A Cold War Story
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Douglas Little
Beneath the snowcapped Zagros Mountains that stretch from southeastern Turkey through northern Iraq to western Iran live 25 million Kurds, the largest ethno linguistic group in the world without a state of theirown. Speaking a language closer to Farsi than Arabic or Turkish and practicing Sunni Islam despite the presence of powerful Shiite communities nearby,the Kurds over the centuries forged a distinctive national identity shaped by an abiding mistrust of Turks, Arabs, and other outsiders who opposed Kurdish independence. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of the First World War, the Kurds embarked on a relentless quest to establish a free, united, and independent Kurdistan, sometimes bargaining with neigh-boring peoples, other times pleading with the great powers, but never inching from armed struggle to secure national liberation. When the Second World War ended, most Americans had never heard of the Kurds, and the few who had were bafºed by the always complex and occasionally absurd tribal,ethnic, and religious rivalries that plagued the no-man’s-land wedged between the Anatolian Peninsula and the headwaters of the Tigris River
By the late 1940s, however, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an escalating Cold War in which an early hot zone stretched from the Turkish straits through Iraq and Iran to the Persian Gulf. As the ideological conflict heated up, Washington discovered that Kurdish nationalism could be useful in limiting Moscow’s innocence in the Middle East. In a classic Cold War story that would be repeated from the central highlands of Vietnam to the rugged savannas of Angola, U.S. policymakers exploited ancient ethnic
and tribal fault lines inside Kurdistan to achieve short-term geopolitical ad-vantage. U.S. officials displayed neither diplomatic commitment nor sentimental attachment to the Kurds, whom they viewed as little more than spoilers in a 40-year struggle to keep the Soviet Union and its Arab clients like Iraq off balance. Although the Kurds began to make cameo appearances in con-temporary news accounts in the 1970s, recently declassified documents now make it possible to trace more fully the ambivalent U.S. relationship with Kurdish nationalism during the Cold War.
This article examines three key episodes: ªrst, the secret backing given to the Kurds by the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Ken-nedy in an effort to weaken the Iraqi military regime of Abdel Karim Qassim,who had tilted toward Moscow after seizing power in Baghdad in July 1958;second, the cynical covert action launched by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Iraqi Kurdistan, with help from Iran and Israel, after Saddam Hussein signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in April 1972; and third, Washington’s halfhearted attempts in the early 1990's to use Kurdish guerrillas to foment regime change in Iraq after the first Gulf War. In each case, the U.S. government exploited long-standing anti-Arab resentments among the Kurds, secretly supplied U.S. guns or dollars or sometimes both, and helped ignite an insurrection in Kurdistan, only to pull the plug unceremoniously when events threatened to spiral out of control.
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