TODAY’S MESOP OPINION : By Caleh Salih – The Guardian

If he really wants to stop Isis, Obama must make new friends in Iraq

The Kurds are a unique US ally – largely secular, pro-Western and willing to fight a group that could threaten America more than al-Qaida in its heyday

12-8-2014 – The Guardian – President Obama has suddenly warmed up to the Kurds. In his address Thursday night announcing the authorization of limited airstrikes against the Islamic State (Isis), Obama explicitly cited the need to stop an Isis advance on the Kurdish capital of Irbil. In an interview with Thomas Friedman the next afternoon, he pointed to Kurdistan’s tolerance and functionality as reasons that the region is worth protecting: the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Obama said, “is functional the way we would like to see.” And after years of avoiding eye contact with Irbil, reports suggest that the US started covertly arming the Kurds.

For many Kurds, hearing Obama’s words of praise was a first. Obama and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) got off to a shaky start: the KRG, which mostly benefited from the US invasion of Iraq, was wary of an American president anxious to withdraw and detach from the country. The Obama administration mostly shunned the Kurds, preferring instead to deal with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad. By early 2014, things had gotten so awkward that KRG President Masoud Barzani cancelled a trip to Washington, saying he would refuse to meet with Obama until Iraqi Kurdish parties were removed from the US terrorism list.

Obama and Maliki had a fundamental common interest from the start: getting the US out of Iraq. Obama hoped that Maliki would be the strongman, but the Kurds clashed with him over the extent of their autonomy, and in 2012 Barzani and other adversaries tried, unsuccessfully, to unseat Maliki in a vote of no confidence.

As a result, for most of his presidency, Obama and his staff “saw the Kurds as a nuisance”, Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me over the weekend. “For the first five years of this administration, they were terrible apologists for Maliki. So anyone who had problems with the Maliki administration would get a tongue-lashing.”The Obama administration has viewed some of the more extreme exercises of Kurdish autonomy, namely unilateral oil exports abroad, as threats to Iraq’s sovereignty. It has viewed Kurdish secessionism as a threat that could drag the US back into the region. “States aren’t born peacefully in the Middle East,” says Ayham Kamel, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. “If you begin to deconstruct the boundaries of the Middle East … that process will be messy.” In the absence of any power to manage the mess, Kamel explains, the US would implicitly be expected to step back in.

The same logic applies to Washington’s hesitance to openly arm the Kurds. As Ali Khedery, a former American official who advised five US ambassadors to Iraq, told me:

Washington didn’t want to arm Kurds for the same reason they didn’t want them to sell oil – the entire, fatally flawed US strategy was to route everything through Maliki and Baghdad in a bid to hold the country together. They thought that was the best way to preserve Iraqi and regional stability, when, in fact, it was doing the exact opposite.

More broadly, according to Pollack, the Obama administration has been “trying to protect this narrative that [Obama] came into office, withdrew from Iraq, and now Iraq is more or less fine – ‘we gave them a chance and now we are going to walk away’.”

So much for that. When Isis took over Mosul last month, the group infamous for brutality announced its intention to march on to Baghdad next. Some US diplomats and civilians were evacuated to Kurdistan, and many of those Iraqis who could left the capital for seemingly safer cities. Many were taken by surprise, then, when Isis did a turnabout last week, and instead started advancing northward toward Irbil. The Obama administration, after having long turned a cold shoulder to the Kurds, found itself turning around, too, stepping back into war in part to save Kurdistan.

Obama needs the Kurds, and he knows it. They are largely secular and pro-Western, but also maintain dynamic ties to both Iran and Turkey. They offer a potential base from which the US can stage counterterrorism operations against Isis. Iraqi Kurdish parties have links to Kurdish groups in Syria, and Kurdistan Worker’s Party-affiliated Syrian Kurds have been one of the only militias able to effectively fight Isis there. Kurdistan is a much-needed safe haven for refugees from Syria, and internally displaced people from other parts of Iraq. It offers a stable, economically prosperous buffer zone right at the intersection of several regional conflicts. A weak, unstable Kurdistan would allow Isis and other militants to more easily move between Iraq and Syria.

Washington cannot ignore Isis, a growing global threat that could pose greater risks to America than al-Qaida did in its heyday. But if Obama really wants to pass the fight against Isis on to local forces, he will have to bolster – not just tacitly support – the Kurdish peshmerga. The peshmerga force has its weaknesses, but is a far better bet than the Iraqi army, which is increasingly disjointed and dependent on Shiite militias. In addition to partnering with the Kurds militarily, Obama will need to work with the KRG to push through a national unity government in Baghdad that can bring about a political settlement inclusive of Sunnis, and make US military aid to Baghdad more palatable.

Obama’s hope that he would not get dragged back into Iraq flew out the window last week. But to check the expansion of Isis without involving the US in another all-out war, he will have to start taking more risks in choosing his Iraqi partners. He will have to turn from supporting “functional” allies to making fast friends. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/11/isis-obama-friends-iraq-kurds-islamic-state