The Kurdish Question: The Elephant in the Room

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Across the Middle East, Kurdish politics are growing more assertive and self-confident. The status quo is increasingly untenable, but the United States appears to have no game plan.

Ofra Bengio

12/12/13

 

In recent months, owing in part to the fallout from the Syrian civil war, belated signs of intellectual movement regarding the future of Kurdish politics have emerged from some Western analysts. We need a deeper understanding of history and context to evaluate this movement, however, because the role of U.S. policy will be crucial in whatever the future brings.

 

For the greater part of the 20th century American foreign policy and national security officials kept a studied distance from the Kurdish issue as such. The main reason is that U.S. administrations have evinced a strong Westphalian bias, always prioritizing the integrity of the territorial states that had emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. In this the United States followed in the Mideastern footsteps of Great Britain, which had prioritized the integrity of the Iraqi state it had created over earlier British promises concerning the establishment of a Kurdish state. After World War II and the Truman Doctrine, U.S. policymakers also had to take into consideration the sensitivities of its two major allies with large Kurdish minorities: Iran (an ally before the 1978 Islamic revolution) and Turkey. U.S. policymakers were extremely sensitive to Ankaras apprehensions of the Kurdish issue not just at home, but in the neighboring countries as well. Additionally, in the early years of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers tended to identify the Kurds with the Soviet Union and Communism. American suspicions were fed by the fact that Mulla Mustafa Barzani and some 700 Kurdish fighters accepted asylum in the Soviet Union for an entire decade following the collapse of the short-lived, Soviet-abetted Republic of Mahabad in 1947. Nor was the Marxist-Leninist ideology of Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiye Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK) in Turkey more palatable to the United States. In short, from any point of view, association with the Kurds or support for them was out of the question. The only exception was the limited, secret support the United States granted the Kurds in 197275, when two allies of the time, Israel and Iran, prevailed over it to supply such support.

 

Developments on the ground in more recent years have forced U.S. policymakers to change their policies, if not their thinking. From the 1990s onward the Kurds began to play a growing role in regional politics, starting with the Kurds of Iraq and continuing with the rising prominence of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, and most recently with the Kurdish dimension of internal tumult in Syria and to a lesser extent in Iran as well.

 

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