resources. Beyond that general interest, there is a tangle of potential conflict. Iraq's oil fields are concentrated in the south and north of the country. The south presents a simple picture -- it is the heart of the Shi'a community. If the Shi'a are not satisfied with the shape of a new Iraq, they can split off and take the revenue of the southern fields for themselves.
The north is more complex -- the fields are outside the Kurdish provinces, but they are located in areas with large Kurdish populations and are coveted by the Kurds. The maximum aim of the Kurds is to annex the oil fields to their provinces and monopolize their revenues. As a second-best alternative, they will fight for a greater share of those revenues.
The Sunni Arabs, who are in the oil-poor center of Iraq, want to hold on to the northern fields and -- as has been consistently the case throughout Iraq's history -- have a greater interest in a united Iraq than the other two communities.
The distribution of oil revenues can be the deal maker or deal breaker of an Iraqi state. On the one hand, a strong federation with a centralized oil policy is to the advantage of all the communities. On the other, that solution will not work unless each party is satisfied that it has been treated justly. Depending on the willingness to compromise, oil resources will be a factor favoring strong federalism or weak confederation tending to dissolution.
In order for Iraq's oil revenues to flow sufficiently to benefit its communities, the oil industry's infrastructure must be modernized and protected from sabotage, and exploration and development must proceed. Until the insurgency is contained, those pre-requisites will not be met. In the present chaotic situation, every outside corporate and state actor with an interest in Iraq's oil is jockeying for advantage, yet is unable to move decisively pending political stabilization, if it comes.
France and Russia have contracts dating from the former Ba'athist regime. British and American corporations want to shoulder the French and Russians aside. The Japanese, Canadians and even smaller powers like the Czechs also want a piece of the action. The Turks have suggested that treaties negotiated after World War I entitle them to a share of revenues from Iraq's northern oil fields. None of the external actors is certain with whom it will eventually have to deal and on what terms, encouraging each of them to hedge their bets and court different factions, which increases uncertainty.
External Powers
Often bound up with oil, the strategic interests of a number of foreign powers encourage them to try to influence the form that an Iraqi state will take after the transition, intensifying instability and uncertainty.
Iran has thus far been the biggest winner from the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, gaining greater leeway to pursue its nuclear program, new influence over Iraq's Shi'a south and prospects for the revival of its bid for hegemony in the Persian Gulf. Iran can be expected to support the moves of Iraqi Shi'a to dominate an emerging Iraqi state and, if that fails, to encourage the formation of a Shi'a mini-state that would be dependent on Iran for protection. Like the Iraqi Shi'a, the Iranians have been playing a waiting game, letting the transitional process work to possible Shi'a advantage. But if Iraq's Shi'a were to become disaffected with the process, Iran would become more assertive.
To the west of Iraq, the Syrian regime has the overriding interest of preserving its hold on its own population. Confident that the United States is not prepared to pursue a military path to regime change against them, the Syrian Ba'athists aim to make the American occupation of Iraq as unsuccessful as possible in order to discourage future interventions. The Syrians can be expected to keep their borders as open as possible to insurgents and to provide covert material support to insurgent groups. American economic sanctions against Syria are mainly symbolic and pose no threat to the regime. A Kurdish population, which is increasingly restive, is a more serious issue, pulling Syria toward collaboration with Turkey and Iran, prefiguring a partial realignment of alliances throughout the Middle East. Forced by the balance of power to concentrate on self-protection, Syria is a defensive destabilizer.
As Seymour Hersh has reported, Israeli security elites are worried by the rise of Iranian power and have been cultivating the Kurds in order to keep the Iranians off balance, straining Israel's alliance with Turkey. Operation Iraqi Freedom has left Israel with less security in the region, forcing hard choices. How far Israel will go to support Kurdish aspirations is uncertain, but the stage is being set for a proxy conflict between Syria backing the Sunni Arabs and Israel backing the Kurds. Israel would like to deal with a unified Iraq that was disciplined by the United States, but it is not confident of that outcome and would welcome a weak confederacy or a break up as a second-best alternative.
Turkey is determined to do what it can to reduce the power of the Iraqi Kurds so that they will not inspire and support its own restive and rebellious Kurdish minority. The Turkish regime has been clear that it will resort to military means to protect its interests as a last resort and has positioned itself as the protector of the Turcoman minority in Iraq's north. Turkey has vital economic relations with Iraq and, like Israel, would prefer to deal with a pro-Western unified Iraqi state. Unlike Israel, Turkey cannot countenance a break up of Iraq that would make Kurdish autonomy or independence permanent. Like Syria, Turkey resists Kurdish expansion in northern Iraq, but, unlike Syria, Turkey has an interest in Iraq's stability.
Jordan, another neighbor with a vital trading relation with Iraq, backed Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and then was forced to submit to American influence. Oil poor and relatively weak militarily, Jordan is reliant on American protection and shares an interest with the United States in a unified Iraq under generally secular rule that follows Western policies. The Jordanian regime has suggested that it would help train Iraqi security forces for the transitional regime if it is invited to do so. Yemen, which has submitted to American influence in the conflict with Islamic revolutionaries, has made a similar offer. Neither Jordan nor Yemen will play a decisive role in the direction of Iraq's transition, but they are, though reluctant, among America's few assets.
The Islamic revolutionaries who have infiltrated the insurgency are a further destabilizing factor in the transition, having an interest in fomenting civil disorder and gaining from it bases of operation for relaunching their struggle to overthrow secular regimes and regimes that collaborate with the West in the Middle East. Their power will rise or fall depending on the failure or success of the transition in producing a stable Iraqi state.
The simultaneously parallel and conflicting interests of the regional forces impinging on Iraq's transition add to the uncertainty surrounding its outcome. Each player is constrained by the others and often by its internally conflicting objectives. No player has control over the struggle between Iraq's three major communities, the results of which cannot be determined. Rarely is there such complexity in a political situation, offering fertile ground for miscalculations on all sides. Each player is at once drawn to hold back and to plunge in. Such a conjuncture of power and interest militates against stability on the whole and discourages the economic investment that would work in favor of a unified Iraq.
Powers from outside the region -- the United States with its military presence and financial aid, and other industrialized states that are potential sources of aid and investment -- pin their hopes on a secular regime with Shi'a leadership presiding over a strong federation bolstered by compromises acceptable to the three major communities. At present, their most satisfactory option is the continuation of the transitional regime, maintaining current Prime Minister Iyad Allawi as its head. The prospects for that outcome would be enhanced by the willingness and ability of the industrial powers to provide effective aid, and on American commitment to give robust military support to the transitional regime. It is not clear that either of those conditions will be met, leaving the future of Iraq in the hands of its three contending communities, pushed and pulled from side to side by the country's regional neighbors.
The presence of its occupying army in Iraq gives the deceptive impression that American influence will be paramount in the transition. The behavior of Iraq's regional neighbors indicates that their policymakers have not been deceived. Iraq is up for grabs.
Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an independent organization that utilizes open source intelligence to provide conflict analysis services in the context of international relations. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. This report may not be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast without the written permission of [email]inquiries@pinr.com[/email]. All comments should be directed to [email]content@pinr.com[/email].
2005-08-08 14:00 | User Profile
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH The New Yorker
As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.
Issue of 2004-06-28 [url]http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact[/url]
In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war's most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency-a campaign of bombings and assassinations-later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.
The border stayed open, however. "The Administration wasn't ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran," Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. "There's no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day-for instance, to make pilgrimages." He added, "The questions we confronted were 'Is the trade-off worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?' Our answer was that as long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the price."
Clawson said, "The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward-that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans."
The warnings of increased violence proved accurate. By early August, the insurgency against the occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad, at the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations headquarters, that killed forty-two people. A former Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel's leadership had concluded by then that the United States was unwilling to confront Iran; in terms of salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, "it doesn't add up. It's over. Not militarily-the United States cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq-but politically."
Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until last year served on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told me that late last summer "the Administration had a chance to turn it around after it was clear that 'Mission Accomplished'"-a reference to Bush's May speech-"was premature. The Bush people could have gone to their allies and got more boots on the ground. But the neocons were dug in-'We're doing this on our own.'"
Leverett went on, "The President was only belatedly coming to the understanding that he had to either make a strategic change or, if he was going to insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find the actual insurgency." The Administration then decided, Leverett said, to "deploy the Guantánamo model in Iraq"-to put aside its rules of interrogation. That decision failed to stop the insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison.
In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.'s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that "none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country" or to hold elections and draft a constitution.
A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the process. "November was one year before the Presidential election," a U.N. consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. "They panicked and decided to share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis."
A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against the insurgency was continuing to founder. "I spent hours talking to the senior members of the Israeli political and intelligence community," the former official recalled. "Their concern was 'You're not going to get it right in Iraq, and shouldn't we be planning for the worst-case scenario and how to deal with it?'"
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel "had learned that there's no way to win an occupation." The only issue, Barak told Cheney, "was choosing the size of your humiliation." Cheney did not respond to Barak's assessment. (Cheney's office declined to comment.)
In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel's strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq's Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials depicted Sharon's decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.
Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel's clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.
Asked to comment, Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, "The story is simply untrue and the relevant governments know it's untrue." Kurdish officials declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the State Department.
However, a senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an interview last week that the Israelis were indeed operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the Israelis felt that they had little choice: "They think they have to be there." Asked whether the Israelis had sought approval from Washington, the official laughed and said, "Do you know anybody who can tell the Israelis what to do? They're always going to do what is in their best interest." The C.I.A. official added that the Israeli presence was widely known in the American intelligence community.
The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan-characterized by the former Israeli intelligence officer as "Plan B"- has also raised tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities. In early June, Intel Brief, a privately circulated intelligence newsletter produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, and Philip Giraldi, who served as the C.I.A.'s deputy chief of base in Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:
Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. . . . The Turks note that the large Israeli intelligence operations in Northern Iraq incorporate anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including support to Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in opposition to their respective governments.
In the years since the first Gulf War, Iraq's Kurds, aided by an internationally enforced no-fly zone and by a U.N. mandate providing them with a share of the country's oil revenues, have managed to achieve a large measure of independence in three northern Iraqi provinces. As far as most Kurds are concerned, however, historic "Kurdistan" extends well beyond Iraq's borders, encompassing parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. All three countries fear that Kurdistan, despite public pledges to the contrary, will declare its independence from the interim Iraqi government if conditions don't improve after June 30th.
Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new. Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq, as part of its strategic policy of seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the Middle East. In 1975, the Kurds were betrayed by the United States, when Washington went along with a decision by the Shah of Iran to stop supporting Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in Iraq.
Betrayal and violence became the norm in the next two decades. Inside Iraq, the Kurds were brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein, who used airpower and chemical weapons against them. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., initiated a campaign of separatist violence in Turkey that lasted fifteen years; more than thirty thousand people, most of them Kurds, were killed. The Turkish government ruthlessly crushed the separatists, and eventually captured the P.K.K.'s leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Last month, the P.K.K., now known as the Kongra-Gel, announced that it was ending a five-year unilateral ceasefire and would begin targeting Turkish citizens once again.
The Iraqi Kurdish leadership was furious when, early this month, the United States acceded to a U.N. resolution on the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty that did not affirm the interim constitution that granted the minority Kurds veto power in any permanent constitution. Kurdish leaders immediately warned President Bush in a letter that they would not participate in a new Shiite-controlled government unless they were assured that their rights under the interim constitution were preserved. "The people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq," the letter said.
There are fears that the Kurds will move to seize the city of Kirkuk, together with the substantial oil reserves in the surrounding region. Kirkuk is dominated by Arab Iraqis, many of whom were relocated there, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, as part of Saddam Hussein's campaign to "Arabize" the region, but the Kurds consider Kirkuk and its oil part of their historic homeland. "If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the Turkomen, and there will be a bloodbath," an American military expert who is studying Iraq told me. "And, even if the Kurds do take Kirkuk, they can't transport the oil out of the country, since all of the pipelines run through the Sunni-Arab heartland."
A top German national-security official said in an interview that "an independent Kurdistan with sufficient oil would have enormous consequences for Syria, Iran, and Turkey" and would lead to continuing instability in the Middle East-no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a widespread belief, another senior German official said, that some elements inside the Bush Administration-he referred specifically to the faction headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz-would tolerate an independent Kurdistan. This, the German argued, would be a mistake. "It would be a new Israel-a pariah state in the middle of hostile nations."
A declaration of independence would trigger a Turkish response-and possibly a war-and also derail what has been an important alliance for Israel. Turkey and Israel have become strong diplomatic and economic partners in the past decade. Thousands of Israelis travel to Turkey every year as tourists. Turkish opposition to the Iraq war has strained the relationship; still, Turkey remains oriented toward the West and, despite the victory of an Islamic party in national elections in 2002, relatively secular. It is now vying for acceptance in the European Union. In contrast, Turkey and Syria have been at odds for years, at times coming close to open confrontation, and Turkey and Iran have long been regional rivals. One area of tension between them is the conflict between Turkey's pro-Western stand and Iran's rigid theocracy. But their mutual wariness of the Kurds has transcended these divisions.
A European foreign minister, in a conversation last month, said that the "blowing up" of Israel's alliance with Turkey would be a major setback for the region. He went on, "To avoid chaos, you need the neighbors to work as one common entity."
The Israelis, however, view the neighborhood, with the exception of Kurdistan, as hostile. Israel is convinced that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and that, with Syria's help, it is planning to bolster Palestinian terrorism as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.
Iraqi Shiite militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr, the former American intelligence official said, are seen by the Israeli leadership as "stalking horses" for Iran-owing much of their success in defying the American-led coalition to logistical and communications support and training provided by Iran. The former intelligence official said, "We began to see telltale signs of organizational training last summer. But the White House didn't want to hear it: 'We can't take on another problem right now. We can't afford to push Iran to the point where we've got to have a showdown.'"
Last summer, according to a document I obtained, the Bush Administration directed the Marines to draft a detailed plan, called Operation Stuart, for the arrest and, if necessary, assassination of Sadr. But the operation was cancelled, the former intelligence official told me, after it became clear that Sadr had been "tipped off" about the plan. Seven months later, after Sadr spent the winter building support for his movement, the American-led coalition shut down his newspaper, provoking a crisis that Sadr survived with his status enhanced, thus insuring that he will play a major, and unwelcome, role in the political and military machinations after June 30th.
"Israel's immediate goal after June 30th is to build up the Kurdish commando units to balance the Shiite militias-especially those which would be hostile to the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would like to see," the former senior intelligence official said. "Of course, if a fanatic Sunni Baathist militia took control-one as hostile to Israel as Saddam Hussein was-Israel would unleash the Kurds on it, too." The Kurdish armed forces, known as the peshmerga, number an estimated seventy-five thousand troops, a total that far exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.
The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel's most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do-penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq.
(I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) "The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency," the former officer said. "But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey."
The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, "Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way-as balance against Saddam. It's Realpolitik." He added, "By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria." He went on, "What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration."
Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes. Syrian and Lebanese officials believe that Israeli intelligence played a role in a series of violent protests in Syria in mid-March in which Syrian Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops clashed, leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are nearly two million Kurds living in Syria, which has a population of seventeen million.) Much of the fighting took place in cities along Syria's borders with Turkey and Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, told me that while the disturbances amounted to an uprising by the Kurds against the leadership of Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his government had evidence that Israel was "preparing the Kurds to fight all around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. They're being programmed to do commando operations."
The top German national-security official told me that he believes that the Bush Administration continually misread Iran. "The Iranians wanted to keep America tied down in Iraq, and to keep it busy there, but they didn't want chaos," he said. One of the senior German officials told me, "The critical question is 'What will the behavior of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel?' Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier"-that is, a military stronghold-"on its border."
Another senior European official said, "The Iranians would do something positive in the south of Iraq if they get something positive in return, but Washington won't do it. The Bush Administration won't ask the Iranians for help, and can't ask the Syrians. Who is going to save the United States?" He added that, at the start of the American invasion of Iraq, several top European officials had told their counterparts in Iran, "You will be the winners in the region."
Israel is not alone in believing that Iran, despite its protestations, is secretly hard at work on a nuclear bomb. Early this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for monitoring nuclear proliferation, issued its fifth quarterly report in a row stating that Iran was continuing to misrepresent its research into materials that could be used for the production of nuclear weapons. Much of the concern centers on an underground enrichment facility at Natanz, two hundred and fifty miles from the Iran-Iraq border, which, during previous I.A.E.A. inspections, was discovered to contain centrifuges showing traces of weapons- grade uranium. The huge complex, which is still under construction, is said to total nearly eight hundred thousand square feet, and it will be sheltered in a few months by a roof whose design allows it to be covered with sand. Once the work is completed, the complex "will be blind to satellites, and the Iranians could add additional floors underground," an I.A.E.A. official told me. "The question is, will the Israelis hit Iran?"
Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A. director, has repeatedly stated that his agency has not "seen concrete proof of a military program, so it's premature to make a judgment on that." David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is an expert on nuclear proliferation, buttressed the I.A.E.A. claim. "The United States has no concrete evidence of a nuclear-weapons program," Albright told me. "It's just an inference. There's no smoking gun." (Last Friday, at a meeting in Vienna, the I.A.E.A. passed a resolution that, while acknowledging some progress, complained that Iran had yet to be as open as it should be, and urgently called upon it to resolve a list of outstanding questions.)
The I.A.E.A. official told me that the I.A.E.A. leadership has been privately warned by Foreign Ministry officials in Iran that they are "having a hard time getting information" from the hard-line religious and military leaders who run the country. "The Iranian Foreign Ministry tells us, 'We're just diplomats, and we don't know whether we're getting the whole story from our own people,'" the official said. He noted that the Bush Administration has repeatedly advised the I.A.E.A. that there are secret nuclear facilities in Iran that have not been declared. The Administration will not say more, apparently worried that the information could get back to Iran.
Patrick Clawson, of the Institute for Near East Policy, provided another explanation for the reluctance of the Bush Administration to hand over specific intelligence. "If we were to identify a site," he told me, "it's conceivable that it could be quickly disassembled and the I.A.E.A. inspectors would arrive"-international inspections often take weeks to organize-"and find nothing." The American intelligence community, already discredited because of its faulty reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, would be criticized anew. "It's much better," Clawson said, "to have the I.A.E.A. figure out on its own that there's a site and then find evidence that there had been enriched material there."
Clawson told me that Israel's overwhelming national-security concern must be Iran. Given that a presence in Kurdistan would give Israel a way to monitor the Iranian nuclear effort, he said, "it would be negligent for the Israelis not to be there."
At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the Israelis' tie to Kurdistan "would be of greater value than their growing alliance with Turkey. 'We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.'" The former Israeli intelligence officer said, "The Kurds were the last surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to square it with Turkey."
There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official explained, "Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it." Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb-"We will burn a blanket to kill a flea"-he said, "We have told the Kurds, 'We are not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.'" (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more direct: "We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey's good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.")
"If you end up with a divided Iraq, it will bring more blood, tears, and pain to the Middle East, and you will be blamed," the senior Turkish official said. "From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim that the United States had a secret agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq is divided, America cannot explain this to the world." The official compared the situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but added, "In the Balkans, you did not have oil." He said, "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it." If that happens, he said, "Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."
In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained that his government had "openly shared its worries" about the Israeli military activities inside Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "They deny the training and the purchase of property and claim it's not official but done by private persons. Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that it was not so. This policy is not good for America, Iraq, or Israel and the Jews."
Turkey's increasingly emphatic and public complaints about Israel's missile attacks on the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip is another factor in the growing tensions between the allies. On May 26th, Turkey's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, announced at a news conference in Ankara that the Turkish government was bringing its Ambassador in Israel home for consultations on how to revive the Middle East peace process. He also told the Turkish parliament that the government was planning to strengthen its ties to the Palestinian Authority, and, in conversations with Middle Eastern diplomats in the past month, he expressed grave concern about Israel. In one such talk, one diplomat told me, Gul described Israeli activities, and the possibility of an independent Kurdistan, as "presenting us with a choice that is not a real choice-between survival and alliance."
A third Turkish official told me that the Israelis were "talking to us in order to appease our concern. They say, 'We aren't doing anything in Kurdistan to undermine your interests. Don't worry.'" The official added, "If it goes out publicly what they've been doing, it will put your government and our government in a difficult position. We can tolerate 'Kurdistan' if Iraq is intact, but nobody knows the future-not even the Americans."
A former White House official depicted the Administration as eager-almost desperate-late this spring to install an acceptable new interim government in Iraq before President Bush's declared June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty. The Administration turned to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, to "put together something by June 30th-just something that could stand up" through the Presidential election, the former official said. Brahimi was given the task of selecting, with Washington's public approval, the thirty-one members of Iraq's interim government. Nevertheless, according to press reports, the choice of Iyad Allawi as interim Prime Minister was a disappointment to Brahimi.
The White House has yet to deal with Allawi's past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies-Saddam became President in 1979-is much less well known. "Allawi helped Saddam get to power," an American intelligence officer told me. "He was a very effective operator and a true believer." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, "Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug."
Early this year, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a "big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's medical degree, she wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party." Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.
"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does," Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A cabinet- level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi's office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.
The Saban Center's Flynt Leverett said of the transfer of sovereignty, "If it doesn't work, there is no fallback-nothing." The former senior American intelligence official told me, similarly, that "the neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat" in Iraq. "What's the plan? They say, 'We don't need it. Democracy is strong enough. We'll work it out.'"
Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives who now consult in Baghdad have told me that many wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families have deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of continued, and perhaps heightened, suicide attacks and terror bombings after June 30th. "We'll see Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out," Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, reported. "What the resistance is doing is targeting the poor people who run the bureaucracy -those who can't afford to pay for private guards. A month ago, friends of mine who are important landowners in Iraq came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one day's security was about twelve thousand dollars."
Whitley Bruner, a retired intelligence officer who was a senior member of the C.I.A.'s task force on Iraq a decade ago, said that the new interim government in Iraq is urgently seeking ways to provide affordable security for second-tier officials-the men and women who make the government work. In early June, two such officials-Kamal Jarrah, an Education Ministry official, and Bassam Salih Kubba, who was serving as deputy foreign minister-were assassinated by unidentified gunmen outside their homes. Neither had hired private guards. Bruner, who returned from Baghdad earlier this month, said that he was now working to help organize Iraqi companies that could provide high-quality security that Iraqis could afford. "It's going to be a hot summer," Bruner said. "A lot of people have decided to get to Lebanon, Jordan, or the Gulf and wait this one out."
2005-08-08 15:14 | User Profile
Outstanding posts, Weisbrot.