Disaster seemingly will
attend the power transition in Iraq. Official Washington
has already reverted to its ancient traditions, in
particular the sacrificial rite of assigning blame.
Within the George W Bush camp, one hears that it was
Secretary of State Colin Powell's fault for appointing L
Paul Bremer as civil administrator in Iraq, or Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld's fault for slighting the
professional military, or National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice's fault for not coordinating between
the hostile camps on either side of the Potomac.
It is a queer sort of disaster, to be sure.
World stock markets are rising, the price of oil is
falling, and the exchange rate of the dollar barely
flutters in the crosswinds. Is it possible that markets
have judged matters better than the pundits? Perhaps it
is no disaster at all, except for the ideologues who
argued that America's political model could be exported
and assembled in Iraq like so much prefabricated
housing. A generation ago, American satirist Walter
Kelly amended Commodore Perry's 1813 dispatch "We have
met the enemy and he is ours" to read, "We have met the
enemy and he is us."
By the same token, one
might say to the peoples of Mesopotamia: "You have met
the enemy, and he is you." Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurd have
one thing in common: they all eschew the American
"melting pot" model of democracy. They are determined to
pursue their own tragic destinies instead.
Last
year, when American forces confounded the skeptics and
swept northward to Baghdad, I warned that it was no
triumph (George W Bush,
tragic character," Nov 25, 2003). Neither
does the present impasse make a disaster. Despite
American policy, and despite America's enemies, the
tragedy will unfold at its own pace. Iraq was not to be
saved in the first place (Will Iraq survive
the Iraqi resistance? Dec 23, 2003). America
once produced leaders who recognized tragedy when it
confronted them; Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural
address portrayed the terrible Civil War of 1861-1865 as
redress for the sin of slavery. Lincoln did not expect a
favorable reception for his view, and he was right.
Although the words of the inaugural are carved on the
wall of Lincoln's memorial, they are as obscure to the
Washingtonians of today as hieroglyphs to sightseers in
Egypt.
America's 42nd president cannot grasp
that Americans comprise a tiny minority who fled the
tragedy of the nations. Those who remained in the old
country chose a tragic destiny. "Men are not flattered
by being shown that there has been a difference of
purpose between the Almighty and them," Lincoln wrote
shortly after his second inaugural. In full denial, the
Bush cabinet remains captive to the fixed idea of Middle
Eastern democracy. Bush's critics spin silly conspiracy
theories about America's "real" intentions (grabbing
oilfields, turning Israel into a regional superpower,
and so forth).
The kingpin of conspiracy
theorists, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, sees an
Israeli conspiracy behind the emergence of an
independent Kurdistan. In his dispatch of June 28, Hersh
quoted a Turkish official: "From Mexico to Russia,
everybody will claim that the United States had a secret
agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq." Why
should Washington care what Mexico thinks? And why
should Russia object to making the Turks miserable,
especially if it tightens the vice around the rebel
Chechnyans?
One should learn more about the
Kurds before portraying them as puppets in anyone's
plot. If Aeschylus had scripted the tragedy of peoples
rather than heroes, the Kurds would have been at the top
of his list. In 1915, the "Young Turk" Ottoman
government enlisted Kurds to exterminate a million and a
half Armenians during 1915-1923. More Armenians died at
Kurdish than Turkish hands. As their reward, the Turkish
government allowed Kurds to resettle the portion of
Eastern Anatolia then known as Western Armenia, that is,
after killing or driving out the entire Armenian
population. That is why Kurds now comprise a majority of
the inhabitants of the former western Armenia, and pose
a continuing strategic threat to Turkey. I do not mean
to fault the Kurds; the neutral Swiss spent half a
millennium earning their keep as Europe's mercenaries.
Small peoples do not survive by being squeamish.
One is tempted to think, "If the Kurds killed
Armenians for land in Eastern Anatolia, a
fortiori they will kill Arabs for oil in Mosul." But
the Kurds are fighting for something much greater,
namely their slim chance of escaping the great
extinction of the peoples. "Unlike animals, human beings
require more than progeny: they require progeny who
remember them," I wrote on August 31, 2001, just before
the suicide attacks on New York and Washington (Internet stocks and
the failure of youth culture.) "Frequently,
ethnic groups will die rather than abandon their way of
life. Native Americans often chose to fight to the point
of their own extinction rather than accept assimilation,
because assimilation implied abandoning both their past
and their future. Historic tragedy occurs on the grand
scale when economic or strategic circumstances undercut
the material conditions of life of a people, which
nonetheless cannot accept assimilation into another
culture. That is when entire peoples fight to the
death."
Tara Welat cited my essay last April 7 in a report on
the Kurdish website www.kurdmedia.com: "There are
competing claims concerning the will of oppressed
nations to survive. One view holds that by reason of
their oppression, peoples who are under constant
pressure to assimilate eventually lose their will to
survive as a distinct people. They may live on a
physical existence, but eventually, they can no longer
defend what makes them unique. For evidence, contenders
of such a view cite the fact that in the last century
2,000 distinct ethnic groups have disappeared. The other
view maintains that people not only seek progeny but
progeny who remember them and to this end, humans will
fight to the bitter end to defend their way of life and
to resist assimilation."
Welat adds, "... While
as a whole, the Kurdish people have survived, for some
Kurds, the temptation of assimilation has been all too
powerful ... There are also other ideologies - aside
from the nationalist ideologies imposed on the Kurds by
their colonizers - namely Islam and socialism, which the
Kurds have been willing to accept, mostly at the expense
of their Kurdish identity ... I believe that there is
among the Kurds, enough people who love freedom for
itself and who will struggle for it obstinately until
the Kurds enjoy self-rule."
Welat makes clear
why American policy must fail. The Kurds understand from
the inside, as it were, precisely what America is about,
and will have none of it: "As more and more countries
become 'melting pots', where cultures and identities are
merged into a 'mosaic', attempts to assimilate the Kurds
will increasingly come under the guise of democracy.
Just as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 upon his
visit to America, we can confidently claim that 'a great
democratic revolution is taking place among us'. This
revolution has swept through America and the West and it
is now bursting through the gates of the Middle East."
Welat adds, "The argument of democracy tailored
by the ruling regimes to address the Kurds goes
something like this: Why do you ask for special rights
or autonomy (or heaven forbid, independence) when we can
live as equals and brothers, with full freedoms, under
one (centralized) democratic state ... We must question
a conception of democracy that is limited to creating a
centralized state and which will ultimately push for the
homogeneity of its citizens."
America will not
succeed in assimilating the Kurds; a people who consider
Islam yet another foreign ideology imposed on them will
not worship de Tocqueville. As its policy crumbles in
the region, the Bush administration will ally with such
forces as the Kurds - and the tragedy will proceed to
its next act.
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