I don’t have time for a thorough critique of this cartoonish piece of writing by Justin Raimondo, the Buchananite conservative who runs the antiwar.com website. But I thought I’d highlight the more absurd passages:
Terrorism is okay with the U.S. – as long as it’s carried out by our friends and allies, namely the Kurds.
Raimondo is referring to the anti-Turkish PKK and its Iranian affiliate Pejak, groups now taking refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. [Note: In the above quote, further revealing his ignorance, he links to an article about the MEK, an Iranian exile group which has done battle against the Kurds.]
By deliberately eliding the distinction between the PKK and the Iraqi Kurdish authorities, Raimondo pushes the tendentious view that the latter actively supports the former — and therefore, so does the U.S. This is, shall we say, creative. The PKK is listed by the State Dept. as a terrorist organization. The U.S. has provided Turkey with gazillions in military aid in its campaign against Kurdish separatism. Here is a report on recent remarks about the PKK by a U.S. official — note the subhead, “U.S. cooperation with Turkey to counter PKK ‘will intensify.'”
But Raimondo can’t be bothered to consider the differing agendas of different Kurdish groups in different countries. Better to paint with a broad conspiracist brush and make racist generalizations about the entire Kurdish people:
Governed by thugs who are on the take from their foreign sponsors, the Kurds are a source of endless trouble for the region.
Gee, maybe someone should try and kill them all. Oh, wait…
In our era of political correctness, where being an Oppressed Minority confers virtual sainthood on whomever is lucky enough to qualify, the Kurds are widely considered lovable and certainly the most “like us” of any comparable sub-group in Iraq.
This is a bunch of propagandistic malarkey. Like the Kosovars, another victim group beloved by the War Party, the Kurds are clannish, militaristic, and have no liberal tradition or real experience with democratic pluralism.
What Raimondo seems unable to grasp is that the Kurds are human; they run the political gamut. There are Kurdish Islamists, Kurdish secular authoritarians, Kurdish liberals and pluralists and socialists, you name it. As I have reported here, here and here, it is indeed a mistake to idealize Iraqi Kurdistan. No government is beyond reproach, and a romanticized view of the Iraqi Kurds is not helpful in understanding their society, their geopolitical realities and so forth. But Raimondo’s vulgar smears flow from the logic that any U.S. ally is necessarily demonic. His piece is hogwash and it mustn’t go unchallenged.
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