Betraying the Kurds again?
The U.S. plan to send 10,000 Turkish troops to Iraq has Kurdish leaders outraged -- and analysts of all stripes incredulous at its folly.

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By Michelle Goldberg

Oct. 14, 2003 | America has rarely lost an opportunity to betray the Iraqi Kurds, but this time was supposed to be different. Their suffering under Saddam Hussein served as one of the war's justifications, and in the war's aftermath they've been America's most grateful and enthusiastic allies in an otherwise restive region. After selling them out in the '70s, '80s and '90s, the United States owed the Kurds justice, and it was finally going to make things right.

It didn't take long, though, for other American interests to take priority. Thus despite protests from Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister -- indeed, despite the increasingly ardent objections of the Iraqi Governing Council and the Iraqi Kurdish leadership -- the United States plans to bring 10,000 troops from Turkey into Iraq.

The Turks are an implacable enemy of the Kurds. They have viciously repressed their own Kurdish population and oppose the Iraqi Kurds' ambitions for autonomy. The two sides are already threatening each other -- in the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, members of the Peshmerga, or Turkish militia, were quoted saying they'd attack the Turks. On Monday the Turks warned that if they were attacked, they'd fight back.

So besides alienating the Kurds, the Turkish deployment seems likely to bring new instability to northern Iraq, the country's most peaceful region. In the last few days, Kurdish leaders have been traveling to cities worldwide to make the case against Turkish troops. But with the American military stretched thin, an election year approaching and critics on both left and right clamoring to internationalize the occupation and bring U.S. troops home, the Kurds find themselves, as they so often do, an inconvenient people lacking leverage among the powerful.