America’s Relationship Problem

We have all either been them or known them in our lives: the man who only lusts after women who appear uninterested in him, or the woman who takes nice men for granted and only really finds herself attracted to trouble. Perhaps such people suffer from insecurity or a kind of self-loathing – causing them to lose respect for anyone who shows them genuine affection or sympathy. For whatever reason it occurs, the dynamic is a familiar one.  Friends get treated much worse than others.

When it comes to American policy, Washington seems to have a relationship problem. The problem does not lie with congressmen and senators, who seem secure and straightforward about their friends and enemies. Rather it lies with the administration itself, and especially the career civil servants of the State Department and a few other branches of government. Such officials seem so keen to win the affections of America’s haters that they treat them better than much more sincere and reliable friends.

In the past few years, we witnessed a number of remarkable policy choices. The administration turned its back on Hosni Mubarak, a long time reliable ally in the region, and attempted to cozy up to Mohammed Morsi, his Islamist successor. One was a dictator and the other an elected leader, of course, so perhaps that explains the choice.

Not all elected leaders seem to receive equal treatment from the Americans, however. Turkish President Erdogan rants and raves about American conspiracies against him and belittles the Americans at every turn. He even denies them the use of their shared air base in Incirlik during an important military campaign against rampaging Jihadists. When the American Vice-President suggested recently that Turkey was not careful enough about stopping Jihadists from entering Syria, Mr. Erdogan angrily demanded – and immediately received – an apology.

In contrast, we recently saw unnamed American officials call the Prime Minister of Israel a “chicken shit” and a “coward.”  It is a strange insult coming from American bureaucrats who probably never saw anything even resembling danger in their desk-ridden lives: Benjamin Netanyahu is a veteran officer of Israel’s most elite combat infantry unit, the Sayeret Matkal. He fought in several of Israel’s wars and sustained wounds in combat behind enemy lines.  A single day leading a Sayeret Matkal team probably requires more courage and resolve than the unnamed American bureaucrats could summon in their entire lives. At the same time, we do not hear them insulting the leaders of other states in the region in this way – people who were not elected, who never served in a real military unit and who never faced much in the way of personal risk. If it were not for America’s senators and congressmen, these policymakers in Washington would no doubt happily throw Israel under the bus.

And then we have American policy towards the Kurds. Whatever the Kurdish movement – whether in northern (Turkish), southern (Iraqi), Western (Syrian) or Eastern (Iranian) Kurdistan – they unflinchingly proclaim their friendship with the United States. In a hundred years of innumerable Kurdish revolts against the governments repressing them, not one American was targeted by the Kurds. Despite the regional enmity it garners them, Iraqi Kurds in particular loudly proclaim their love for America and invite the Americans to establish bases and business in their territory. During the American occupation of Iraq more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers were killed by enemy action, but not one of these deaths occurred in friendly Iraqi Kurdistan.

For the last ten years, however, American officials seemed closer to Baghdad than the Kurds. Washington gave Baghdad some twenty billion dollars of training for its soldiers as well as military hardware and kit beyond measure. None of the weapons went to the Kurds, although a good portion ended up in the hands of the Islamic State (IS) after much of the Iraqi Army collapsed in June.  Only in August when IS Jihadists threatened to destroy the only successful part of Iraq did the U.S. come through for the Kurds – with air support and supplies.

Even as they finally moved to back the best remaining fighting force facing off against the IS Jihadis, however, officials in Washington insisted on channeling all military aid through Baghdad. When they were arming Sunni Arab awakening councils in Anbar from 2005 to 2008, in contrast, the Americans did not feel the need to give Baghdad control or a veto over the process.  As American senators and congressmen loudly call for full and direct support for the Kurds, only a trickle of weapons – and none of the heavier weapons needed to go on the offensive against the IS – appear to make it through.  Bureaucrats in Washington still seem to fear that their friends will do too well with more assistance -- perhaps even better than their frenemies.

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).

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