A Kurdish State is in America’s Interest—and the Region’s, Too

The Kurds are an ancient people, with the trifecta of territory, language, and religion that makes them a nation in the classical Western sense. They are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, and the largest stateless people in the world, with a combined population of about 30 million.

The Kurds have been encouraged and then betrayed by Western powers, notably Britain and the U.S. They have been bombed and tortured by Turkey. They have been bombed, tortured, and gassed by Saddam Hussein. Most recently, they have been slaughtered by jihadists both Shiite and Sunni. Despite their shabby treatment by the British, the French, and the Americans, the Iraqi Kurds have been pro-Western throughout their ordeal.

Today, Iraqi Kurdistan is democratic, egalitarian, tolerant of religious minorities, a proven bulwark against ISIS, and an obvious bulwark against the imperial ambitions of Iran. The rest of Iraq is a disaster. The failed state-building that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 has bequeathed a corrupt Iranian satrapy and a leaking ulcer of Sunni fanaticism.

In a region defined by Islamism and repression, the Kurds of Iraq are moderate in religion and democratic in politics. In a region awash with anti-American and anti-Western loathing, the Kurds of Iraq are our loyal allies, and a strategic asset. In the fiasco of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, the Kurdistan Region is the only success story. Yet the United States opposed today’s referendum.

In August, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of Central Command, all pressured the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani to call off the referendum. Britain and France, who bear the historic responsibility for creating Iraq in the first place, also sent emissaries. The EU and the Russians opposed the vote. So, obviously, did the Turks, who implied that the Kurds have a nice semi-autonomous situation, and it would be a shame if Turkey had to smash it up.

So did our good friends the Iranians, and our trusted allies in the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. So, for what it’s worth, did the family mafia that claims to run the ex-state of Syria. So, curiously, did the left-of-center commentators who are usually so enthusiastic about statehood for the Palestinians.

It is not the right time for a referendum, say the Kurds’ dishonest friends. It is never the right time, say the Kurds’ candid enemies. Massoud Barzani, the president of the Iraqi Kurds, knows that this is the best of all possible times. The rest of Iraq is a theocratic shambles, ISIS has been beaten back, and the collapse of Syria has thrown the entire post-Ottoman settlement into play.

So Barzani has ignored them all, friends and enemies. The Kurds have already created their facts on the ground. Tellingly, the only endorsement for Kurdish independence came from the leader of another non-Arab minority whose women are also more likely to be seen wearing camouflage pants than burkas, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Jews and the Kurds have a long history of friendship: another reason why a Kurdish state aligns with American interests. Of course, Arab and Turkish leaders succumbed immediately to public paranoia about a “second Israel.” As if the development of a liberal, hi-tech, egalitarian powerhouse capable of defending itself would be yet another disaster for the region.

Historic Kurdistan falls within the territory of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. There are somewhere between 12 million and 15 million Kurds in Turkey, as many as 8 million Kurds in western Iran, up to 3 million in what used to be Syria, more than 6 million in the ruins of Iraq, and up to 2 million in the European diaspora.

This is why the Kurds’ bullying, bigoted neighbors, who are often also their governments, oppose the referendum. It is also why the outsiders, the U.S. included, opposed it, and sided with the bullies and bigots. Yet there is no reason why an independent state in Iraqi Kurdistan should destabilize the region or undermine Western policies. The utility and potential of a Kurdish state as a stabilizing, pro-Western buffer between Turks, Arabs, and Persians, was evident from the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

A Kurdish state was implied by Woodrow Wilson’s list in 1918. The 12^th of of Wilson’s Fourteen Points demanded the “absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development” for the non-Turkish peoples who had escaped the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurdish state made it as far as the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), and was also advocated for by Winston Churchill in 1921.

Churchill, then colonial secretary, rightly foresaw that the Kurds would be victimized as a non-Arab minority in “the Arab state of Mesopotamia.” But Turkish aggression killed the Treaty of Sèvres, and Britain’s pro-Arab and oil-hungry diplomats cast the Kurds into a unitary Iraq.

The same sorry factors combined to thwart the Kurdish uprising of March 1991. First, President George Bush effectively abandoned the Kurds to the onslaught of Saddam Hussein’s tanks. Then, the ceasefire deal negotiated by Norman Schwarzkopf compounded strategic blindness with military idiocy, by allowing Saddam’s air force to continue operating its helicopters. American pilots held their fire as they observed Saddam’s helicopters attacking Kurdish fighters and civilians.

James Baker, then secretary of state, advised against involvement because the U.S. would become embroiled in “the Lebanonization of Iraq.” By 1991, Lebanon had long since become the first post-Ottoman state to effectively cease to exist. The Lebanonization of Iraq was in the cards from the beginning: That is why Churchill favored a separate Kurdish state.

Since 2003, the U.S. and its allies have, contrary to their intentions, created a thoroughly Lebanonized Iraq. The traditional “realist” objections to breaking up Iraq have survived the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, just as the first President Bush’s errors passed for wisdom in the Clinton administration. But these objections are meaningless before the facts.

“Iraq,” like “Lebanon” and “Syria,” is a fiction: an amorphous area of the map, Balkanized by sectarianism, corruption, Iranian meddling, and Sunni jihadism—and, in the case of Iraq, by our failed attempt to build a multiethnic democracy in a state whose ethnicities hate each other. These are also the facts on the ground. A fifth of Iraq’s population wish to establish a liberal pro-Western, majority-Muslim state. Our glass in Iraq will never be half full. We are lucky that it is a fifth full.

The Iraqi state is unviable, and a Kurdish state inevitable. The Kurds of Iraq will have their state regardless of what their neighbors or foreign powers say or do. If they have to fight for it, they will. Given that they are warlike mountain-dwellers with a militia called the peshmerga, “those who face death,” they will probably win, too. The United States should acknowledge this reality, both to advance its interests and to reduce the regional tensions surrounding Kurdistan’s birth.

Barzani has said that he would ask for a two-year transition period in which Kurdistan could negotiate its independence from Iraq. It is in the interests of the United States to recognize Kurdish aspirations; to press the Baghdad government to accept this fait accompli; and to ensure that Kurdistan’s borders with Iraq are drawn peaceably. It is also in the interests of the US to insist that support for Kurdistan is conditional: Kurdistan’s border with Turkey must not become a launch pad for irredentist violence against Turkey.

The collapse of the post-Ottoman state system in the Middle East has turned unitary states into a scattering of ethnic jigsaw pieces. The imminent reality of a Kurdish state is an opportunity for placing one of those pieces in a stable setting, and one which fosters the regional interests of the U.S. and its allies. American support for Kurdistan is not just the right thing to do. It is also the sensible thing to do.