This coming week, President Bush will announce his plan for a “surge” of some 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq — an absolutely futile, last-ditch attempt to secure order in the country. Prime Minister Maliki is expected to match the U.S. troop increase, but here’s a little-noted point:
[U.S. officials] said two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from northern Iraq, and they said some doubts remained about whether they would show up in Baghdad and were truly committed to quelling sectarian fighting.
Yet another poor, potentially disastrous decision: in the name of increased security, this could drag the peshmerga into the civil war. Iraqi Kurdistan does not have an infinite supply of peshmerga soldiers, who patrol the Kurdish border and all of Kurdistan’s roads, guarding against insurgent infiltration 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Their presence is required in the north. It seems to me that diluting the protection force could jeopardize the very existence of the de facto Kurdish state.
Comments are closed.