Israeli
involvement with the Kurds is not a new phenomenon. In
its search for non-Arab allies in the region, Israel has
supported Kurdish militancy in Iraq since the 1960s. In
1980, Israeli premier Menachem Begin publicly
acknowledged that besides humanitarian aid, Israel had
secretly provided military aid to Kurds in the form of
weapons and advisers. Later on, that relationship was
kept low profile due to Washington's alliances in the
region; first with Iran during the Shah's monarchy, and
then with Saddam Hussein's Iraq when he fought Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran. Israel's partnership with
Turkey that was founded mainly to counter threats from
Iran, Syria and Iraq, was also a factor.
Israel
and the Kurds also share a common bond through the
Kurdish Jews in Israel, who number close to 50,000.
Prominent among them is Itzhak Mordechai, an Iraqi Kurd
who was defense minister during Benjamin Netanyahu's
last term as prime minister.
Israeli-Kurd
relationships soured a bit in February of 1999, when the
Kurds accused the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad of
providing information that led to the arrest of Turkish
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in
Kenya. Kurdish protestors attacked the Israeli embassy
in Berlin, resulting in the shooting deaths of three
protestors by Israeli security forces. In an
unprecedented public denial, the then Mossad chief
Efraim Halevy dissociated Israel from Ocalan's capture.
Despite such bumps and its alliance with Turkey, Israel
succeeded in keeping its relationship with the Iraqi
Kurds intact, by keeping a safe distance from the PKK,
which is primarily a Turkish Kurd entity, and not
becoming a party to the bloody infighting between the
various Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish groups.
However,
Israel does have a favorite - the Barzani
family-dominated Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), whose
current head, Massoud Barzani, inherited the mantle from
his father, the legendary Mullah Mustafa Barzani. Israeli
television has in the past broadcast photographs from
the 1960s showing father Barzani embracing the then Israeli
defense minister Moshe Dayan. In alliance with its
erstwhile rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)
party, the KDP in post-Saddam Iraq commands the largest
and most formidable of the Iraqi militias, the Peshmerga,
with estimates of anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000
battle-hardened fighters. In contrast, the next in line
of militias is the Iranian-sponsored Shi'ite political
party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
(SCIRI), with no more than 15,000 fighters.
So
why in the post-Saddam Iraq has Israel chosen to
dramatically escalate the nature of its involvement with
Kurdish militants, and in so doing, risk its strategic
alliance with Turkey, while confirming its activities on
record through individuals like Patrick Clawson (one of
the named sources in Seymour Hersh's expose in the New
Yorker), known to have close ties with the Israeli
government?
According to Hersh's report,
"hundreds" of undercover Israeli Defense Force
intelligence officers and Mossad agents have
reestablished cooperation with Kurdish militiamen in
northern Iraq, with the aim of launching cells that
might yield new intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.
Israeli operatives are also said to be providing an
ancillary role to the Kurds and are aiding Kurdish
elements in northern Syria. Kurdish riots and the seeds
of a minor rebellion in northern Syria have recently
rocked Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.
A questionable pretext Quoting
Clawson, the Hersh article presents a pair of weak
justifications for Israeli intervention in Iraq. The
first one is the fear of Iranian nuclear ambitions. This
information is hardly new. The latest revelations about
the Iranian nuclear program were in fact provided by an
Iranian dissident group. Furthermore, Iran is under
constant US satellite surveillance and sustained
political pressure by the US, the United Nations'
International Atomic Energy Agency and European powers
to roll back its nuclear efforts. It is therefore
doubtful as to what quality or value the Israelis can
add to such a formidable lineup.
The
second motivation that the article talks about is the
urgent need for Israel to move on Iraq as a national
security imperative to counter the growing Iranian influence.
A quick analysis, however, reveals such urgency to
be exaggerated, and any Israeli surprise at the
growing Iranian footprint in Iraq to be unconvincing. One of
the most predictable outcomes of the Iraq conflict was
the growth in Iranian influence in that country. Besides
a 1,500 kilometer border, the two
neighboring Shi'ite-majority nations share deep historical
and religious bonds making it almost impossible for the
US to prevent the ascent of Iranian-backed groups
without inviting a full-scale Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq.
Realizing this, American officials moved quickly during
pre-war days to co-opt Iran-backed groups such as the
SCIRI, with tacit Iranian approval.
Would it not
be naive to expect that Washington would create a
situation hospitable for growth in clout of its Iranian
adversary in a region key to American interests, and
thereby limit its own options?
Unclean
break To begin to answer the preceding questions,
we need to take a look at a now famous policy paper: "A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm".
This neo-conservative-authored paper presented in 1996
to the then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
offered a bold strategy to provide "the nation [Israel]
the room to engage every possible energy in rebuilding
Zionism", and strengthen and increase its influence in
the Middle East. "Our claim to the land - to which we
have clung for hope for 2000 years - is legitimate and
noble," the authors proclaimed. "Israel will not only
contain its foes; it will transcend them" through means
including "reestablishing the principle of preemption,
rather than retaliation alone".
The paper emphasized that Israel needed to
enhance its strategic position independent of the US, in order to
deny the US any leverage it may want to exercise
on Israel to maintain stability in the region
under the "peace process". The paper betrays a high
degree of discomfort regarding US influence over Israel and
suggests ways to actively neutralize it. What is most
surprising are the names of its authors that comprise past
and present US civilian policy-makers, including ex-chairman
of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, present Under
Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Vice President
Dick Cheney's adviser for Middle East Affairs, David
Wurmser. How individuals with such openly stated
positions preferring Israeli interests over those of the
US became influential members of the US government is
quite mystifying.
The paper bemoans the status
quo where Israel is asked to follow European and
American prescriptions for peace and stability, and
proposes that a key ingredient of the "US-Israeli
partnership" must be "mutuality" and that Israel must
position itself to be the protector of the "West's
security" in the Middle East rather than being a junior
partner. Such strategic co-dependence, specifically
between Israel and the US, and to a general degree
between Israel and Western powers, would imply
dismissing the strategic status quo. Thus, to achieve a
"clean break", the security map of the Middle East would
have to be significantly re-built to assign Israel an
apex role, rather than being just a party to territorial
disputes with its neighbors and being treated as another
ally, albeit a strong one, along with Washington's
oil-allies in the region.
The removal of Saddam
Hussein, enunciated to be a key goal in "Clean Break",
was to be the first phase of this new strategy of
independence through co-dependence. As has been
discussed earlier (see Asia Times Online, All going according to plan? ,
May 12), under the pretext of regime change, the US
quite intentionally annihilated the Iraqi state and its
military forces, the largest in the Arab world. In his
article titled "Beyond Fallujah: A Year With the Iraqi
Resistance" in the June issue of Harper's Magazine,
Patrick Graham, a freelance journalist, quotes a
resistance fighter's account of looting the Iraqi army's
weapons caches. "They [American soldiers] almost gave us
the weapons. They watched us taking RPGs
[rocket-propelled grenades] and other weapons," he
continued, "They thought we were destroying the Iraqi
army."
An opening is created The
strategic space created from the ruins of the Iraqi
state and its pillars offers immense opportunities by
employing persecuted minorities as proxies that can
provide a strong foothold in a pivotal oil-rich nation
hundreds of miles away from Israel. Furthermore, the
Kurdish beachhead in Iraq would serve to project
influence in key adversaries such as Iran and Syria.
In "A Clean Break", the authors called for
signaling to the Syrians that their "territory is not
immune" to attacks "by Israeli proxy forces". Kurdish
unrest in Syria has been quite rare. In early March
of this year, northeastern Syria broke out in violent
protests that eventually reached the capital Damascus.
The Syrians were caught completely off guard.
The riots lasted for days and left scores of people dead
before being brought under control.
In a war
viewed by the neo-conservatives as an unavoidable course
of action for protecting American interests, the growth
in Iranian influence was an inevitable consequence. But
Iranian reach would be dangerous only if it spread
beyond southern Iraq and a unified Iraq emerged. With
uncertainty surrounding the future of high levels of US
troops in Iraq, the Israeli-backed Peshmerga is the ideal
proxy as a powerful rival to the Iranian-inspired Shi'ite
ascendancy in Iraq. With their superior numbers, excellent
training and materiel, thanks to the US and
Israel, the Peshmerga can set the terms for the Iraqi
federation or for its disintegration. Furthermore, the
Kurds are completely dependent on extra-regional players
due to their isolation in the area. The current
situation in Iraq points to a nominal sovereign existing
in the shadow of armed militias competing for power,
with the most powerful of the militias aligned with the
occupying forces. The Peshmerga number more than the
proposed Iraqi Security Forces (an entity that closely
resembles a highly equipped police force rather than a
proper military), and are being trained by elite and
highly secret Israeli commandos, the Mistaravim
according to Hersh's Central Intelligence Agency
sources.
To see these developments as just
attempts in securing cheap oil (Israel relies on
expensive Western imports due to the Arab boycott),
would be to underestimate the resultant benefits to
Israel from the situation. Without engaging its military
directly, the Israelis have made themselves a major
power-broker in the region and a party to internal
stability of important regional states. Unable to
confront the only regional nuclear power and the
military of its principal sponsor providing strategic
cover in Iraq, Israel's foes in the vicinity must
acknowledge that they need to deal with Israel in new
ways and be ready to offer concessions if need be.
A significant threat, albeit a remote one,
emanates from a possible strategic accommodation between
Iran and Saudi Arabia regarding Iraq and the future of
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But
such a scenario seems less and less likely. The present
leadership of Saudi Arabia is battling with a series of
high-impact acts of violence in areas key to oil
production. Furthermore, a carefully crafted ambiguity
surrounds Saudi Arabia's role in America's wider
regional ambitions, which when combined with recent
signaling from the US and the United Kingdom, is causing
great alarm in Riyadh.
Conclusion The
spate of high profile bombings in Iraq, including the
one that killed the UN representative for Iraq and
another that killed Ayatollah Baqir Hakim, head of the
Iran-backed SCIRI militia, must now be viewed in the
light of this new information.
A UN presence in
Iraq would have led to an early rehabilitation of a
federal Iraqi state, something that would have led to
the disarming of the Kurdish militias, thereby denying a
major source of influence to Israel in the region. By
ramping up armed proxies devoted to a
crypto-secessionist struggle and leaking its support for
them, Israel has delivered a masterstroke of strategic
foresight. It clearly knows that the creation of a
Kurdish republic in Iraq, let alone a greater Kurdistan,
is not viable for several reasons.
Some of the
crucial factors include the religious and ethnic
diversity of Iraqi Kurds themselves (though mutually
intelligible, Iraqi Kurds speak two different languages
and are religiously quite mixed), lack of access to
natural resources, recent history of bloody strife
within the Kurdish parties, and their autonomy posing an
existential threat to the Turkish state.
Nevertheless, by its plausibly deniable support for
Kurdish militias, Israel has declared to the regional power
centers that it is an indispensable power broker in
the future stability of the greater Middle East. Israel
can manage its alliance with Turkey as the Turks are
mainly concerned with degrading the PKK and denying it a
safe haven in northern Iraq. Iran is gearing for a proxy
war with Israel in Iraq, but with the presence of US
forces has to work in a far stricter environment than it
had in southern Lebanon. Of all the three, Syria seems
to be in the worst position, with the least economic and
political clout and unable to turn up the heat in
Lebanon without Iran's help; an Iran that is engaged on
multiple fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, apart from its
nuclear woes. The road to Iraq's future therefore, and
by extension that of the "New Middle East", now has a
detour through Tel Aviv.
Sadi Baig is
a freelance political analyst.
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2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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