Who Won't Be Making Jokes About WMD

Who Won't Be Making Jokes About WMD

By Gerald A. Honigman
August 2003

While Jay Leno & Co. crack jokes on late night television and AP writers such as Matthew Fordahl also make light of the subject in papers such as The Herald in Rock Hill, South Carolina on July 16th ("For Today's Giggle, Try Asking Google To Find weapons Of Mass Destruction"), there is one people who surely will not join in the laughter. And they were not the only ones for whom the subject is deadly serious--literally.

"The Kurds have no friend but the Mountain" is a piece of aging Kurdish wisdom. And while the mass gassings and other slaughter of this people is treated as "yesterday's news" by too much of the rest of the world, all the current hype about whether or not Adolph--er Saddam--Hussein had/has weapons of mass destruction brings their tragic story back onto center stage...or at least should.

Thirty million stateless, used, and abused Kurds are the native, non-Arab, non-Turkic, non-Semitic people who were promised independence in Mesopotamia-- the ancient heartland of Kurdistan--after the Ottoman Turkish Empire collapsed in the wake of World War I. They were the Hurrians of the Bible and the Medes of Persian history. Saladin, the mighty medieval Muslim warrior, was a Kurd. Unfortunately, they soon saw these earlier promises sacrificed on the altar of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism. Arab Iraq was born instead.

It's imperial navy having recently switched from coal to oil power, Great Britain did not want to anger the strategically important "Arab" world, possessing its own oil wealth, by agreeing to support a Kurdish nationalism which was viewed by Arabs with the same disdain as they display towards the nationalist movement of Israel's Jews (one half of whom descended from refugees from the "Arab"/Muslim world) or any other of the subjugated peoples--Berbers, Black African Sudanese, etc.--who dared to assert their own identities and demanded political rights.

Despite their own internal differences, Kurds from all over the region had largely put their hopes and dreams into the creation of that one independent Kurdish state, not unlike situations involving Greeks, Armenians, and Jews in their own respective earlier diasporas. The frustration arising from the abortion of that earlier Mesopotamian dream (a cause supported by such personalities as President Woodrow Wilson, Mark Sykes, and others) lead to decades of revolts and problems in Syria, Turkey, and Iran as well. In a post-imperial age when other dormant nations were reawakening, the Kurds were repeatedly told that they were unworthy of such desires... by so-called "friends" and foes alike. That brings us back to current times.

While repeated partitions have occurred and are still being demanded of the geographic area of "Palestine" (the first occurring when the Arab nation of Jordan was created in 1922 as a result of Colonial Secretary Churchill's separation of all the land east of the Jordan River from the 1920 borders), none have been allowed for a much larger Mesopotamia.. Only Arabs have had their nationalist desires sanctioned in a land in which millions of Kurds and others have lived long before the Arab conquests in the 7th century C.E. and the continuing forced Arabization ever since. In their frustration, the Kurds have subsequently been caught up in numerous regional and global rivalries, being used and abused by all...Syrian and Iraqi Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Soviets, Brits, Russians, Americans, etc.

Post-World War I Iraq was largely divided between two major factions: Arab nationalists, who saw Iraq simply as one part of the overall greater Arab patrimony, and Iraqi nationalists. The latter--some Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, a few Arabs, etc. (with few exceptions, Iraq's 200,000 Jews basically watched carefully from the sidelines)--deluded themselves into believing that Arabs would allow a true equality to emerge within the country. Yet earlier Iraqi history should have taught another lesson: the Arab Caliphate of the 'Umayyads based in Damascus had been replaced in the 8th century during the Abbasid Revolution. The latter established its imperial base farther east in Baghdad and was supported largely by non-Arab converts to Islam, the Mawali, who demanded an equality that Arabs back then had also refused to give. Short of another major Abbasid-like revolution, Iraq's Arabs (Shi'a or Sunni)--having once again regained their position of dominance--were not likely to give it up. Sure enough, subsequent massacres of non-Arab populations and the continued forced Arabization of their cultures and lands helped squash most of the modern "Iraqi" nationalist delusions. While, in theory, this would be a nice, American-styled democratic solution, centuries of reality regarding actual Arab practices and attitudes tell quite a different story.

In the 1970s, after promoting Kurdish military support for the Shah of Iran against Iraq, America pulled the rug out from under Mullah Mustafa Barzani when the Shah made his temporary peace. Tens of thousands of Kurds were subsequently slaughtered as a result. A repeat performance came in 1991, when President George Bush, Sr. called for the Kurds and others to revolt in order to topple Saddam from within. When they heeded his call, he then stood by and watched as Kurdish men, women, and children got gassed and slaughtered by the thousands--5,000 in Halabja alone--and did nothing, even though the might of the U.S. military was still within a stone's throw of the action. The pathetic excuse meekly offered was that America had been "tricked" by the Iraqis in agreements regarding terms of the ceasefire. This will forever be a stain on the honor of America, despite after-the-fact "no fly" zones subsequently set up by the Allies. Besides the thousands of Kurdish civilians who were immediately killed, tens of thousands of others have subsequently died due to the lingering effects of the poison, etc. Remember this the next time someone offers up a chuckle about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Adding insult to injury, at a time when much of the world is now demanding that the sole, miniscule, resurrected state of the Jews accept that a terrorist 23rd Arab state--and second Arab one in Palestine--be created in its own backyard, these same alleged voices of ethical enlightenment still insist that there will be no "Roadmap" for the creation of Kurdistan.

While other butchers do exist elsewhere, and America cannot simply assume the roles of the world's policeman, judge, and jury, there were very good reasons to bring about the end of Saddam's regime...whether we're ever able to locate his WMD or not. Just ask those Kurdish parents who recently bore witness to mass graves holding hundreds of their children being unearthed...a scene right out of the Holocaust.

And then again, just how do we define weapons of mass destruction? Thanks to Israel's surgical strike removing the immediate nuclear threat some two decades ago (for which it was universally condemned--George Bush, Sr. leading the pack in his pre-presidential days), Saddam's nuclear option suffered a severe setback. But ample evidence suggests that he didn't give up on this endeavor, and Iranians and probably others as well were also gassed by Saddam, so no one doubts his possession and willingness to use this type of WMD. It's not too difficult to hide poison gas--or even its delivery systems--in a country as large as Iraq, especially since weapons inspectors had been out of the country for a long time. Additionally, Saddam had plenty of time to learn since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that it wasn't a good idea to leave your weapons easily exposed. No one ever claimed that the Iraqis are stupid....even if some of Saddam's actions antagonizing America (and giving it little choice but to act) in recent decades might suggest otherwise.

So what's all the current fuss about WMD really all about? Could it be just domestic politics being played out by opponents of Tony Blair and George W. (I voted for the "other guy" the first time around) and/or another example of the hypocrisy and double standards of the rest of the world which put Israel under a high power lens in judging its struggle to survive while ignoring the literally millions of non-Arab people who have been massacred, seen their cultures and languages "outlawed," etc. for simply daring to assert their own identities and resisting forced Arabization? Is it that the murder of hundreds of thousands of Kurds over the decades simply doesn't matter? And if it really did, would it matter if we could or could not locate the hidden WMD we already know that Saddam had and used against this people?

The real concern and debate should not be about locating Saddam's WMD, but providing the long term justice the victims of his WMD deserve. What will happen once America packs up and leaves the country and the tax payers, Turks, etc. get tired of the "no fly" zones? Unless we work out an arrangement for our own long term presence (i.e. bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, etc.), the tanks and planes Iraq's Arabs mostly kept leashed in confronting America will very likely once again wreak vengeance against America's strangely loyal Kurdish friends.

Yet, despite all of this, America insists that a modified federal version of a failed "Iraqi" nationalism will be all that Kurds will be offered in post-Saddam Iraq, as if Saddam alone was the problem and created those subjugating attitudes towards non-Arabs himself. It's more than doubtful that a post-Saddam Iraq will view "political equality" any differently than when Saddam was forcibly removing Kurds from their oil-rich lands around Mosul and Kirkuk and replacing those he didn't kill with Arabs.

The American occupation, despite the good that it has brought to the land, will increasingly be resented, and those who aligned themselves with America--the Kurds in particular--will once again be sought out for revenge. Yet, without a prolonged, guided, and powerful occupation, there is no chance whatsoever for an inclusive "Iraqi" nationalism to emerge. With America's presence, this might have one chance in a hundred to succeed in the long term. There are simply too many powerful forces working against it.

While America has been playing a delicate balancing act trying to soothe Turkey's fears regarding its own large Kurdish population and not angering the Arab oil sheikhs and autocrats with the prospect of the loss of what they see as "purely Arab land" to the Kurds, it must begin to reassess this policy. Certainly if Arabs, most of whom still deny Israel's right to exist, are deemed deserving of their 23rd state, some thirty million stateless Kurds living in varying degrees of danger and subjugation are, at long last, deserving of one. This should be the issue being debated and under scrutiny right now...not Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

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