Kurdistan-Kosovo

In the post I wrote yesterday outlining my 9-point exit plan from Iraq, I drew an analogy between the distinctly unsettled and unsettling situation in Kosovo today, six years after its partial amputation from Serbia, and the prospects for a Kurdistan that might similarly end up as a redoubt for US and allied armies.
There are similarities and dissimilarities between the situations of the two territories. Both are, quite significantly, landlocked. Both contain impressive mountain fastnesses within which, historically, “minority” populations had sought refuge. Both still come formally under the sovereignty of the broader polity with which they have been connected for many decades; but in both, a form of formalized or less formalized autonomy has been practiced and enjoyed for some time now.
In Kosovo, the “final outcome” of the sovereignty question is judged by the UN to be still unresolved– but with resolution promised “soon”, once UN-prescribed conditions are met in the area.
In Iraqi Kurdistan the soveriegnty question is not really, at present, on the table as such– though the question of a more dilute form of devolved, semi-autonomous rule very much is. But sovereignty could be placed very centrally in question if the US decided to regroup/concentrate some of its forces in I.K. after a withdrawal from the rest of Iraq. Of course, the landlocked nature of I.K., and the fact that surrounding states could be expected not to be happy to see a US-Kurdish power emerge there, would most likely make maintaining a US troop presence there for any length of time very costly in both financial and political/diplomatic terms.

Before 1991, Kurdistan had a modest degree of self-rule allowed it under the terms of the 1975 Algiers Agreement (and also, I believe, prior to that.) That formal autonomy was then superceded by the US/UK-protected “interdiction zone” created in some parts of Kurdistan in the aftermath of the 1991 war. In those western-protected parts of Kurdistan a degree of de-facto self-governance and autonomy grew up over the 12 years that followed– to the extent that many kids in high schools there reportedly don’t even learn or understand any Arabic any more.
In any discussions– whether over a devolved degree of autonomy or full sovereign indep[endence– the issue of boundaries will be, regarding Iraqi Kurdistan, highly contested. This is a significant difference from the situation in Kosovo, where at least the main boundaries of the autonomous province were established and well-known prior to 1999.
In Kurdistan, the major boundary-related contests will be over Mosul and Kirkuk. These are contests not just over the governance of fairly large cities (and their surrounding provinces) but also over the oilfields and oil-processing facilities in those two areas.
It is in these realms– the presence of oil and the continuing contestation over the territory’s borders– that the situation in Kurdistan is considerably more serious, and less stabilisable, than that in Kosovo. In addition, western and pro-western influence is far, far stronger in the general area surrounding Kosovo than it is in the area around Kurdistan. If it has been hard and expensive for NATO and the UN to maintain a presence in Kosovo and project its power against potential challengers there– imagine how much harder it would be to do these things in and around Kurdistan.
That, in short, is why I describe any putative plan to regroup US forces in I.K. after a withdrawal from the rest of Iraq as a “can of worms” for the US. I also don’t believe that being rebranded as a longterm protectorate of the US in a situation of chronically unresolved soveriegnty status would be in the interests of Iraqi Kurds, either. Any who think so should look at the current situation in which the Kosovars live– one that is riven with political instability, gang activity, and deep problems of internal governance. All that, six years after being “saved” by NATO.
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Another couple of small notes on Kosovo:
… I previously visited the Kurdistan-Kosovo anlagy in this April 2005 JWN post, which contains some interesting information from the IWPR on the situation inside Kosovo.
… I see that in the July 14, 2005 edition of the New York Review of Books Tony Judt is writing in a thought-provoking way about the re-evaluations that liberal war-hawk David Rieff and others have been starting to make about the usefuleness of war in achieving their desired (and in themselves, quite admirable) goals.
Judt touches on, but to my mind does not satisfactorily resolve, an interesting question:

Those of us who oppsed America’s invasion of Iraq from the outset can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of “preventive” military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong– “the wrong war war at the wrong time” [as he himself had written back in October 2002]– why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right? That war, after all, lso lacked the imprimatur of UN Security Council approval. It too was an unauthorized and uninvited attack on a soveriegn state…

He doesn’t resolve this question well, I think, because he sweepingly fails to take into account the fact that there are many people– not just traditional pacifists but also many traditional realists like the folks who started Antiwar-com– who opposed both wars, and did so for well-grounded reasons.
I admire Judt’s reporting on the Balkans and generally admire his thoughtful commentary on international affairs. However, in that opening paragraph there I think he projects himself far too much as a blinkered liberal, who swims only in the universe of other liberals like himself who supported the Kosovo war but may or may not have opposed the Iraq war.
At least, in the David Rieff book that Judt cites, Rieff seems to be engaging in some very painful reevaluation of his earlier enthusiasm for what liberal hawks once upon a time used to call “humanitarian intervention”– using that term to denote, actually, the launching of a war, a human endeavor that is always as we can now so much more plainly see intrinsically anti-humanitarian.
Rieff seems, from Judt’s rendering of his book, to be placing a lot of blame for the mishaps of the past 6 years on the shoulders of an ineffective UN. Personally I would place it much more firmly on the shoulders of western leaders and uber-hawkish liberals in western elites who persisted far too long in the illusion that waging war could ever bring about desirable humanitarian ends.
That, I guess, is for another post, sometime soon.