The Kurds are in the way again

In today's Washington Post, Najmaldin Karim, president of the Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI), has a column called A 1991 Kurdish Betrayal Redux?

Sadly, the report is unlikely to offer anything other than the same discredited policies that for 60 years created a dangerous illusion of stability in the Middle East, a "stability" bought with the blood of Middle Easterners and that produced such horrors as the massive 1991 bloodletting of Iraqis who sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein. ...

... Some of the "experts" are Arabs, and in once case, an Iraqi Sunni Arab. Interestingly, none is a Shiite Iraqi or a Kurdish Iraqi.

Worse yet, the Iraq Study Group, which has made great play of visiting Iraq and talking to Iraqi officials has refused to visit the safest and most pro-American part of Iraq -- Kurdistan.

The failure to visit Iraqi Kurdistan, or to consult with its democratically elected president and prime minister, or simply to see the evidence of a peaceful, thriving economy, is no oversight. The Iraq Study Group has considerable policy experience and its expert advisory groups, if expert they truly are, must know about the advances made by the Iraqi Kurds. ...

No, the Iraq Study Group has shunned America's closest allies in Iraq, the Kurds, out of ideological prejudice....

...Of course, why would a panel that has spent more time talking to America's enemies, Syria and Iran, than America's allies, the Iraqi Kurds, care about the democratic wishes of the people of Iraq? Looking at the Iraq Study Group, what Iraqis, and Kurds in particular, see is not an expert group coming up with new ideas, but a likely repetition of the failed and costly policies of the past.

It makes me think of Calvin Trillin's poem:

The Kurds Are in the Way Again

The Kurds are in the way again,
And so, to our dismay again,
If we begin a fray again,
As it appears we may again,
It seems we must betray again
The Kurds: They're in the way again.

(The Nation, March 24, 2003 issue)