A future Kurdish state is inevitable; the West should support it

Since at least 2011 it has been clear that the break-up of the modern state of Iraq into its constituent ethnic territories is a distinct possibility, one only strengthened by IS and their dramatic gains across the region. Although many in the Western world have been fretting about the break down of the artificially imposed borders of the contemporary Middle East, the historical reality is that Iraq has always been a fractious and divided country. Its multiple ethnicities historically hold a greater attachment to their tribes and their ethnicities than to their state, particularly those Sunnis and Kurds that have been the victims of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s pro-Shia sectarianism. Analysts such as General Jay Garner are right to argue that the state of Iraq no longer exists,yet Western governments need to go still further and support the establishment of a sovereign Kurdistan, something they should have done a century ago when the region’s borders were being drawn in London and Paris.

2014 was a year replete with acts of remembrance and the centenary of the First World War should remind observers of the effects of that conflict and how they are felt today across the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement – a secret series of treaties between Britain and France carving up the Ottoman Middle East between them according to imperial interests – divided not just Iraq but the entire region according to the interests of European powers and secular, personally ambitious Arab elites. These European bureaucracies – which included among their number one Winston Churchill – took little notice of the complex national, tribal and religious divisions that define Middle Eastern politics and were exposed as imperial anachronisms as soon as 1918 by Woodrow Wilson and his famous 14 points speech. In his declaration Wilson emphasised the character of the new units of international relations; not ethnically heterogeneous empires such as those run from London, Paris and Istanbul, but homogeneous nation-states made up of national communities with a shared linguistic, religious and cultural base from which a coherent nation-state could be formed.

Yet the Republic of Iraq boasts no such cohesion. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein a Shia majority – led until relatively recently by the unashamedly sectarian Nouri Al-Maliki – has dominated Iraqi politics leaving a deep sense of political disenfranchisement amongst Sunnis and Iraqi Kurds looking to carve out their own autonomous state in the North. This ambition of statehood has historically been sidelined by the West as a Kurdish state would demand a large chunk of South-Eastern Turkey, a secular, Western ally. Yet the Islamisation of the Turkish state under President-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan has led to a cooling of Western-Turkish relations and a willingness upon the part of Western capitals to risk the previously steadfast alliance in favour of supporting the Kurdish nation and its status as a bulwark against Islamic State. American and European governments have decided that the threat of Islamic State, or IS, is so strong that military support for Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga, is necessary – despite the possibility of this Kurdish army turning its weapons upon the Syrian, Iraqi and even Turkish central governments for the establishment of a sovereign Kurdistan.

http://www.thelondoneconomic.com/2015/01/27/a-future-kurdish-state-is-inevitable-the-west-should-support-it/