In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind argues, the choice to go to war with Iraq, was a "default" --a fallback, driven by the "realization that the American mainland is indefensible." -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response."
Suskind also disclosed the degree to which Cheney deliberately kept Bush in the dark, so as to be able to achieve his desired ends. For example, when Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler, visited Bush in 2002, the advance packet sent by the Saudis to prepare Bush for the meeting was mysteriously diverted to Cheney's office. Bush never read it. As a result, he had no idea what the agenda of the meeting was and failed to respond to the Saudi's requests for American help with the exploding Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which severely weakened Abdullah's position as an ally in the "war on terror." Nor did he extract any concessions from them. For Cheney, it seems, the less Bush was prepared for Abdullah, the less chance he would make any concessions to the Arab leader. Or perhaps Cheney simply wanted to control the meeting for the sake of control.Cheney and Rumsfeld, Suskind writes, viewed Bush as an inferior, the child of their contemporaries. A master at bureaucratic stealth, Cheney quietly orchestrated the war, which was "about the only matter on which all three agreed ... So, as America officially moved to a detailed action plan for the overthrow of Hussein, only three men would be in the know: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld."
Cheney's strategy of keeping Bush in the dark, Suskind argues, went back to Watergate. The break-in and violation of laws was not the problem for Cheney, Suskind writes: The problem was that Nixon should have been "protected" from knowing about it. It was his knowledge that ultimately led to his undoing. Keeping information from Bush allowed the president to say anything without ever being held accountable. "He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements." The most notorious case of this was the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, laying out the case for war. Bush was given only the summary, which did not include the U.S. intelligence community's caveats about the yellowcake and aluminum tubes claims. Since Bush had not read the actual NIE, when those claims later turned out to be false, no one could accuse him of lying. And in the meantime, the higher good -- the war -- would have been achieved.
But Bush, in Suskind's portrayal, was hardly putty in Cheney's hands (although Suskind reports that inside the CIA Cheney was nicknamed "Edgar," after the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, whose famous dummy was Charlie McCarthy). Bush played along with the game. He didn't want to know any more than Cheney wanted him to know. "No one would dare say that the President made it clear to his most trusted lieutenants he did not want to be informed, especially when the information might undercut the confidence he has in certain sweeping convictions."Kurdistan
On March 11, 1970, Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani (the father of the current Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani) and Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein reached a framework agreement for a semiautonomous Kurdistan. The Shah of Iran, who had supported the Kurds in their rebellions against Baghdad, viewed the agreement with alarm since it would strengthen Iraq's Ba'athist regime and Iraq itself. Over the next few years, the Shah tried to induce Barzani to abandon the autonomy agreement and resume the Kurdish revolt. Barzani, however, did not trust the Shah, a fact of which the Shah was well aware.
So, the Shah enlisted the Americans. On May 30, 1972, President Richard Nixon and Kissinger made a twenty-two-hour visit to Tehran. In addition to giving the Shah almost unlimited access to modern U.S. weapons, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to support a covert assistance program to Iraq's Kurds, a program so secret that the American ambassador to Iran was not informed. Believing the Americans were committed to his cause, Barzani now toughened his negotiating stance with the Iraqi state, and in 1974 rejected a final offer from Saddam. The Kurdish revolt resumed.
A year later, on March 6, 1975, Saddam and the Shah conferred during an OPEC meeting in Algiers. Saddam agreed to the Shah's demand that the border between their countries be at the thalweg of the Shah aI-Arab, or the midpoint of the deepest channel. In return, the Shah agreed to turn over to Iraq 210 square miles in the central sector of the two countries' border and to end Iran's support for Barzani and his Kurdish rebels.
By this time, Nixon was gone but Henry Kissinger was now President Ford's secretary of state. Without a word of protest, he accommodated the Shah's about-face, ending the CIA's program for the Kurds. Barzani was now a refugee along with 30,000 peshmerga and family members.
In his first visit to Kurdistan in May 2003, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III looked at one of the many portraits of Mullah Mustafa Barzani and asked his son Massoud, "Who's that?" The Kurds were dumbfounded. Bremer was Kissinger's protege, but he seemed not to know about the man his old boss had double-crossed. Mullah Mustafa Barzani had learned the hard way that the Kurds could not rely on American support, and it was not a lesson his son would forget. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the history of Kurdistan or the role of the Barzani family would have known that Massoud was never going to play his assigned role in what Bremer was to call the "path to a new Iraq.” The Kurds today, as is known, are the most numerous people without their own state.
By far the largest number live in Turkey, where they constitute a quarter of the population, or about 18 million. There are about 8 million Kurds in Iran, 6 million in Iraq, and smaller populations in Syria, the Caucusus, and Kazakhstan. While Kurdish culture is associated with the mountains (their favorite saying is "the Kurds have no friends but the mountains"), most Iraqi Kurds live in the cities and towns at the edge of the mountains. Iraq's Kurds are mostly Sunni- but generally practice a more liberal version of Islam than the Arabs. Many of their rituals, including the celebration of Newroz on March 21, hearken back to their pre- Islamic Zoroastrian past.
The Kurds have suffered in all the countries where they live, but nowhere as horrifically as in Iraq. Not surprisingly, therefore, Iraq is the incubator of Kurdish nationalism, and the place where the Kurds are closest to their dream of independence.In the aftermath of World War I, the Kurds thought they had been promised an independent state. In his 14 Points (1918), President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed national self-determination as the organizing principle of the postwar world, a promise embraced by the subjects of the collapsing empires, including the Kurds. For a brief moment the Kurds thought they had their independence. In 1920, at Sevres near Versailles, the Allies imposed on the remains of the Ottoman Empire a treaty of capitulation. Article 64 of the Treaty of Sevres stated: If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 [i.e., Turkey] shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas. The same treaty assigned the Kurdish parts of Mesopotamia (now Iraqi Kurdistan) to Britain but allowed its people to join Kurdistan if it were created. “N0 objection will be raised by the Principal Allied Powers to the voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which has hitherto been included in the Mosul valiyet.”
For the Kurds, the Treaty of Sevres was their holy grail, their moment in the international sun. Even today, in any discussion with Kurdish academics on the national question-and discussion of almost any topic in Kurdistan eventually turns to the national question they will refer to the Treaty of Sevres with verbatim citations of Article 62 and 64. In Turkey, however, the Sevres terms caused a revolution. It led to the proclamation of the Turkish Republic and the rise to power of Mustafa Kemal, the general who defeated the British Empire in the battle of Gallipoli and later became Turkey's great modernizer, known as Ataturk, or the father of the Turks. Bankrupt and preoccupied with events in war-devastated Europe, the Allies had no stomach to enforce the terms of Sevres. In 1923, they concluded a new treaty with Turkey in Lausanne, Switzerland. It made no mention of an independent Kurdistan. The other big losers were the Greeks, who were expelled from Anatolia, and the Armenians, who also lost their hopes for a state. Just as Kurds to this day reverently talk of Sevres, Turks frequently display copies of the Treaty of Lausanne in their offices, alone with the mandatory portraits of Ataturk.
As the Sevres Treaty was unraveling in 1921, the British now had to decide what to do with the predominantly Kurdish valiyet of Mosul. Winston Churchill, the cabinet minister responsible for the Near East, was open to the idea of an independent Kurdistan carved out of the Mosul valiyet. He foresaw, correctly as it turned out, the myriad problems of forcing the Kurds to live in an Arab state. However, the Colonial Office professionals led by Sir Percy Cox (the British high commissioner for Mesopotamia) and his advisor Gertrude Bell argued for the inclusion of Kurdistan in Iraq, not only to enlarge the new state but to have the Sunni Kurds help the Sunni Arabs offset the numerical superiority of the Shiites.
The Kurds never reconciled to being part of Iraq, and the entire history of modern Iraq is characterized by periodic Kurdish rebellions and Iraqi repression. When Iraq gained full sovereignty in 1932, the British required it to grant autonomy to the Kurds as a condition of its admission to the League of Nations the same year. But this did not happen and the requirement disappeared in 1945 when the United Nations replaced the League.
In 1946, the Kurds in neighboring Iran proclaimed an autonomous republic in the city of Mahabad, choosing as its flag a red-white-green tricolor emblazoned with a yellow sun with twenty-one rays. Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the head of Iraqi Kurdistan's most prominent clan, went to Mahabad, where he was made commander of its armed forces. While in Mahabad, on August 16, 1946, Barzani founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party. By happy coincidence, his son Massoud was born the same day.The Mahabad Republic was short-lived, collapsing when the Soviets-who occupied northern Iran at the end of World War IIwithdrew. Barzani and his forces trekked through the mountains to the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Qazi Mohammed stayed behind, and the Shah hanged him.
Barzani returned to Iraq after the 1958 coup that overthrew the monarchy. The new republic proclaimed Kurds and Arabs equal peoples in the new Iraq, but it was a brief reconciliation. When Baghdad failed to live up to its commitments on Kurdistan autonomy, Barzani launched a new revolt in 1961. In January 1970, Mullah Mustafa's son, Massoud, received an unusual message. An Iraqi delegation had shown up at the checkpoint near Barzani's headquarters in Choman. Massoud went to meet the guests, who included several ministers, and the man who was clearly in charge: Sad dam Hussein. Saddam, Massoud recalls, was friendly and practical. In a mud guesthouse he sat with Mullah Mustafa Barzani to discuss how to end the war. The elder Barzani told Saddam that no peace was possible without autonomy, and that under no circumstances would he give up the peshmerga. Saddam accepted both conditions. When Mullah Mustafa raised the question of democracy in Iraq, Saddam asked: "Why do you care what happens in the rest of Iraq? You have your autonomy in Kurdistan. What system we have in our part of Iraq is of no concern to you."
On March II, 1970, the Iraqi government announced a limited autonomy for Kurdistan, and Mullah Mustafa ordered his peshmerga to stop fighting. The negotiations continued but the two sides could never reach agreement on whether Kirkuk would be part of the autonomous Kurdistan Region. It was at that point, in 1974, that Barzani restarted the Kurdish revolution in the belief he had American support.
After the Shah and Saddam Hussein agreed to the Algiers Accord, the Shah sent word to Barzani that he had a choice: he could surrender to Iraq or to Iran. Barzani announced the end to the Kurdish rebellion on March 23, 1975. Not all Kurds agreed. Jalal Talabani, an energetic Barzani lieutenant steeped in Marxist ideology, broke with Barzani to found the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1975. Both the KDP and the PUK carried out raids against the Iraqi regime in the late 1970s, but the Shah's refusal to allow operations from Iranian territory meant that any Kurdish military activity was small-scale. Ayatollal:
Khomeini, who toppled the Shah at the beginning of 1979, set his sights on overthrowing Iraq's Ba'athist regime. He resumed Iraniar: support for the Iraqi Kurds. In many cases, however, the KDP and P~ were as interested in fighting each other as they were in fighting the Iraqi government.With the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, the KDP aligned itself with Iran. When Iran opened an offensive in the north in 1983, the PUK announced it would resist the Iranians and began negotiations with Baghdad. These negotiations broke down in 1985, and fighting between the PUK and the regime resumed. In 1987, Iraq began attacking villages in Eastern Kurdistan's Balisan Valley with chemical weapons, initiating the Anfal campaign. On March 16, 1988, Iraqi poison gas killed 5,000 civilians in Halabja. Between August 25 and 27,1988, Iraqi airplanes and helicopters gassed forty-eight villages in Dahuk Governorate. As part of the Anfal, the Iraqi government eradicated more than four thousand Kurdish villages, relocated or deported more than one million people, and killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. In 1988, the KDP and PUK set aside their differences to form the Iraqi Kurdistan Front (with three smaller parties). Facing the full force of the Iraqi military after the August 20, 1988, end of the Iran-Iraq War and without a rural population to shelter its peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdistan Front operated only in the most mountainous parts of Kurdistan in 1989 and 1990. Talabani and Barzani became exiles in Syria and Iran, respectively.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the war that followed provided new opportunities for the Kurdish resistance. When the allied bombing of Iraq started on January 16, 1991, peshmerga inside Iraq collected intelligence on the actual damage, which was radioed to Damascus, called into a Kurdish dentist in Detroit, and then translated and faxed to me at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I passed it on to U.S. military intelligence, which showed little interest even though much of the Kurdish reporting about bombing damage turned out to be more accurate, and less favorable to the Air Force, than the assessments based on satellite and aerial photographs.
With Sad dam's defeat in the ground war and the start of the Shiite uprising at the beginning of March, Iraq's Kurds seized the opportunity to throw off the hated Iraqi yoke. In the middle of March, the KDP and PUK leaders returned to Iraqi Kurdistan to take control of the newly liberated region. As previously told, the uprising collapsed at the end of March as the Iraqi Army moved north and the peshmerga helped evacuate the large urban population for which they had unexpectedly become responsible. At the beginning of April, the peshmerga stopped Iraqi tanks in battles at Kore north of Erbil and on Aznar Mountain east of Suleimania. This left a large swath of territory, perhaps 7,000 square miles, under Kurdish control. When the United States intervened in the northwest to establish the safe haven, it added another 3,000 square miles to the Kurdish enclave. Dahuk was the only sizable city within the enclave. Much of the rest of the Kurdishcontrolled territory was empty countryside dotted with piles of stone that had once been villages.
When he set up the Kurdish safe haven, President George H. W. Bush described it as a temporary measure. Therefore, when Saddam invited Talabani and Barzani to resume negotiations on autonomy in April, they did. The dictator, Massoud Barzani thought, was very different from the practical man he had met in the mountains twenty years before. "Even his closest aides were afraid to speak in his presence;' Barzani later told me. Saddam was conciliatory, but not prepared to go beyond the limited autonomy of the March 1970 agreement. Barzani gently raised the issue of the tens of thousands of Kurds who had disappeared in the preceding decade, a figure that included 5,000 members of the Barzani clan although he did not specifically mention them. "He couldn't look at me;' Barzani recalls. "He said, 'Many bad things have happened. If we reach an agreement, I will release those still alive. We will also fix something for those not alive.' " At that moment, Barzani says, "I knew they were all dead."
Saddam began his negotiations with the Kurds at a time when his hold on power seemed tenuous in the immediate aftermath of the March 1991 uprisings. By summer 1991, he was more confident and less willing to compromise. As it became clear that U.S. military support would continue, the Kurds also became less flexible. In September, Saddam decided to call the Kurds' bluff. He withdrew the Iraqi military to a line that he deemed to be the boundary of Kurdistan, giving the Kurdish political parties control over the region's two major cities, Suleimania and Erbil. He also stopped paying salaries for Kurdish civil servants, including teachers and police, which meant that the new Kurdish authorities were responsible for a large population but with no means to provide for them.
Saddam expected the Kurdish authorities to capitulate. Instead, teachers continued teaching and police policing, all without pay. And as the situation normalized, ordinary Kurds reveled in their new freedoms, including such simple pleasures as being able to picnic in the countryside. In 1992, the Iraqi Kurdistan Front decided to establish a Kurdistan Regional Government and to elect a Kurdistan Assembly and Kurdistan president. The elections, the first-ever fully democratic vote held in Iraq, were a moving testament to the idea of democracy. In order to avoid fraud and to facilitate international monitoring, the Kurdish authorities set up only several hundred polling places in a Switzerlandsized territory. Kurds traveled long distances to the polls and waited up to eight hours in line to vote. Turnout exceeded 80 percent.
The outcome was as unfortunate as the balloting was extraordinary.The KDP and the PUK effectively tied in the assembly elections. Neither Massoud Barzani nor Jalal Talabani had a majority in the presidential race. Rather than pursue a divisive runoff, the parties agreed not to have a president, but to govern in a coalition cabinet with ministerial positions equally divided between the two parties. On the ground, the PUK had its base in the eastern city of Suleimania while the KDP enjoyed solid support in the Kermanji-speaking areas along the Turkish border. Erbil, the capital, remained contested territory.
The power-sharing arrangements worked tenuously, and fell apart in 1994 over disputes about sharing revenues at the KDP-controlled Khabur Bridge, where Kurdish "customs fees" on legal and smuggled trade with Turkey provided the regional authorities their only source of revenue. Clashes between peshmerga associated with the rival parties evolved into an intra-Kurdish civil war.In August 1996, a PUK military offensive, abetted by the Irani-led a desperate Massoud Barzani to ask Saddam Hussein for help. August 31, Iraqi forces entered Erbil, ousted the PUK, installed -KDP, and left. The Clinton Administration took steps to abandon the safe area, on the grounds that Saddam had effectively retaken the tee tory.
But in spite of their divisions, the Kurds made good use of the twelve years of freedom under U.S. and British protection. In the seventy years up to 1991 that Iraq ruled Kurdistan, the Baghdad authorities constructed one thousand schools. The two Kurdistan Governments built another two thousand schools between 1992 and 2003, recruiting and training the necessary teachers. When Saddam pulled out of Kurdistan in 1991, there was one university in the region. The Kurdistan Governments opened two new universities-in Dahuk and Suleimania. All three are of high quality. Medical instruction is in English, and Kurdistan's new doctors are qualified by the British Medical Board.Most important, the Kurds rebuilt the four thousand villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein's army in the 1970s and 1980s. Farmers restored old water systems. Abandoned fields again sprouted wheat and barley. With funding from the United Nations under the oil-for-food program, the Kurdistan Governments embarked on an ambitious program of reforestation, planting millions of pines on hills that have been denuded for centuries. As a result, the Kurds started to change the ecology of their region. When I visited in the summer of 1987 as Saddam's effort to destroy rural Kurdistan was in full swing, I had the impression of a barren, dust-choked land. Visiting again in the summer fifteen years later, the yellow of grains waiting to be harvested had replaced the brown and gray of the earlier landscape.
As the second Iraq War loomed in 2002, many Kurds feared that Saddam's fall would mean the end of their American-protected freedom, and that the Americans might allow a more democratic Iraqi government to reduce their independence. They knew they could not influence President Bush's decision on whether to go to war. But, if the United States did go to war, they decided they wanted to be firmly on the American side. In the buildup to war and in the war itself, the United States had no more enthusiastic partner. However, the Americans mistook Kurdistan's devotion to the alliance as a sign that the Kurds would play their assigned role in building a new Iraq that was democratic, multiethnic, and united. It was wishful thinking, as could readily be determined by a visit to Kurdistan, or a quick review of its history.
The Iraq War produced the best possible outcome for the Kurds. The United States not only removed Saddam but also destroyed the foundations of Sunni Arab rule in Iraq, the Army, the Ba'ath Party, and the intelligence services. When Bremer applied the coup de grace by officially dissolving these institutions, the Kurds applauded. Bremer had consolidated the independence of Kurdistan.
The war also altered the international position of Kurdistan. In February 2003, the Turkish Parliament refused permission for the American 4th Infantry Division-then circling in warships in the eastern Mediterranean-to move through Turkey to open a second front in Iraq's north. The refusal created a full-scale crisis in U.S.-Turkish relations and infuriated the Pentagon neoconservatives who had long promoted close U.S. ties with Turkey. The Kurds made many American friends by creating the northern front that had been the assigned task of the 4th Infantry. As American forces swept north from Kuwait, peshmerga units, assisted by American Special Forces, tied down Iraqi divisions and then entered Mosul and Kirkuk as Saddam's forces collapsed.
On January 27, 2004, Barzani and Talabani met alone with Bremer. Bremer presented a paper of general principles on federalism: Kurdistan would be recognized as a federal unit, but it would have few powers. The central government would have responsibility for security, natural resources, the economy, and borders. The peshmerga would be disbanded or integrated into the Iraqi Army and Kurdistan's independent judiciary would disappear. Bremer emerged from the meeting believing that the Kurds had accepted his proposals. When I went over the Bremer paper with Barzani a few days later, he was surprised by what it said and vehemently denied that there was any such agreement. I heard later that Bremer's staff was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which their boss got the Kurds to surrender most of their autonomy. This should have been a clue that there was no meeting of minds.
The on February 1 was the Id al-Adha, a major Muslim feast marking the sacrifice of Abraham, and a suicide bomber detonated himself. 101 people died, including three cabinet ministers in the Kurdistan Regional Government, the governor of Erbil Governorate, the deputy governor, and the mayor of Erbil city.Thus a closer union with Baghdad seemed to carry the risk that Iraq's chaos would be imported into hitherto stable Kurdistan.
Fortunately, it was Bremer who backed off the January 27 proposal first. After a condolence call on the Kurdish leadership on February 6, Bremer drew Massoud Barzani aside to say that he had to send "our agreement" back to the White House, and that there had been changes. The White House, he explained, wanted to eliminate all references to the Kurdistan Regional Government from the interim constitution, which would mean Iraq's federalism would be based on Saddam's eighteen governorates. This was unacceptable to the Kurds, not only because they thought of Kurdistan as one entity (in spite of having two governments), but also because Saddam's governorate boundaries did not match the territory administered by the Kurdistan Government. The White House also wanted to eliminate a provision from the January agreement making Kurdish an official language of Iraq along with Arabic.
These changes were yet another example of ideology trumping reality and common sense. The White House was dreaming of a nonethnic Iraq. They wanted the federal units based on "geography"-as if Iraqi provinces should resemble u.s. states where the lines on the map define the community. The Kurds thought of themselves primarily as Kurds, not as residents of three Iraqi provinces with borders established by Sad dam Hussein. They were not about to give up their cherished Kurdistan. The White House commitment to making the Kurds into non ethnic Iraqis included having Arabic as the common language. No one in the White House seemed to realize that Arabic is also the language of an Iraqi ethnic group.
But the Kurds were thrilled with the White House changes. It now meant they could submit their own proposals. Kurdistan would remain a single entity within its March 19, 2003, borders and Kurdish became an equal official language of Iraq along with Arabic. As Iraq moved to write its permanent constitution, Massoud Barzanit took the initiative to organize a Kurdish delegation and negotiating position that would achieve each objective outlined in their February 11 proposal, and then some. In one of its first acts after convening in June 2005, the newly elected Kurdistan National Assembly adopted a law to prohibit the Iraqi military from entering Kurdistan without the assembly's approval.
The permanent constitution, adopted in the October 2005 referendum, recognized the Kurdistan Region as Iraq's first federal region. The constitution allows Kurdistan, and any future Iraqi regions, to have its own military, called Guards of the Region. Except for the few subjects listed as being within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, the Kurdistan constitution is superior to the federal constitution within Kurdistan, and Kurdistan law prevails when there is a conflict with federal law. This means that Kurdistan's secular legal system and Western-style constitutional human rights protections will continue to apply as other parts of Iraq evolve toward theocracy. Under the permanent constitution, Kurdistan owns and manages its land and water. As the Kurds proposed in February 2004, the regional governments have exclusive control over future oil fields (those never in commercial production) within their region. The Kurdistan Regional Government, and not Baghdad, determines the legal regime for the development of new oil fields, decides where drilling will take place, and makes investment decisions. The federal government shares control of existing oil fields with the government of the oil-producing region, meaning the Kurds will get a voice in the management of the Kirkuk oil field should Kirkuk become part of Kurdistan. This sharing represented a significant advance for the Kurds over their February 2004 proposal, which gave the federal government sole responsibility for existing commercial production. The list of exclusive federal powers is much shorter than in the Transitional Administrative Law. The federal government has exclusive control over foreign affairs, but Regions have offices within Iraqi embassies to handle their affairs. The federal government is responsible for defense policy, but has no control over regional guards and cannot deploy troops to a Region against its will. The federal government prints money but has no power to impose taxes unless the affected Region agrees to be taxed. The federal government regulates weights and measures, thus ensuring that a meter in Basra is the same length as one in Erbil.
If Bremer had left it to the Iraqis, they would have come up with an interim constitution different from the TAL. It would most likely have resembled the permanent constitution since the same Shiites and Kurds who sat on the Governing Council were the main players in the negotiations on the permanent constitution. Had the Iraqis been allowed to strike a constitutional bargain in 2004, they would not have given the central government as much authority as the TAL provided, but the deal might have carried through to the permanent constitution. In their proposal for a Kurdistan chapter in the TAL, the Kurds would have placed their self-defense force under the ultimate control of the Baghdad Defense Ministry (subject to caveats) and would have ceded some tax powers to the federal government. Bremer rejected the idea of an Iraqi Kurdistan National Guard outright and would not consider the Kurdish tax compromise. With their ideas having been rejected in the TAL, the Kurds took a tougher line in the negotiations for a permanent constitution and won on every point. They have a Regional Guard that is not subject to Baghdad's supervision, and the central government cannot impose taxes in Kurdistan. The permanent constitution institutionalized a virtually independent Kurdistan, the very result Bremer sought to avoid. But no doubt Kurdistan's desire for independence will continue to overshadow all other aspects of its relationship with Iraq.
Kurdistan's president, Massoud Barzani, said so directly in a little noticed interview with Turkish television station NTV broadcast on November 18, 2005, just after a day of fresh bombings of Shiite mosques. "May God save us from civil war, but if others start fighting among themselves and there is an outbreak, we will have no other alternative to independence!' As he has said in other interviews, Barzani insisted that independence was a "natural and legitimate right" for Iraqi Kurds. Given that Iraq is already in a civil war, Barzani's comments, reflecting the views of almost all Iraqi Kurds, cannot be encouraging to American hopes for a unified Iraq.
President Bush's military strategy for Iraq can be summed up by a phrase in his June 28, 2005, speech to the nation. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." There is little reason to think that this will happen soon, or ever. In 2005, the Iraqi Army nominally had 115 battalions, or 80,000 troops. This figure, often cited by those who see the Iraq occupation as a success, corresponds only to the number of troops listed on the military payroll. When the Ministry of Defense decided to supervise the payment of salaries, a third of the payroll was returned. (In Iraq's all cash economy, commanders receive a lump sum for the troops under their command; this acts as an incentive for them to maintain ghost soldiers on the payroll.) A top ministry official estimated that barely half the nominal army exists and that just 10 percent show up for combat.
Claims about weapons provided by the U.S. to the Iraqi Army are still more doubtful. Iraqi defense officials say the Americans have not provided them with records of who has been receiving weapons. Without such controls, soldiers sell their weapons on the open market, where some are bought by insurgents. Most weapons captured come from stocks supplied to the Iraqi Army and police. Craig Smith reported in the New York Times that the U.S. military is now unwilling to provide more sophisticated weapons to the Iraqi military for fear they will be used in a civil war, or against Americans.
The problems with the Iraqi Army go beyond the many opportunities for corruption. The army reflects the country's deep divisions. Of the 115 army battalions, sixty are Shiite, forty-five are Sunni Arab, and nine are Kurdish peshmerga, although they are officially described as the part of the Iraqi Army stationed in Kurdistan. There is exactly one mixed battalion (with troops contributed from the armed forces of the main political parties) and it is in Baghdad. While the officer corps is a little more heterogeneous, very few Kurds or Shiites are willing to serve as officers of Sunni Arab units fighting Sunni Arab insurgents. There are no Arab officers in the Kurdish battalions, and Kurdistan law prohibits the deployment of the Iraqi Army within Kurdistan without permission of the Kurdistan National Assembly.
Because the Sunni Arab battalions are not reliable, the Iraqi government and coalition have been using Shiite troops, and some Kurdish ones, in the fight against the insurgency. The Americans think of these troops as Iraqis, but the Sunni Arab population does not see them that way. To the Sunni Arabs, the Shiite troops are not fighting for Iraq but for a pro- Iranian Shiite-dominated political order. The Shiite troops have aggravated this feeling by scrawling religious graffiti where they bivouac, and by displaying pictures of their clerics. A strategy that entails Shiite and Kurdish troops fighting against Sunni Arab insurgents plays into the insurgents' hands by rallying the population against the new army and the authorities they represent.
Following the January 2005 elections, the Shiite list and the Kurdistan Alliance formed a coalition. In exchange for making Dawa leader Ibrahim Jaafari prime minister, the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani became president. The coalition divided up the key ministries with the Shiite list taking interior, oil, and finance and the Kurds foreign affairs. A Sunni Arab, Sadoun Dulaimi, became defense minister while a Kurd, Babkir Zebari, remained chief of staff of the Iraqi Army and another Kurd, Bruska Noori Shaways, served as the ministry's top civil servant. Ahmad Chalabi and the former speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament, Rowsch Shaways, became Iraq's two deputy prime ministers. SCIRI's Adel Abdul Mehdi became the Shiite vice president and former President Ghazi al- Yawar (who refused to vacate the presidential residence) became the Sunni vice president. A Sunni Arab from California, Hajim al- Hassani, was elected speaker of the National Assembly.
For the Kurds, there was a lot of symbolism in these appointments.Not only was a Kurd Iraq's first ever democratically elected head of state, but two Kurds, Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, represented Iraq at the Arab League summits in 2005. The Kurds did not forget that the Arab League never criticized Brother Sad dam Hussein for gassing them. But when it came to positions with real power, these went mostly to the Shiites, which was acceptable to the Kurds since the Baghdad government's writ did not extend to Kurdistan.
Although in coalition, the Kurds and the Shiites did not forge a common program. The two sides are too far apart with regard to their values and visions for the future. Instead, they have made a deal: the Kurds would let the Shiites run Arab Iraq in exchange for Baghdad not interfering in a de facto independent Kurdistan. For the Shiites, the deal is an acceptable price to be able to get their own way in Arab Iraq. For the Kurds, Iraq is a secondary consideration to protecting Kurdistan.
After the January 2005 elections, the Bush Administration lobbied the Kurds hard not to form a coalition with the Shiites, in the hope that Ayad Allawi, with support from the Kurds, could draw enough support from the VIA (itself a fairly broad coalition) to head a secular government. With Allawi, the Americans argued, the Kurds could build a new Iraq. The Kurds were, however, much less interested in a new Iraq than in Kurdistan. They needed to make a deal with a party that wanted its agenda as much as the Kurds wanted theirs, and that was the Shiites.
Not surprisingly, the Shiite-Kurdish coalition was not a comfort able one. Although the TAL gave most political authority to the prime minister, it was not in Talabani's nature to take a backseat. The president and prime minister clashed on matters of protocol so intensely that they could not agree who would give Iraq's speech at the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, and so both did. When Talabani made an official visit to Washington as the president of Iraq in September 2005, Jaafari ordered the Shiite ministers to boycott. This didn't faze the Kurds, who joked that the almost all-Kurdish delegation was a sign that the United States now recognized Kurdistan.
Talabani worked hard to bring Sunni Arabs into the political and constitutional process but mostly encountered hard-headedness from both Sunnis and Shiites. (In a moment of exasperation, he jokingly complained to me about "your English cousins" who had created such an unworkable country.) Long before anyone else seized on the issue, Talabani protested the Ministry of Interior's role in the disappearance and summary execution of Sunni Arabs. Kurds and some Shiites also complained about Jaafari's ineffectiveness. On the eve of Iraq's constitutional deadline and with many critical issues about the future of the country unresolved, Jaafari convened a cabinet meeting that spent three hours discussing tomato paste, and whether it would be included in the food rations distributed for Ramadan. The Shiites and Kurds have never shared common ground as Iraqis. But they did find a way to accommodate each other's main interests.
They had in common a shared history of oppression and of struggle against the dictatorship. In many ways, it was fortunate that Sunni Arabs boycotted the January 2005 elections. The Sunni Arabs had a political agenda opposed on almost every important point to the goals of the Kurds and of the Shiites. It is hard to see how a three-way coalition could have been formed, especially with the contentious constitutional questions still to be resolved. But the Kurds and Shiites shared, through bitter experience, a common perspective on Iraq's dark history. The Sunni Arabs could not acknowledge there had been a problem.