MB Civic

Najmaldin Karim | Saturday, December 2, 2006 | The Washington Post

Make no mistake about it: this is a very biased op-ed piece, biased in favor of the Iraqi Kurds. But it is something we should all read to understand how abandoned the Iraqi Kurds feel by the disastrous war in Iraq and the current civil war there.

Karim (who is President of the Washington Kurdish Institute) reminds us of the awful consequences of US abandonment in 1991 (when James Baker was Secretary of State to Bush the Elder). He argues strongly in favor of the three-state solution put forward by Senator Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb (former president of the Council on Foreign Relations). He howls with outrage at the exclusion by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group of Kurdish interests and Iraqi ‘experts’ other than pro-Arab Sunnis from its “fact-finding” phase and its panel of witnesses. Finally, he argues that the Iraq Study Group’s report will be inevitably prejudiced against Iraqi Shiites and Iraqi Kurds, and in favor of the Sunni ‘Arabs’ – who were the only ethnic group among the three largest to be interviewed.

The last bit is something I have never seen in print before: an Iraqi Kurd arguing in favor of fairness to all in Iraq. That means not only his ethnic group – the second largest sub-population of Iraqis – but also the majority Shiites and Iraq’s third largest subpopulation, the Sunni ‘Arabs’, in all important decisions. Refreshing but bleak, if that is possible…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101308.html