Dispatches From the Other Iraq

a Washington Post foreign correspondent who reported from Iraq from 2006-08
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; Page C02

INVISIBLE NATION

How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East

By Quil Lawrence

Walker. 366 pp. $25.95

In journalistic accounts of the Iraq war, the Kurds, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be used as a counterexample. Kurdistan [sic.] is a place of relative calm amid chaotic violence. Its construction boom highlights the economic wasteland elsewhere. Its politicians are stalwart partners of the United States in a country bristling under U.S. occupation. A Kurdish public relations campaign describes the region simply as “the other Iraq.”

In “Invisible Nation,” the first thorough, book-length chronicle of the Kurds’ recent history and their role in the war, BBC reporter Quil Lawrence doesn’t deny these differences. But his brisk and engaging narrative makes clear just how tenuous — and anomalous — is this period of relative peace and prosperity for the Kurds of Iraq. They endured a genocidal campaign by Saddam Hussein and have been pushed to the corners of the four nations they primarily inhabit: Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. With a population of about 25 million, Lawrence notes, the Kurds may be the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent homeland.

“So in a dearth of good news, why isn’t the United States crowing about this one great achievement in Iraq?” Lawrence writes. “Because Kurdistan’s [sic.] success could be cataclysmic. Like no event since the 1948 creation of Israel, a declared Kurdish state within the borders of Iraq will unite the entire region in opposition, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf.”

Facing such a hostile neighborhood, the Kurds who live in Iraq’s three northern provinces have tried to carve out a niche of near-autonomy just on the safe side of independence. Lawrence, who writes a sympathetic but balanced portrait of the Kurds, describes their leaders’ gradual transition from guerrilla fighters to statesmen, including how they were betrayed by their ostensible allies (such as Henry Kissinger and the shah of Iran, who effectively handed over the Kurds to Hussein in 1975) and how they often squandered their best opportunities. For example, the belated U.S. creation of a no-fly zone over Kurdistan [sic.] after the Gulf War helped protect the Kurds from Hussein — “Washington unwittingly had become the midwife to a de facto Kurdish state,” Lawrence writes — only to have the two leading Kurdish parties slug it out for years in sporadic civil war.

“Invisible Nation” briefly traces the ancient history of the Kurds but really begins in earnest with their struggle for survival during Hussein’s vicious campaign against them in the late 1980s. The book continues through the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and into the time of the subsequent occupation, trailing off in 2006. The now-familiar themes of the Iraq war echo in the Kurds’ story as well. The intelligence, for one thing, rarely panned out.

Before the invasion, the Bush administration claimed that al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants were operating in Kurdish territory inside Iraq. But Lawrence shows those claims were riddled with errors and mostly wrong. While the militant group Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdistan, [sic.] for example, no links to Hussein or al-Qaeda were proved. And the opening airstrike of the war, a failed attempt to kill Hussein in southern Baghdad, was the result of an elaborate but often ineffectual intelligence-gathering operation based in Kurdistan [sic.] and led by CIA informant Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Karim al-Kasnazani, a Kurd and Sufi leader who was paid millions for his followers’ work as spies.

In Kurdistan, [sic.] as elsewhere in Iraq, faulty U.S. planning had unintended consequences. Sometimes this benefited the Kurds. The Bush administration’s inability to persuade Turkey to allow a ground invasion of Iraq from the north prevented thousands of Turkish troops from accompanying U.S. troops and may have averted guerrilla war between the Turks and Kurds — something that “may go down in history as the luckiest thing that happened to America regarding Iraq,” Lawrence writes.

The partnership between Americans and Kurds was far from easy, and many Kurdish officials have expressed exasperation over the years. Lawrence recounts how Iraq’s current foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, couldn’t even walk through the State Department doors as a Kurdish emissary during the Gulf War. On a visit to Washington in 1991, the best he got was a cup of coffee with junior staffers at a cafe around the corner from the State Department’s C Street headquarters. After the 2003 invasion, Lawrence says, there was considerable Kurdish frustration with Gen. David Petraeus, then a division commander in northern Iraq. Many Kurds were upset because Petraeus was working with their Sunni Arab enemies in Mosul and not giving Kurdish soldiers more control in what they saw as their territory.

Lawrence, who has reported extensively in Kurdistan [sic.] over the past eight years, dwells less on how the Kurds have governed their territory in the later years of the war. He only alludes to the darker side of Kurdish rule: the seemingly unlimited power of the rival Barzani and Talabani clans over the population, the allegations of corruption among government officials, the mistreatment of Arabs living in Kurdistan. [sic.]

But he succeeds in drawing lively portraits of the Kurds who have worked against terrible odds for the rights of their people. Their stories remind us how many of Iraq’s top politicians — President Jalal Talabani, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, Foreign Minister Zebari, to name just a few — endured prison torture, assassination attempts and long years of war on behalf of Kurdistan [sic.] and against the country they are now helping to govern. “There are short- and there are long-term deals,” Talabani says at one point in the book. And it is not entirely clear which kind the Kurds have entered into with Iraq.