The "K" Word

On 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Bob Woodward revealed that Henry Kissinger is back, serving as an advisor to both Cheney and Bush. Henry's fingerprints are still to be found almost everywhere in the Middle East.

The return of Kissinger means a lot of things to a lot of people, especially the Kurds of northern Iraq. For these Kurds, Kissinger is a name associated with treachery and betrayal.

America has exploited these Kurds pretty shamelessly and more than once. Here's an account from Peter Galbraith's "The End of Iraq":

"'Covert action should not be associated with missionary work.' With these words, Henry Kissinger shrugged off the consequences of his abrupt termination of a covert operation to assist Iraq's Kurds. On March 11, 1970, Kurdish leadere Mullah Mustafa Barzani and Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein reached a framework agreement for a semiautonomous Kurdistan (sound familiar?). 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... ...resume the Kurdish revolt. Barzani, however, did not trust the Shah, a face of which the Shah was well aware.

"So, the Shah enlisted the Americans. On May 30, 1972, President Richard Nixon and Kissinger made a twnety-two-hour visit to Tehran. In addition to giving the Shah almost unlimited access to 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 in Iran was not informed. Believing the Amercans 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 Shatt al-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, endng the CIA's program for the Kurds. Barzani was now a refugee along with 30,000 peshmerga (rebels) 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."

Massoud Barzani is now the President of what is loosely called the Kurdistan Regional Government which may well become the foundation for a completely sovereign, breakaway Kuridstan state. Massoud Barzani rejected Bremer's pressures to fall into line in the "new Iraq."

If conflict comes between Iraq and a secessionist Kurdistan, the Kurdish constitution will probably be the spark of revolution. The Kurds want a great deal of control over their rich oilfields and they want the city of Kirkuk. As a sop to the "new Iraq" they introduced a Kurdish constitution that cedes control over the existing oil wells to Baghdad for the benefit of all Iraqis; Sunni, Shia and Kurds alike; but retains exclusive control, ownership and benefit of all new oil discoveries to and for the benefit of Kurdistan and the Kurdish people.

Less than two weeks ago the Kurds and Baghdad appeared to be nearing a showdown. The Kurdistan government has been negotiating oil agreements for new fields that it claims as its own, exclusively. Iraq's oil minister. Hussein Shahristani, fired back, announcing that his ministry was not bound by these contracts.

You may not have heard about it elsewhere but this heralds the moment of truth for the notion of a unified Iraq. Kurdistan's Prime Minister, Nechirvan Barzani, (yeah, that's right, yet another Barzani) fired back aggressively with a statement warning Baghdad to back off:

"...I resent Dr. Shahristani's efforts to sabotage foreign investment in Kurdistan's oil sector. The KRG is working to develop petroleum in Kurdistan, an area that previous Iraqi regimes had declared off limits as means of punishing our people...

"The people of Kurdistan chose to be in voluntary union with Iraq on the basis of the constitution. If Baghdad ministers refuse to abide by that constitution, the people of Kurdistan reserve the right to reconsider our choice."

It's too early to predict whether these tensions will erupt into an independence movement but, plainly, the gloves are coming off. In other circumstances America might be expected to play honest broker to smooth this over and restore peace. But Washington has long since squandered its political capital with the Kurdish leadership and the resurfacing of Henry Kissinger as Bush's Machiavelli isn't going to help that one bit.