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This month in an article for Foreign Affairs, Denise Natali closely replicates the Obama Administration’s thinking on Iraq. She recognizes the Kurds’ decades-long fight against Islamist extremists, long-running cooperation with the United States, and the fact that they are a “committed and pragmatic partner in the battle against ISIS [the Islamic State].” She notes the Kurds’ ability and willingness to cooperate with a wide array of actors in the war against ISIS, including the Americans, the Iranians, Shiite and Sunni Arab militias, Yezidi and Christian volunteer fighters, and fellow Kurds from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). She concedes that Kurds have “...won back 25–30 percent of territories lost to ISIS,” and “limited ISIS’ access to oil and gas resources, drying up some of its revenue streams.”
Despite all this, she then goes on to warn readers that the Kurds are gaining too much. American aid to Syrian Kurds (which has been very limited, but apparently still worthy of note) causes great consternation in Turkey, she reminds us. Kurds in Iraq are antagonizing Arabs with their territorial gains around places like Kirkuk, and Kurdish forces have violated some Sunni Arabs’ rights by preventing their return to formerly ISIS controlled areas or singling them out at security checkpoints. The Kurdish parties are all divided and of questionable allegiance, she adds.
Natali uses this to justify a policy prescription wherein the U.S. should not provide "unconditional" military aid to the Kurds, but rather channel all aid via Baghdad. The U.S. should demand that Kurds not use the weapons to oppress non-ISIS Sunni Arabs, and that Kurdish authorities cooperate with Baghdad, Sunni Arabs, minorities and others. “U.S. and coalition forces,” Natali states, “should act as a neutral arbiter, not as a permanent security force or political cushion for any specific group."
This all probably presents a fairly accurate summary of how the White House and the State Department see things in Iraq. The irony is that Mr. Obama and his diplomats have not apparently made any of their military aid to Baghdad conditional. Last I checked, Shiite militias -- with much more U.S. weapons coming to them (via the “Iraqi Army”) than the Kurds -- are behaving infinitely worse towards Sunni Arab civilians than the Kurds. One indicator of this is that Sunni Arab civilians prefer to flee to Kurdistan when given the choice. The Kurds are in fact receiving around 10% of the aid given to Baghdad (and hence Shiite militias, given how divided and of questionable allegiance Baghdad is). What’s more, does anyone think the likes of Iran are acting like "neutral arbiters" in the region? If the United States and the rest of the West do not back their allies, they will lose to other people's allies.
Republican members of Congress, along with a few Democrats, seem to have understood the situation much more clearly than the Obama administration. They just released a defense authorization bill, via the House Armed Services Committee, that would arm the Peshmerga, Sunni Arab tribes and a Sunni “national guard” directly. Page 266 of the draft bill (yes, your humble columnist actually read it) proposes treating the Kurds and the Sunnis as “countries” for the purposes of providing military assistance, meaning such assistance need not go through Baghdad.
The proposed bill would earmark at least 25% of all aid to Iraq (not counting the aforementioned direct aid) for the Kurdistan Region and the Sunnis. If Baghdad fails to forward this aid, if it keeps handing weapons over to Shiite militias, if these militias continue their human rights abuses, or if Baghdad fails to take other steps to share power with Sunnis, Kurds and others, all U.S. aid to Baghdad would be frozen, and 60% of the originally earmarked assistance would be immediately delivered to the Kurds and allied Sunni forces.
This appears radically different from the current U.S. administration’s “woo your enemies and screw your friends” approach. Perhaps the Congressmen grasp the situation better than Mr. Obama, his advisors and his State Department mandarins. The bill’s language is so strong that Iraqi Shiite firebrand Moqtada al Sadr responded threateningly, stating that if the Americans’ bill is passed, he will have to activate his militias and “begin hitting US interests in Iraq and outside it.”
Al Sadr’s militia friends, of course, are the ones currently getting most of the weapons Washington sends to Iraq.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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