The United States and the Kurds a Cold War Story

LittThel eUnited States and the Kurds The United States and the Kurds A Cold War Story ✣ Douglas Little Beneath the snowcapped Zagros Mountains that stretch from southeastern Turkey through northern Iraq to western Iran live 25 million Kurds, the largest ethnolinguistic group in the world without a state of their own. Speaking a language closer to Farsi than Arabic or Turkish and practic- ing Sunni Islam despite the presence of powerful Shiite communities nearby, the Kurds over the centuries forged a distinctive national identity shaped by an abiding mistrust of Turks, Arabs, and other outsiders who opposed Kurdish independence. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of the First World War, the Kurds embarked on a relentless quest to establish a free, united, and independent Kurdistan, sometimes bargaining with neigh- boring peoples, other times pleading with the great powers, but never ºinch- ing from armed struggle to secure national liberation. When the Second World War ended, most Americans had never heard of the Kurds, and the few who had were bafºed by the always complex and occasionally absurd tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries that plagued the no-man’s-land wedged between the Anatolian Peninsula and the headwaters of the Tigris River.1 By the late 1940s, however, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an escalating Cold War in which an early hot zone stretched from the Turkish straits through Iraq and Iran to the Persian Gulf. As the ideologi- cal conºict heated up, Washington discovered that Kurdish nationalism could be useful in limiting Moscow’s inºuence in the Middle East. In a classic Cold War story that would be repeated from the central highlands of Vietnam to the rugged savannas of Angola, U.S. policymakers exploited ancient ethnic 1. For a concise overview of Kurdish history through the First World War, see David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd ed. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 38–112; and John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 50–87. For an excellent account of recent Kurdish affairs, see Quil Law- rence, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (New York: Walker and Company, 2008). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 63–98 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00048 by guest on 25 September 2021 Little and tribal fault lines inside Kurdistan to achieve short-term geopolitical ad- vantage. U.S. ofªcials displayed neither diplomatic commitment nor senti- mental attachment to the Kurds, whom they viewed as little more than spoil- ers in a 40-year struggle to keep the Soviet Union and its Arab clients like Iraq off balance. Although the Kurds began to make cameo appearances in con- temporary news accounts in the 1970s, recently declassiªed documents now make it possible to trace more fully the ambivalent U.S. relationship with Kurdish nationalism during the Cold War.2 This article examines three key episodes: ªrst, the secret backing given to the Kurds by the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Ken- nedy in an effort to weaken the Iraqi military regime of Abdel Karim Qassim, who had tilted toward Moscow after seizing power in Baghdad in July 1958; second, the cynical covert action launched by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Iraqi Kurdistan, with help from Iran and Israel, after Saddam Hussein signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in April 1972; and third, Washington’s half-hearted attempts in the early 1990s to use Kurdish guerril- las to foment regime change in Iraq after the ªrst Gulf War. In each case, the U.S. government exploited long-standing anti-Arab resentments among the Kurds, secretly supplied U.S. guns or dollars or sometimes both, and helped ignite an insurrection in Kurdistan, only to pull the plug unceremoniously when events threatened to spiral out of control. The Kurds could reasonably claim to have been betrayed three times over, yet America’s ªckleness was not the only obstacle to Kurdish self-determination. Fierce tribal rivalries among the Kurds themselves made them easy prey to outside manipulation, and Arab strongmen like Saddam Hussein regarded an independent Kurdistan as a threat to their own nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the ambivalent U.S. response to Kurdish nationalism during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath helps explain why the Kurds have been so reluctant to embrace U.S. plans for a uniªed multiethnic Iraq in the post-Saddam era early in the new millennium. 2. For early coverage of secret U.S. relations with the Kurds, see George Lardner, Jr., “Nixon, Shah Tied to Arms for Kurds through CIA,” The Washington Post, 2 November 1975, pp. A1, A10; Joseph Fitchett, “Kurds Say CIA Betrayed Them,” The Washington Post, 19 November 1975, p. A11; William Saªre, “Mr. Ford’s Secret Sellout,” The New York Times, 5 February 1976, p. A15; William Saªre, “Son of ‘Secret Sellout,’” The New York Times, 12 February 1976, p. A17; and Taylor Branch, “The Trial of the CIA,” The New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1976. The ªrst overviews of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert action during the Cold War offered only brief accounts of U.S. contacts with Kurdish nationalists. See John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 607–608; and John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through Iranscam (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 313–315, 323. In an updated version of his earlier study, Prados expanded his discussion of Kurdish affairs to include material on the 1990s. See John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006), pp. 391–395, 604. By contrast, a recent prize-winning but con- 64 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00048 by guest on 25 September 2021 The United States and the Kurds Cold War Comes to Kurdistan Nearly 30 years before the Cold War began, Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into a hot war “to make the world safe for democracy.” When the Kurds learned that the twelfth of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points pro- posed that “other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured . an absolutely unmolested opportunity to autonomous develop- ment,” they expected him to endorse an independent Kurdistan.3 Self- determination proved an elusive goal, however, largely because of great-power politicking at Versailles, where imperial ambitions trumped Kurdish nationalism. Branded in the covenant of the new League of Nations as a people “not able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” the Kurds inhabiting the old Ottoman vilayet of Mosul became part of the new multiethnic kingdom of Iraq, a British mandate ruled by King Faisal, an Arabian-born Hashemite prince.4 Convinced that there was no hope for Kurdish autonomy inside an Iraq dominated by Sunni and Shia Arabs, Sheik Mahmoud Barzinji, the self-styled “King of Kurdistan,” led a se- ries of rebellions in the 1920s that culminated in an all-out guerrilla war in late 1930. Outgunned by the Iraqi army and bombed by the Royal Air Force, Barzinji and his followers ºed eighteen months later into exile, where the King of Kurdistan spent his ªnal years watching Britain’s showdown with Nazi Germany from the sidelines. By the time the war ended in 1945, a Kurdish nation-state seemed about as likely to emerge as the mythical kingdom of Shangri-La.5 Prospects for self-determination grew dimmer during the ªrst stages of the Cold War when the Kurds became entangled in a U.S.-Soviet confronta- tion over Iran. In early 1946 the administration of Harry S. Truman was troversial history of the CIA does not mention covert action in Kurdistan at all. See Tim Weiner, Leg- acy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Random House, 2007). 3. Woodrow Wilson, “Final Draft of the Fourteen Points Address,” 7 January 1918, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 62 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. 45, p. 528. For a superb analysis of the impact of Wilson’s Fourteen Points on Third World nationalism in the immediate wake of the First World War, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self- Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2007). 4. “Draft Covenant of the League of Nations,” 3 February 1919, in Link, ed., Papers of Woodrow Wil- son, Vol. 54, p. 455. On the creation of an Iraqi nation-state that included parts of Kurdistan, see McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 115–150; and Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Iraq 1900– 1950: A Political, Social, and Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 99– 105. 5. On Barzinji and the Kurdish uprisings against the British, see McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 158–171; Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, pp. 87–97; and Jonathan Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 120–125. 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00048 by guest on 25 September 2021 Little alarmed when Iosif Stalin tried to prolong the USSR’s wartime occupation of Azerbaijan in northern Iran, which was scheduled to end six months after the victory over Japan.

Load more