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In an interview with Rudaw, former US Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey says, “The United States is not going look favorably on a breakup of Iraq unless it is absolutely unavoidable,” citing in the meantime Kurdish concerns about the turmoil in the wider Middle East and their right to choosing their own future.
“Given the risks of Iranian encroachment on Iraq as a whole, given the possibility of the breakup of the country, given the possibility of ISIS and the form it will stay in, the option to find one’s own future has got to remain in the back pocket of any Kurdish leader.” Mr. Jeffrey says. “But the decision to take that option is a very very serious decision both for Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq.”
Speaking to Rudaw’s Washington correspondent Rebaz Ali, the former ambassador who served in Iraq 2010-2012 believes that “Even if Kurdistan is independent it doesn’t go away from Iraq. Iraq is still there.”
Mr. Jeffrey acknowledged that Iraq is in deep trouble and has become dysfunctional, but saying that the US did not create these troubles.
“We didn’t create the dysfunctionality of Iraq,” he says. “We didn’t create the dysfunctionality of Syria, of Egypt or many other countries in the region.” Adding that the US tried to fix the situation in Iraq but failed.
“The American effort to fix all of that was a failure.” Mr. Jeffrey said. ““We expended a great deal of money and effort. I don’t think we made it worse. But we didn’t fix it the way over the decades we fixed, with the people of those regions, South Korea, Japan, and Eastern Europe. Those are positive examples, the Middle East obviously has negative examples.”
Speaking on the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), Mr. Jeffrey blamed the political situation in the Middle East, the policies of the former Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki and, the United States for not acting in time, especially in Syria.
“ISIS is the result of three things,” he said. “One, the underlying penchant for Sunni, extremist, violent jihadists to seize any sort of ungoverned territory. That is a disease that is in the blood of the region.
“Secondly, the exaggeration of that through the actions of the Maliki government in looking at the Sunni Arab population as a potential threat which of course just created exactly what he feared.
“The third thing is our allowing Syria to become an ungoverned territory. That is where the Al Qaeda in Iraq transformed itself and became a state and army. And it is a state and an army that is threatening much of the Syrian population, much of the Iraqi population and all of us throughout the world today.”
The former US ambassador went on to say that the US was aware of Maliki’s actions that led to antagonizing the Sunni population of Iraq as well as his authoritarian tendencies, but couldn’t do much about it other than warning him against it. “We knew what Nouri al-Maliki was doing all of the time, but he was democratically elected with the support of the Shiite parties, with the support of the two major Kurdish parties and with the support of the Sunni political system at least up to the removal of Rafi al-Esawi.
“Given that the United States isn’t in the business of micromanaging the affairs of other countries and given the fact that Maliki had a great deal of support or at least his government did, we knew what was going on, we warned him against it, but I have yet to hear anybody tell me what action we should have taken we he didn’t listen to us.”
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