Christopher Hitchens interviewed by Huge Hewitt on the Kurds (2007)

CH: (The Kurds) They’re not Arabs. They don’t speak Arabic. They’re not Turks, they’re not Persians. They’re a unique national group. They’re the largest national group, actually, in the world who don’t have a state of their own. There are about 24 million of them. They live in the rather unpromising neighborhood where Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq meet. It’s not the place you would want to pitch your tent, perhaps, if you wanted a state of their own, but that’s where they’ve lived for thousands of years. So what’s happening is a new nation is being born. They’re not going to proclaim independence, but it looks and feels much more like an autonomous country, if not yet a state, when you’re there...they’ve decided to send their own people south to make it work. The troops that are now being sent to Baghdad, the Iraqi Army troops, are, as you know, mainly Kurdish battalions. These people helped to clear Fallujah of the al Qaeda, they captured Zarqawi’s messenger, the man who was taking the message to bin Laden, making the first very evil proposal that we blew the cover on the story, you know, Zarqawi’s strategy was to provoke a sectarian civil war, which unfortunately has worked. They’re very tough on the al Qaeda people.

HH: Do you worry, Christopher Hitchens, that if in fact the Iraq project crumbles, that the Turks will not allow a Kurdistan to exist across their border?
CH: Well, that’s rather up to the United States. We haven’t actually said, I think we should, and I think Congress should add a form of words that says we recognize a Kurdish autonomy as a positive gain, and we won’t compromise on it.

https://www.hughhewitt.com/vanity-fairs-christopher-hitchens-on-kurdistan-baghdad-and-comparisons-to-vietnam/

Meanwhile Hugh Hewitt is throwing the Kurds under the bus today on Twitter. The Kurds were just a prop.