A Long View of a War

PESHMERGA

Nuance and subtlety have pretty much taken a hike in reporting on the Iraq war. After all there’s nothing particularly gray in the blacks and whites of suicide bombings, tactical air strikes and oil pipeline explosions.

But Peter Galbraith, writing in the forthcoming issue of The New York Review of Books, has done an admirable job of sorting through the daily outrages and tracing back the tensions that were just waiting to burst into the open when the post-invasion occupation came a cropper.

It’s a long read, but a worthwhile one. The opening grafs:

"On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon, the US commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the 'benchmark' now achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's eighteen provinces.

"In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.

"Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the US congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgement that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag—an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley's Believe it or Not."

You can read the rest here.