TODAY‘S MESOP OPINION : The Obama Administration Is No Friend of Kurdistan

Dr. Sabah Salih – Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, USA.

August 9, 2014 – ekurd.net – Last night, even as President Obama laid out a specific plan for America’s mission in Kurdistan—“targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians”—it was glaringly clear he was only doing so reluctantly.First, he insulted the people of Kurdistan by not even acknowledging the existence of their region. The speech was no more than two pages, but the President mentioned the word Iraq nearly thirty times. And the words Kurdistan or Kurdistan Region or Kurdistan Regional Government? No even once.

This was intentional. Words do matter. By using the word Iraq so frequently and by not mentioning Kurdistan at all, Mr. Obama robbed Kurdistan of its real identity and allowed himself to sound very much like the enemies and oppressors of Kurdistan who to this day cannot bring themselves to utter the K-word. That he did so at a time when Kurdistan is thinking seriously about translating the national wish for independence into reality was obviously intended to undercut that effort (as has been, by the way, his shameful maneuvering to block the sale of Kurdish oil in the world market.)

Iraq for all practical purposes is a dead state; even non-Kurds acknowledge that. ISIS terror gangs control nearly a third of the country; this all happened right under Obama’s watch. But he made no effort to help the people of Iraq deal with the situation. And yet last night the President used the power of the pulpit to re-impose on the people of Kurdistan a vision of Iraq that has no bearing on reality.

Second, the President made sure that his key phrase “targeted airstrikes” was accompanied by a big IF. Here’s the full sentence: “To stop the advance on Erbil, I’ve directed our military to take targeted strikes against ISIS terrorist convoys should (italics added) they move toward the city.” That means if ISIS gangs are doing the pillaging and slaughtering elsewhere, they’ll be free to do so. Notice also the choice of targets, not targets that could cripple ISIS—its positions, training camps, command centers, and infra structure—but only those “conveys” that try to advance towards Erbil. But the likelihood of ISIS succeeding in advancing on Erbil is zero. Surely the President knows that. ISIS knows that. So it’s obvious that the President has committed himself to nothing more than a series of pinpricks.

The real question, anyway, is not defending Erbil. The Peshmerga can do that; the masses can do that. The real question is whether Mr. Obama is committed to defeating and crushing ISIS? On that he and his national security advisors sound just like a bunch of lost amateurs who seem to be hopelessly unable to make up their minds. Just reflect for a moment on the lame explanation they so frequently spew out: We can’t fix Iraq’s problems, the Middle East has always been a dangerous place, Iraq’s factions need to work together. Meaningless generalizations like that are meant to obscure the facts, and the facts are the very things that Obama and his team don’t want to face.

It should be recalled that it was America’s mistakes in Iraq that helped Obama win the presidency in 2008. And yet he and his team often sound like what’s happened in Iraq just happened, as if by magic. His ridiculously feeble sentence “I’ve said before, the United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world” clearly shows that he is not willing to accept responsibility for the intended and unintended consequences of American action in Iraq.