One of Ours

I was thinking about this, and the Kurds meet all of the qualifications to get a state. They are a cultural and national group with strong ties to the land on which they live. They've been persecuted mercilessly for a long time (much worse then the Palestinians, FWIW), and even better, they have quietly gone about building the institutions of statehood and a civil society pretty much on their own.

So, if you want to talk about ethnic groups that deserve a state of their own, the Kurds ought to be at the top of anyone's list.

Oh, one other thing. The Kurds have never blown up any busses full of civilians, never desecrated religious shrines, never mutilated 'enemy' corpses, never machine-gunned elementary schools, never sent teenagers in bomb vests to kill other teenagers at restaurants and coffee shops, and as far as I know, they have never tried to make a bomb filled with rat poison or HIV+ blood.

Perhaps the Kurds should do all of those things. Then they would be rewarded with diplomatic recognition, become the toast of the entire Arab world, and be fawned over by university professors, guilt-ridden Westerners, and European diplomats. People would say that there can be no peace in the Middle East until the Kurds get a state, and Kurdish leaders would be seen as heroes, even as they massacre 'enemy' civilians by the hundreds ever year.

That's the problem with the Kurds. They spend their energy and talents on things like economic development, education, and infrastructure. They just go ahead living their lives, farming, raising their kids, passing along their culture to new generations. If they just taught their kids to hate, and turned their whole society into a psychotic death cult, well, a state would practically be thrown at them.

At this date, I don't see any particular advantage in bowing to those who want to continue to control the Kurdish population. In particular, if Iraq cannot form a government, then the U.S. should support independance for Kurdistan. Even in this worse case scenario, I am certain that the Kurds would be quite happy to allow the U.S. to use aribases and military facilities in the Kurdish area.


In any case, both peoples deserve a state.