You might call me a pessimist on the glory of democratic Kurdistan. Therefore, I am not exactly won over by this sort of talk:
If we rescue Kurdistan, moreover, it does retrieve a sliver of the original hope.
They will be free of Saddam; they will be a Muslim democracy deeply grateful to the United States; they will be a Sunni society that is not hostile to the West; their economy could boom; their freedoms could flourish further. The Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope for some Persians who want to live in a free society and lack an obvious regional role model [bold mine-DL]. I fear, alas, that Arab culture is simply immune to modern democratic norms - at least for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage democrats or liberals [ed.–so we should discourage them?]; but that we should have no illusions about their viability in Arab society. Mercifully, the Middle East is not all Arab dysfunction. The Turks, the Jews, the Kurds and the Persians offer much hope.
Note that Kurdistan is apparently in need of “rescuing.” From whom? Oh, yes, the Turks. But not just the Turks–it is apparently in need of rescue from its own regional overlords. That makes all this talk about rescuing Kurdistan seem a bit bizarre–if we must rescue Kurdistan from both Turk and Kurd, the “rescue” mission would appear to be as futile and senseless as the “model of transformation” theory. The statement quoted above is also riddled with the subjunctive, ever the mood of the optimist: these things might happen and it could lead to something better. Well, okay, there are always many different possibilities, but are any of these proposed outcomes likely? Optimists are great ones to talk about possibilities, but seem decidedly less curious about finding out which ones are more probable than others. Supposing that Turks and Kurds can somehow “work it out” and the massing Turkish forces on the northern Iraqi border are just out for a summer hike, isn’t Turkey (at least according to its boosters) already supposedly something like a “regional role model”? Wasn’t the point of democratising Iraq that it was a predominantly Arab country and would therefore be a beacon (or whatever they were calling it back then) to reformers in other Arab states? Wasn’t Turkey considered less suitable as a model for reform because Arabs and other non-Turks remembered with some resentment the Ottoman yoke? Since we’re pretending that Turkey is some sort of free society–unless you want to, you know, speak freely–I suppose we can also pretend that these previous objections never mattered, and that the rest of the region will take inspiration from Turks (whom the other nations dislike or resent) and the Kurds (whom most of the other nations look down on). Let the rescue begin!
Additionally, this is a fascinating distinction between Arabs and everybody else, and it is as close to full-on essentialism as I think I have ever seen Sullivan endorse. (Ross is appropriately skeptical of the promise of the Kurdish Eden.) I see that Sullivan is talking about “Arab culture,” but he speaks about “Arab culture” as if it were somehow so thoroughly different from the cultures of other Near Eastern peoples as to have no meaningful relationship with them. Especially when it comes to other largely Muslim nations, this distinction becomes even more tenuous. What is there about Kurds that makes their culture more amenable to liberal democracy than Arab culture? The differences are not as great as one might suppose. It is easy to see why.
The Kurds’ ”stateless” existence has meant that they, perhaps more than others that have had a national state(s) of their own, have melded and adopted more cultural norms of their neighbours than others. This is also not simply a question of shared culture among Muslims, but of shared culture among all peoples of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean. The distinctions between the different nations should certainly not and really cannot be overlooked, but Western observers’ rediscovered confidence in understanding the importance of ethnicity in foreign affairs has become a bit overzealous. The trouble with Arab culture, as Sullivan seems to be telling it, is that it is the product of Arabs, and there’s simply nothing to be done with Arabs. The Kurds, on the other hand, well, these are people you can work with….It doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. Are the structures of Kurdish social and family life so radically different from those of their neighbours that they are not likely to suffer from all of the same political pathologies?
In the past, certain optimists believed that some of the biggest problems in the Near East were a lack of democracy and the absence of a robust civil society. Fix those problems, and things would begin going the right way–the region would be transformed! Now other optimists (haven’t we learned by now to stop being optimistic?) wish to tell us about the Kurdish (or Turkish or “Persian”) exception to the Near Eastern rule. It turns out, they tell us, that the Near Eastern rule is actually just an Arab rule. Even though the new proposed “arc of hope” does absolutely nothing to address the original “swamp” question that encouraged all of the original nonsense, and even though it means that the roots of the problem are even deeper and even less easily remedied, if they can be at all, this is supposed to be some consolation.
Sullivan ends his post with a rationale for his position:
It seems to me we should be investing in those places that have a chance, rather than further antagonizing those regions that have yet to develop any politics but violence, paranoia and graft.
Well, all right, but by that standard–at least according to some the latest evidence from Kurdistan–we should be clearing out of Kurdistan. Indeed, using that standard, we should be investing our resources more heavily in Chile and Thailand than we put into in any country between the Tauros and the Hindu Kush.
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July 12th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Grumpy Old Man
I see no reason not to wish the Kurds well. They seem to be more or less at peace, except in Kirkuk, and with peace some prosperity has come. The Iraqi Kurds are not hostile to us.
The Turks have their hands full with their own Kurds. I can see them crossing the border to sort out the PUK, but why they would want to sit on a hostile Iraqi Kurdistan is almost as much of a mystery as why Bush wants to sit on a hostile Iraq.
There’s apparently plenty of Turkish money in Iraqi Kurdistan and considerable trade. Why would the Turks want to mess with that, once their election frenzy passes?
Kamil Said Qadir, whom you link to, has his Chalabi-esque grievances. No doubt Kurdistan is something less than a Fabian socialist paradise, and some of Mr. Qadir’s complaints are justified. Our problem? Not hardly.
If we can leave the Kurds to work out their future without our troops and without a war with Turkey, and with a curb on the irredentism that might arise because related minorities exist in Turkey, Syria and Iran, a tolerable Kurdistan might be one useful shard from the débâcle.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Daniel Larison
I have no objections to wishing them well. I get annoyed when people fall into the same lazy arguments that were made about Iraq generally and who insist on applying them all over again to Kurdistan. The Kurds are at peace (for the time being), but they are also under a petty despotism with the trappings of elected government. They have some prosperity and have fairly good security (provided that you aren’t on the bad side of one of the ruling families!), but the ruling factions seem intent on making sure that Kurdistan exists for them, the faction leaders and their relatives and allies, and not for the general welfare of Kurds. There will always be elites, but they need not always be quite so blatant in their concentration of power.
All of that has to enter into the discussion of the “hope” of Kurdistan. I wouldn’t mind if sympathisers with the Kurds argued that a petty Kurdish despotism was providing a measure of order and allowing for some prosperity (less the costs of corruption), but then I would want to see them conceding that they had accepted that a regime providing some political stability was part of the reason why Kurdistan is doing as well as it is. They would have to acknowledge that stability, even when mixed with some measure of despotism, is better in the long-run than subjecting people to the post-Soviet “may the man with the largest militia or mafia win” approach to political and economic reform and calling it freedom. At the same time, they would have to consider whether a certain degree of despotism is unavoidable because of political culture, and if it is they would need to stop praising Kurdistan because it is democratic and free (since, in important ways, it is neither) and simply cite those areas where it has been successful.
In other words, it is not because Kurdistan is democratic that it is faring better, but because it has security and a local government that is in control. Whether some sustainable self-government eventually emerges out of the domination of the head families remains to be seen. If it does, that’s all very well. My larger point here is that we should not let certain overly enthusiastic assumptions about Kurdistan dictate how and where we redeploy. If we “invest” in Kurdistan by redeploying there and securing the border against Turkish incursions (at no small risk to our soldiers and the continued alliance with Turkey), as Sullivan suggests, we had best be sure that we are not making a bad investment. Talking happy talk about arcs of hope and Kurdish democracy is a good way to ignore the warnings and suffer bigger losses when the “investment” collapses.
“The Turks” may not want to mess with the growing cross-border trade, but the political and military elite may well put a higher priority on a certain idea of national security. If a government is provoked by events, especially terrorist attacks, nationalism can override better judgement about the actual national self-interest and make governments commit blunders that, judged coolly in retrospect, seem unbelievable. See, for example, the invasion of Iraq.
Of course Qadir has grievances. Those should be kept in mind with all dissenters against all regimes. When we meet the political dissenter who lacks all self-interest and resentment against the government he is actively opposing, it will be like finding a unicorn. Such people are forged by resentment and the self-interest of undermining the government that caused the resentment. However, dissenters are usually telling the truth when they describe a regime’s tendency to lock up its opponents, indulge in nepotism and corruption and concentrate power in a few hands. When people report, for instance, on the detentions of dissidents in Burma, no one thinks that this is purely made up because it comes from anti-regime sources. It may be exaggerated to some degree, which is why intelligence provided by dissenters and defectors is usually flawed (they have an interest in exaggerating things and distorting evidence, which undermines getting reliable information about what is going on) and not a good basis for taking action. (For a great send-up of the ability of “dissident” information to persuade a government to take action, Tailor of Panama is not a bad story.)
When it comes to most reports of abuses, though, dissenters don’t need to make these things up, because they are only too common. Where dissenters and defectors become less relevant is when they begin telling impressive-sounding stories, saying that “this government is a dangerous threat to the entire world and, oh by the way, would you mind installing me and my friends in power as the price for warning you about your imminent deaths?” The self-interest and biases of the dissenter, which tend to make their stories about the cruelties of a despotism more credible, are the same things that should set off alarms when they begin claiming that they know things about their former government that just happen to match nicely with the most paranoid fears of your policy elite.
Speaking of self-interest and biases, it is, of course, entirely in the interest of Talabani and Barzani to depict Kurdistan in the best possible light as a successfully reforming Near Eastern democratic society. Likewise, those boosting this image of Kurdistan are usually deeply implicated in support for the war and need to find something, anything, that makes that continued support seem justifiable. Since self-interest is everywhere, the thing to do is consider whose biases seem to be distorting their interpretations the most and to try to determine, as much as possible, what the whole story is. The instinct of pundits to say, “Well, at least Kurdistan is doing well” is understandable, but it is potentially misleading and causes us to mistake what we want to be true with what is true. That is a central part of how optimism confuses people. We may *hope* that such-and-such a thing happens, but when we begin assuming that the hopeful scenario is also a likely one, rather than an unlikely one whose improvement is incumbent upon actual human agents, we are engaged in a kind of optimistic fatalism–things will turn out all right because they just will. One problem I have with “freedom agenda” supporters is their conviction that freedom is natural, a default state that would quite readily flourish, if only it weren’t for, well, everything else in human existence. This causes them to expect freedom, when the normal thing to expect from political arrangements is some measure of unfreedom. Expecting the wrong thing, they are not prepared for what happens in most cases. Because they believe that everyone desires freedom–and desires it more than anything else–they have had great trouble conceiving of how it is that people might choose something other than that (even though most of history is filled with people choosing something else).
It is relevant that the man likely highlights the worst about Kurdistan because he opposes the current government, but then part of the reason why he opposes it is that they have a habit of imprisoning people, like him, who oppose it. As corrupt clan-based government goes, Kurdistan could be a lot worse, but I don’t know why anyone has to pretend that it isn’t like this. It is always possible that Kurdistan *could* improve, but one of the reasons why I don’t like optimism is that it encourages people to take improvement as being somehow natural or more likely than degeneration. Neither one is inevitable, but depends on the quality of the decisions being taken.
July 14th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Grumpy Old Man
Generally sound comments. Kurdistan should in some ways be familiar territory to those who know something of James Michael Curley, Huey P. Long and his progeny, et al., except the cops are meaner and the prisons danker. Kind of a Middle Eastern PRI, perhaps.
You have made a fine riposte to those who would elevate Sulimanyeh to a shining city on a hill, or the prize that justifies the half-decade of bloody fecklessness that has been our Iraq adventure.
That said, a reasonably stable condominium of family despotisms with parliamentary trappings strikes me as not so bad if one asks the question, “Compared to what?” As long as we don’t mistake it for a chalice, a half-full glass is a great deal better than the usual pile of shards.