Reply #27: Fear of Turkey, Instability, and Ethnic Cleansing [View All]

It's important to keep in mind that the area isn't uniformly Kurdish either. The city of Kirkuk is an ethnic tinderbox and is highly mixed. There are a million Kurds in Baghdad too. There are many Turkomans (ethnically Turk) in Northern Iraq as well.

The way things are going, the creation of a small independent Kurdish state might well happen. But it would accompany disaster if it were to happen. Very few countries have divided peacefully and partition is something that observers should be wary of. It's sometimes unavoidable (see the splitup of the Ottoman Empire), but it ALWAYS is accompanied by massive bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and often intractible conflicts between the successor states.

For examples, witness Yugoslavia, India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland. Now, some of those may have been unavoidable - it's very difficult to imagine the Israelis and Palestinians living in the same state. With Yugoslavia, observers differ. Some, like JK Galbraith insist that allies were misguided in trying to keep Yugoslavia together and that an orderly partition was the only possibility. Others argue that most Yugoslavians had no problems with the Yugoslav state and as late as '91 the principal demand of nationalist figures was more decentralization. The President of Yugoslavia as a whole when the country started to break up was actually a Croat (Milosevich was a Serb). As for India/Pakistan, most Indian observers and most Western observers feel that partition was a mistake - of course, most Pakistani historians would disagree with that. Northern Ireland? Obviously people differ on that as well, but many have pointed out that had independence been given to a united Ireland in the 1920s, there's absolutely no chance there would have been a conflict lasting this long.