The Resolution's Weakness (Bush double crossing the Kurds - like Dad did)

[papau]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/opinion/09SAFI.html

The Resolution's Weakness (Bush double crossing the Kurds - like Dad did)
By WILLIAM SAFIRE Published: June 9, 2004

In his eagerness for the approval of the Shiite religious leader — and driven by desperation to get yesterday's unanimous U.N. resolution in time for the G-8 meeting — President Bush may be double-crossing the Kurds, our most loyal friends in Iraq.

Not a single U.S. soldier has been killed in the area of northern Iraq patrolled by the pesh merga, the army of Kurdish Iraqis who have brought order to their region. Savaged by Saddam's poison-gas attacks in the 80's, Kurdistan was abandoned by the first President Bush to Saddam's vengeance after the first gulf war. When our conscience made us provide air cover in the 90's, the Kurds amazed the Middle East by creating a free, democratic mini-state within despotic Iraq.

These Kurdish Sunni Muslims — an ancient ethnic group, neither Arab nor Turk — are one-fifth of Iraq's population. They cheered our arrival and set aside old dreams of independence, asking for reasonable autonomy in return for participating enthusiastically in the formation of the new Iraq.<snip>

The U.S. promptly caved. Stunned Kurds (Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani) protested in a letter to President Bush that "the people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq." If the law guaranteeing minority rights was abrogated, Kurds would "have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan."<snip>

[slipperduke]

1. Bloody hell,

Just when it looks like something good may come out of all of this, Bush manages to screw it up again. The Kurds are an incredible people, you'd think that the neo-cons might want to take advantage of that.