Obama, free Iraq's Kurds

The Kurdish state that will ultimately emerge from the wreckage of Iraq will not encompass the whole of Kurdistan, which includes parts of Turkey, Syria and Iran. But the Kurds, who have been playing a very long game, understand that an independent Kurdistan in part of their ancient homeland — the part now within the borders of Iraq — will satisfy many of their needs as a nation, and serve as a center of Kurdish culture and politics. It could also prove to the three states that control the rest of Kurdistan that the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan will not undermine their own strength and independence.

The official position of the Obama administration is that the Kurds, who make up as much as 20 percent of Iraq’s population, should be advancing the cause of Iraqi national reconciliation. “This is a very critical time for Iraq, and the government formation challenge is the central challenge that we face,” Secretary of State John Kerry said last week on a visit to Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region. Iraq’s leaders must “produce the broad-based, inclusive government that all the Iraqis I have talked to are demanding.”

Kerry might be talking to the wrong Iraqis. The Kurdish Iraqis I talk to see this moment as a turning point in the history of their people, when the lie that is Iraq — a country cobbled together by the British and French 100 years ago in way that institutionalized discrimination against the non-Arab Kurds by the majority Arab population — is finally being exposed. The president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, told Kerry, carefully, but tellingly, that, “We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq.” (Barzani has become less careful, now telling the the BBC of plans to hold a referendum on independence.)