"That was for us an indication of this guy's bravery," Qubad recalled. "Anyone else would have gone back to Mayfair, counted his losses, and gotten on with life. But he stuck around and lived the life of a pesh merga. Whatever anyone can say about Ahmed Chalabi, I will never doubt his bravery."
Jalal Talabani also recontacted Washington, and heard Robert Pelletreau advise him not to fight, to stay put and depend on Washington to sort out a cease-fire. From his perspective on the mountainside, with Barzani's troops vowing to finish him off, Talabani told Pelletreau he was through listening, and instead he intended to take back his cities. Remarkably, the PUK started a counteroffensive in October and turned the tide completely. Smashing through the KDP's overextended forces, Talabani regained all of his lost territory by the end of the month and prepared to attack Erbil. Before he could strike, warnings came screaming in from Washington, Tehran, and Baghdad that he shouldn't enter the city. Talabani stood down.46
The Clinton administration had ignored the Kurdish issue as long as it could, hoping to coast through the presidential election without dealing with Iraq. Inaction finally started to cost them. At a White House principals meeting the day after Saddam's incursion into the north, the National Security Council pondered their limited military options. Clinton's advisors feared any help they gave would mean supporting Talabani against Barzani, and at the moment they could hardly decide whom they liked least.47
"The northern no-fly zone was a bluff from day one," said Bruce Riedel, then a senior Pentagon official on the Near East desk. "And when Saddam called it, that was dramatically illustrated."
The Turks felt reluctant enough about lending their base at Incirlik for even symbolic flights over Iraq, and they let Washington know that real attacks were out of the question. The next closest planes could be launched from Saudi Arabia, a long, risky flight away, and all of it over Iraqi territory. Because Saddam had pulled back so quickly, U.S. forces would have bombed his tanks south of the no-fly zone. It would have meant a major escalation of a conflict the Clinton administration mostly wanted to disappear. 48 Instead the United States used the incident as an excuse to do something it really wanted. Washington declared that the southern no-fly zone that had been in place since 1991 would now extend up to the 33rd parallel, just south of Baghdad. Then, in a move that stymied the Kurds, the United States retaliated against Saddam's incursion in the north not by hitting the army that had attacked Kurdistan, but by destroying Iraq's air-defense systems in the south. Still, some inside the administration protested that the response made America look impotent.49 Taking out Iraq's antiaircraft batteries seemed a great idea for the jets patrolling over Iraq, but what good was a no-fly zone if Saddam was allowed to roll tanks instead of flying helicopters?
To this day Masoud Barzani and his entire party maintain they did what they had to do to survive, having called for help everywhere else they could, in response to an outside threat. "The 31st of August was not against the PUK," said Barzani. "It was against the Iranian intervention. It's one point within the larger process."
Nonetheless, from outside, the events of 1996 dumbfounded even sympathetic observers. August 31 seemed to prove once and for all that Barzani hated Talabani more than he hated Saddam Hussein. But considering what happened to his father with the American betrayal in 1975, Barzani probably trusted the Americans less than he trusted Saddam to honor a bargain and come to his aid. Similarly, the PUK will always deny it got significant military aid from Iran. Talabani at least admits that Iran helped after August 31, 1996, and in doing so gives some rhetorical cover for his rival. "Churchill cooperated with Stalin," said Talabani. "This is something ordinary. It's not a catholic marriage. There are short- and there are long-term deals."
It should be said that at the time of writing, neither leader easily talks about the events of the Kurdish civil war, though grudges remain within their military commands. Qubad Talabani, looking back at the whole mess from his Washington office, ruefully listed the missed opportunities, ending with a sigh: "God, if we would not have done that . . . I would say we would be independent today."
Indeed, the Kurdish leadership looked hell-bent on destroying their chances for freedom and killing the Kurdish state in the womb. If any thing-positive came from the conflict, it was the conclusive proof that neither side could eliminate the other. Or, as several frustrated Kurds remarked to American visitors, "You had your civil war, and now we've had ours."
* Opinions vary about Ahmed Chalabi: exile, banker, MIT doctorate, patriot, hustler, spin doctor, scoffer at all things inferior, and probably the single person most culpable for selling the ideas that brought the American invasion in 2003. Peter Galbraith notes that Chalabi had no reason to be more loyal to American interests in Iraq than to his own interest in pulling down Saddam.
* The Fayli Kurds are doubly unlucky—landless as Kurds and oppressed as Shi'ites in Saddam's Iraq. Saddam deported tens of thousands of them from Baghdad in the late 1970s and '80s, sending them to Iran, often with nothing but the change in their pockets.
* Even this early, each party had its own prime minister; essentially two full governments existed, such as they were.
* In Iraq, "Sheraton" is a label applied to the biggest hotels. The largest hotel in Baghdad is called the Ishtar Sheraton, though it hasn't had any formal ties to the hotel chain for years. The same applied to the building in Erbil that the PUK shot up in 1995; when they rebuilt it in 2004, they called it "Sheraton" again.
* Lake provided me with an e-mail forwarded to him on April 1, 2003, from Ron Kessler, who was corresponding with Baer for a book about the CIA. In the e-mail Baer wrote, "As for Lake, as I understand it, he was never told about the Samarra'i plan . . . or at least not until after March 5. No wonder he thought it was nutty." Baer can't be too upset these days after George Clooney played him in Syriana. Baer didn't respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this book.
* Also American personnel had been lost in the effort. In April 1994 the small contingent of U.S. Special Forces led by Colonel Dick Naab had been pulled out after an incident of "friendly fire" in which an American F-15 shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters, killing twenty-five State Department and military personnel, Turkish officials, and Kurdish guards.
* Again, the U.S. government's right hand didn't know what its left had done. A part of the State Department issued a démarche to Baghdad not to attack Erbil on August 28, but somehow Clinton administration high officials never realized that Saddam was about to attack Erbil, never prepared any military assets, and didn't warn Americans on the ground.
CHAPTER FIVE
Carnival in Limbo
AFTER THE DISASTROUS SUMMER OF 1996, Washington had fired all its guns with nothing to show for it. Saddam looked coup-proof, and the Kurdish safe haven wasn't safe from threats inside or out. Both Clinton on the campaign trail and Robert Pelletreau in congressional hearings had protested that the civil war in Kurdistan was an internal problem, and implied that the Bush administration had left them this mess. But Kurdistan remained America's only window into Saddam's secret world. Pelletreau invited Barzani and Talabani to Ankara, where serious negotiations began in late October 1996. Both leaders signed an agreement that finally had some money behind it—the United States put up three million dollars in cash and four million more in vehicles and equipment from the Pentagon to fund a four-hundred-strong Peace Monitoring Force (PMF). To placate the Turks, three hundred of the force were ethnic Turcomans, Iraq's Turkik minority.1 The peace held, more or less, until the following spring, when the Turks and the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) helped crack it.
Turkey's Kurdish rebels followed their leader Abdullah Öcalan with a fanaticism that eclipsed any of their stated ideology. Qcalan's PKK was far more violent than the Iraqi Kurdish parties as it fought a decades-long war against the Turkish government in which neither side respected civilians. Both the PKK and Talabani's PUK were founded in the mid-1970s with a leftist tone, and PKK fighters
had always been more closely aligned with Talabani's PUK than with Barzani's KDP. But the real conflict between Barzani and the PKK was territorial. The PKK had bases in Barzani's backyard—in the northwestern Badinan region of Iraqi Kurdistan—and competed with the KDP for influence and real estate. As the only group in the region advocating outright independence for all four Kurdish regions, the PKK occasionally picked up recruits from among Iraqi Kurds, especially when one of the other parties pulled a particularly cynical move. If Barzani disliked the PKK, it was a good enough reason for Talabani to like them. This was hardly an even trade—the aid of the PKK in exchange for the enmity of the Turks. In May 1997 the Turkish army stormed into Kurdistan again—this time with about fifty thousand troops, tanks, choppers, and jet fighters. Turkey claimed to have killed some thirteen hundred militants, not distinguishing Öcalan's men from Talabani's.2 The PUK slung insults at Masoud Barzani for calling in outside help once again; again he in turn blamed the PUK's alliance with Öcalan for provoking the Turks.
The political partition of the north began to solidify, and by the beginning of 1997 the PUK erected its own government in Sulimaniya to rival the KDP government in Erbil. Both claimed to be governing the entire Kurdish region. Every civil institution had a mirror on the other side—Erbil banned the Sulimaniya newspapers and vice versa. The desperate poverty eased a bit, especially on the KDP side of the border. When Saddam had pulled out in 1996, without official announcement, the internal blockade of Kurdistan had ended, most directly for Erbil. Spies certainly infiltrated from Baghdad, but trade came too, and for average Kurds that looked like a fair bargain—some of them hadn't eaten meat or even chicken for five years. Black market fuel prices came back down to a reasonable level.3
Around the same time, the economic embargo on Iraq had softened. In 1995 the U.N. had adopted resolution 986, which came to be known as "Oil-for-Food." The economic blockade imposed on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait would continue, but Saddam Hussein would be allowed to sell two billion dollars' worth of oil every six months in exchange for food and other nonmilitary products. The Iraqi government, the U.N., and the United States wrangled over the details for some time, so the first shipments of oil didn't flow out of Iraq until the eve of 1997.4 The United States primarily wanted to take away one of Saddam's propaganda tools: the sympathy he was winning because of economic hardship under the sanctions. It also took away some steam from the growing number of countries in favor of opening up to Iraq—like Russia, China, and France (the French had unceremoniously pulled their jets out of the no-fly-zone patrols in 1994). Twenty-five percent of the revenues went from a U.N. escrow account to Kuwait as war reparations, and another 3 percent covered the U.N.'s operating expenses, including the weapons inspection program. Because of the U.N.'s respect for Iraq's sovereignty, Saddam still exercised influence on how quickly aid went north, but some Oil-for Food supplies started flowing to Kurdistan. Still, both Erbil and Sulimaniya were capitals at war, and with tens of thousands of fighters to support, teachers and doctors went for months without pay.
"It was very dreary," said one State Department official who visited Kurdistan in 1997. "They wanted us to see the pesh merga everywhere. Resources were going to mounting machine guns in pickup trucks. Not much was going to public service."
There is an old Kurdish proverb that fighting is better than idleness, but Barzani and Talabani started showing signs of battle fatigue. This coincided with the Clinton administration finally taking an interest, and even allowing the State Department to create a position for a de facto Kurdistan desk officer. The State Department believed the Kurdish leaders sincerely wanted peace but needed an outside power to help them with appearances. On the ground, the war had embittered commanders from both parties. Barzani's nephew Nechirvan earned a reputation as a hardliner, while the PUK's Kosrat Rasul, his body already a road map of battle scars, also pushed hard to keep fighting. As a native of Erbil, Kosrat thought defeating the KDP was the only way he would get back to his hometown with any sort of dignity, and he led many of the offensives from the front.5 With Turkish air support, the KDP erased any PUK gains, and the two parties found themselves back at the cease-fire line at Degala. With so much bad blood, Barzani and Talabani welcomed the American imprimatur that they could claim was forcing their hands. In the summer of 1998, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch made the trek to Kurdistan and invited both leaders to the United States.
In the first week of September, Barzani arrived and made the rounds of high-level meetings, including those with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Clinton's new national security advisor, Sandy Berger. The White House saw Barzani as more resistant and wanted the extra time to work on him; they had done a similar job on Talabani the previous year, bringing him to Washington to insist he shut off support for the PKK.6 By the second week in September both leaders had arrived; the PUK set up at the Marriott Key Bridge hotel, while the KDP was at the Four Seasons, across the bridge in Georgetown. As the White House strong-armed, internal Kurdish diplomacy also played a role. Najmaldin Karim shuttled back and forth over the river urging the two leaders to shake hands. On September 17, after many all-night negotiating sessions, the Kurds signed the Washington Agreement, witnessed in writing by David Welch.7 After a White House ceremony with Madeleine Albright, the two leaders went home to a cold peace. The deal permanently stopped the shooting but left the main issues unresolved. The PUK still accused the KDP of pulling down a million dollars each day at the Khabur bridge border; the KDP still protested that Talabani was collaborating with the PKK. The two sides held on to their prisoners from the civil war. From Washington's perspective the deal was a good one—the Kurds had promised not to invite nor provoke any more outside interference. Northern Iraq had a long way to go, but at least it wasn't hemorrhaging. And in the view of the Clinton administration, someday it might come in handy.
OUT OF ONE shivering newborn pseudo-state, the Kurds cleaved two totally separate provinces. This I discovered in January 2000, when I went looking for something that doesn't exist: a visa to an invisible country.
I was a freelance reporter, with only a few years' experience. I spoke some Arabic and had traveled in the Middle East, but my journalism experience came from Latin America. In 1999, while I was living in Bogotá, Colombia, I had read about the capture of the Kurdish rebel Abdullah Öcalan. U.S. intelligence helped nab Öcalan in Kenya, and he was turned over to Ankara, where everyone expected him to swing. Press reports of Kurds in Turkey and Europe immolating themselves in protest shocked and fascinated me. When I left Bogotá in 1999, I decided to make a trip to Kurdistan, but as a freelance journalist with almost no budget, getting there took some acrobatics.8
I first visited the PUK office near Union Station in Washington, with the smoothest Kurd in America, Barham Salih. Already the dean of the Iraqi opposition in D.C., Salih had been the first name mentioned to me by former ambassadors to the region. Warm, charismatic, and composed to a fault, "Dr. Barham" spoke flawless English with an accent that sounded British-becoming-American. He eloquently ran down the PUK's positions for me and promised that I would see the great things happening in Sulimaniya. Taking notes at his elbow stood a young man in a tailored suit with a neat goatee, who introduced himself as Qubad Talabani. They pledged to do everything they could to make my trip to Kurdistan a smooth one and listed off the sort of colorful projects going on that they knew would make great newspaper copy. Then they told me the catch. From Tehran they could make arrangements to get me across the border, but no one in the PUK could lift a finger for me unless I got an Iranian visa, a long shot at the time. I smiled, they smiled, and I went looking for the KDP office.
The KDP ran a river crossing from a tiny stretch of Syrian border near Zakho. Many journalists had entered through there, as had foreign NGO staff, often carrying tens of thousands of dollars in cash for their Erbil offices. Washington's KDP representative also had a familiar surname. Farhad Barzani had come to Washington as a young m
an and had taken care of his ailing grandfather Mulla Mustafa Barzani. When I met him in the KDP's Washington office, he gave me his version of how to get into Kurdistan. First I was to get a Syrian tourist visa, and under no conditions let them know I was a journalist. Once in Damascus I would contact the KDP office, and they would get permission from the Syrian secret police for me to unofficially cross the Tigris into Iraq near Zakho. I could stay in Kurdistan, but only as long as my tourist visa allowed, and return pretending that I had never left Syria. A few weeks later I got the Syrian tourist visa through some minor economies with the truth. I gave Farhad all of my travel details, but I never heard from him. After many calls to his office, I gave up on that route.9
With the American presidential elections coming that fall, Al Gore had written a strong letter of support to the Kurds, promising to defend their safe haven; but they found George W. Bush a more attractive suitor. Bush himself showed no awareness that Kurds existed. (He had recently been sucker punched when a journalist asked him to name the leaders of Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Chechnya—Bush ventured that the president of Taiwan might be named Lee.) Rather, it was Bush's entourage that had the Kurds daydreaming, chief among them, Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz had been thinking Iraq since the Ford administration. He theorized that it was fertile ground for democracy in the Middle East, a model he hoped could be more stable than the Arab dictatorships America relied on for energy security. Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives had been uneasy with the way cold political realists had kept the 1991 Gulf War so limited in scope, but the Clinton presidency really boiled them. Fresh off the cold war victory that left America supreme, they had to fidget through eight years of languid restraint of U.S. power. As Clinton's presidency drew to a close, a group of congressional hawks and neo-conservatives pounded him on Iraq. In January 1998 a group called the Project for a New American Century sent Clinton a letter demanding a stronger Iraq policy. Nine of the signatories were destined to become prominent members of the Bush administration, including Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad.* In October 1998 Congress pushed through the Iraq Liberation Act, stating that it was U.S. policy to change the regime in Baghdad. It authorized Congress to spend ninety-eight million dollars on the Iraqi opposition, and the Kurds could have qualified for some of that money. Still, Clinton's cabinet advised him that containing Saddam was the only practical option.
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