This Is Not America’s Fight to Win or Lose

In sending missiles against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Clinton administration has thrown the vital interests of the United States into a dispute in which the risks outweigh the gains. At issue in northern Iraq is not the security of the world’s oil supply but the ongoing, bitter and often bloody rivalry between Kurdish factions that Iraq and Iran find useful to exploit in their own power struggle. By acting unilaterally, the U.S. may prove to be the ultimate loser in this contest with no immediately foreseeable winners.

The Kurds are a people of clouded origins, a distinct ethno-linguistic group that shares identity with no other in the Middle East or southwestern Asia. After several centuries under the rule of the Turks, the Kurds’ sense of nationalism exploded in the 19th century as the Ottoman empire became “the sick man of Europe.” After it died in World War I, the Kurds went to the Versailles peace conference to demand independence for Kurdistan, encouraged by the promise of self-determination stated in Woodrow Wilson’s “14 points” outline for the postwar world. Instead, they fell victim to deal-making by the victors of the Great War. Ignoring the plea for an independent Kurdistan, the map makers of Versailles divided the Kurd population among Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet Union.

The struggle for the elusive independent Kurdistan has continued ever since. It is not a simple contest between an occupied people striving against an occupying power. It has become a complicated contest among snarling factions with parochial concerns, split along tribal lines and led by individuals possessing competing interests and ravenous egos. Periodically, each of these groups reaches out to engage as allies one government or another. Each of these governments manipulates the Kurds as long they prove useful. In the current crisis, Iraq and Iran are once more both ally and manipulator of the Kurdish question.

Particularly since the early 1970s, Iraq and Iran have frequently employed their Kurdish minorities against each other. In 1974, when the Iraqi Kurds were in full revolt against the government in Baghdad, the shah of Iran sent them money and arms. Only when the shah felt that he was skirting the edge of war did he withdraw his support, leaving the Kurds to the fury of a revolutionary named Saddam Hussein.

In 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, the Kurds on both sides of the border figured in the power configurations of secular Iraq and Islamic Iran. When that war ended in 1988, Iraq and Iran continued to spar as ideological and regional adversaries. In recent weeks, the interests of both governments have meshed with those of two Kurdish factions vying for control of northern Iraq: the Kurdistan Democratic Party, allied with Saddam Hussein, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, allied with Iran. As a result, the destructive dynamics of the Kurdish question are once again in operation--Kurd against Kurd and government against government.

Now the Clinton administration has chosen to place the vital interests of the United States into the conflict pitting Saddam Hussein against the mullahs of Tehran. It has done so with no clear indications of a tidy end to the operation and without the support of any of the governments of the region.

In the short run, the United States will win by forcing Saddam Hussein to back down from the invitation of the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani to enter the Kurdish enclave created by United Nations resolution at the end of the Gulf War. But in the long run, the United States loses by playing into all the perceptions that the masses of the Middle East have about the aggressive intentions of an American giant that they see as determined to dominate them economically, culturally and politically. Rational or not, it is an emotion that leaves regimes like Saudi Arabia’s House of Saud and Jordan’s King Hussein, already shaken by internal unrest, under indictment for failure to resist yet another intrusion by the United States’ awesome and feared military power. As for Iran, U.S. action against Saddam Hussein leaves the Islamic Republic positioned in northern Iraq via its Kurdish surrogate.

Most damaging to long-term U.S. interests is the decision to act unilaterally. In alienating its allies over a dispute between Kurdish factions backed by Iraq and Iran, the Clinton administration, supported by the Republican Congress, is sacrificing the unity of Western and Arab nations that allowed the U.S. to so successfully wage a war that kept the oil of the Persian Gulf flowing. Now that carefully constructed U.S. umbrella is collapsing in the rush to intervene in a murky situation with questionable dividends for U.S. vital interests.