Israel reaches for the Kurds, can I blame them?

There was a burst of rather jarring news recently about Israel's involvement with the Kurds and Israeli interrogators in secret U.S. prisons from the BBC and Sy Hersh. Hersh has an extended New Yorker piece, revealing among other things that Israeli commandoes are cruising with Kurds into Iran!!

Via BBC the thoroughly worthless Gen. Janis Karpinski now says that she saw an Israeli who claimed to help interrogate Iraqis, the first time a senior American has admitted the Israelis had security access:

The US journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal told the programme his sources confirm the presence of Israeli intelligence agents in Iraq. Seymour Hersh said that one of the Israeli aims was to gain access to detained members of the Iraqi secret intelligence unit, who reportedly specialise in Israeli affairs.

Wow, now the respected pubisher Jane's Security News reports exclusively on Shin Bet interrogators in Iraq. Argh!!

Some Kurdish guys justified a new sort of alliance with Israel against Syria and Iran in Haaretz:

"The Kurdish public is not ready to take any more humiliation. As long as we thought we could persuade the Americans to support our positions, our leaders were supported by the public," he said. "The Kurdish public is disappointed and angry, it wants results. You in Israel talk of the greater Eretz Yisrael and here we talk of greater Kurdistan. Today our political war begins."

The Kurd's struggle has two main objectives - to regain Kirkuk and its suburbs, and to gain a share of the power in the central Iraqi government. Both are uphill struggles.
[....]
Fridon Abed Alkadar, who was Kurdish interior minister, said: "The situation is now very strange. The U.S. told us they do not want to divide Iraq like Lebanon, for fear that what happened there would happen here. But if they don't accept the idea of a federated Iraq, the situation may be like the one that triggered off the civil war in Lebanon."

I have mentioned before that (because the U.S. handed security in the Kurdish areas to local militia) Kurdish armed groups are purging Arabs from places like Kirkuk and the outlying cities. Kirkuk could be the next Saravejo. Really.

Already there are reports of Kurdish militants fighting Iran, which we had to expect at some point, I suppose. Nor is it that surprising that the Israelis would reach out yet again to the non-Arabs of the middle east, in an attempt to improve their position with the Arab regimes. I don't have a moral problem with this occurring, but it certainly illustrates a central flaw in the idea that Israel is America's unwavering ally in the Mideast. Simply put, Israel has its own interests and those don't always coincide with ours. If they want to use the Kurds now that we've nearly shattered Iraq, what use is it to get offended? It's all political expediency, the Great Game anew.

In other Israel news I would like to say "Blahhhhh" to Richard Cohen for getting so damned delighted that Israel shifted its wall slightly back, via a Supreme Court ruling. Ok, fine, then show me how that whole West Bank approach actually builds a stable democracy. Or two.

You see, it turns out that in the first days of the Intifada, Israel fired more than a million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza, without any sort of strategic doctrine that framed a peaceful resolution, in part because as I said before, the head of their military intelligence, Amos Gilad, originally set a self-fulfilling prophecy by laying out a policy that Arafat and all of Palestine was not interested in negotiation. This is groupthink, systemic insanity, folks. A nice editorial illustrating why the fence is so toxic to the Arab residents of greater Jerusalem.

Speaking of insanity, more about the talk of Palestinian ethnic cleansing emanating from the settler leaders. This piece neatly refutes the view that Israel 'won' the Intifada, because, hell, Israel is still tied down in a hot, exhausting war. Duhhh?

This is very alarming. A top rabbi went off talking about 'rodef,' the supposed religious justification for a Jew to kill another Jew. Such things appeared shortly before a religious fanatic killed Rabin, in other words pretty much direct incitement that is now being threatened against Sharon if he dares pull back from land.

More about Sharon's wedged situation, attempting to retreat from Gaza among domestic political turmoil.

Wow, confusion inside and out. But in a sense the U.S. put them in the position of having to connect with the Kurds by destabilizing Iraq. And now the effort to secure their own gambit will probably cause more tumult inside Iraq, while the symbolic implications of Israeli interrogators are just terrible. Middle East is like that.

Posted by HongPong at July 8, 2004 01:52 AM
Listed under Iraq , Israel-Palestine .