Why the Kurds matter

It looks like the attacks on Turkish tourist spots may have been the work of a Kurdish group, at least one such group has claimed responsibility. This isn't really anything new for the Turks, and some say that it may have been a Kurdish group that assassinated Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme in Stockholm way back in 1987 (for reasons unknown). So there have always been a few dangerously discontented Kurds floating around. What I think is different now is that we are only months away from having the US and Coalition partners finally admit to what was clear to perceptive newshounds early on after the fall of Saddam, i.e. that if there is to be both peace and democracy on the territory of what is now Iraq, then that place has to be partitioned into three states. And if it is to be partioned into three states, then one of those states will have to be a majority Kurdish state in what is now northern Iraq. And that is something that not only the Turks will vigorously oppose, but maybe even also Iran. Turkey and Iran are the other two countries with Kurdish populations, and those populations would find themselves living in bits of Turkey and Iran that would border the news Kurdish state in northern Iraq. Now for some reason Turkey, Iran, and the former Iraq all have historically been in the business of denying Kurds their own automony or territory. For example, right now Saddam is on trial partly for supposedly gassing "his own people". However, we should note that when we say that Saddam gassed his own people, we are speaking incorrectly, because what he did in fact was to gas his own Iraqi Kurds. Saddam's "own people" are all Sunni Arabs from specific tribes of a specific area of Iraq that has almost no Kurds.

Anyway, why it is that nobody wants the Kurds to get their own country, I don't know. You'd think that if a people were that much trouble to hold onto, that a reasonable existing country would want to let them go. On the other hand if you look at countries like India and China that seem willing to subject themselves to all manner of trouble just to keep a hold of some worthless, in-arable, mineral-poor piece of rock out on the perify of the country, well then you see what they're up against over there where the Kurds live.

So what we will have, when the partitioning begins, is a situation where the US will have to either alienate the Turks or the Kurds. My guess is that the US will choose to alienate the Kurds, just like everyone else does, and then we will have yet another group of pissed-off mountain folk vilifying the US and vowing never to forget, etc., etc.