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Source: Lies Are Unbekoming
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Of my two closest friends in Iraq, one of them was Kurdish, Arkan, and he played chess. In fact, he first taught me how to play. I’ll come back to Arkan a bit later.
This post is knitted from a ball of threads that have floated through my mind this last week. Let’s see if I can stitch them into something worthwhile.
It started when a friend sent me a link to a Dan Carlin episode from 2019. This was the first time I’d listened to Carlin, and it’s clear from the clip in the masthead that he gets American Empire, and he gets its unsustainability, and his hope for a soft landing. I wonder what he thinks of Empire today, four years later. Does he know that the whole Covid Show was Empire’s latest and greatest production?
If there is any doubt that it was a production, here is a great piece just today from Toby Rogers.
The Spectacle of Covid - by Toby Rogers
This week also I’ve been paying more attention to Fredrick William Engdahl, who in his April 2009 introduction to his book Full Spectrum Dominance wrote this:
What few were aware of, largely because their responsible national media refused to tell them, was that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Pentagon had been pursuing, step-by-careful-step, a military strategy for domination of the entire planet, a goal no earlier great power had ever achieved, though many had tried. It was called by the Pentagon, 'Full Spectrum Dominance' and as its name implied, its agenda was to control everything everywhere including the high seas, land, air, space and even outer space and cyberspace.
That agenda had been pursued over decades on a much lower scale with CIA-backed coups in strategic countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Vietnam, Ghana, the Belgian Congo. Now the end of a counter vailing Superpower, the Soviet Union, meant the goal could be pursued effectively unopposed.
As far back as 1939 a small elite circle of specialists had been convened under highest secrecy by a private foreign policy organization, the New York Council on Foreign Relations. With generous funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the group set out to map the details of a postwar world. In their view, a new world war was imminent and out of its ashes only one country would emerge victorious-the United States.
Their task, as some of the members later described, was to lay the foundations of a postwar American Empire - but without calling it that. It was a shrewd bit of deception that initially led much of the world to believe the American claims of support for 'freedom and democracy' around the world. By 2003 and the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq on the false and legally irrelevant assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that deception was wearing thin.
Engdahl also gets it, and I like that he talks about this Empire’s invisibility. It doesn’t like to be called Empire and it certainly doesn’t like to be seen, which is why I like to keep calling it Empire and pointing my finger at it.
Which brings me to James Corbett, another person I’ve known of without allocating bandwidth to his work. He recently wrote this great piece, with a special mention of the Kurds and a connecting thread to chess.
Your Guide to the Grand Chessboard's Pawns (substack.com)
There's an interesting feature in the game of geopolitical chess. Sometimes the pawns on the board are available for either the white team or the black team to use. If they can be convinced that it's in their interests, the pawns will paint themselves with one or the other team's colours and attempt to capture a square on the grand chessboard for their new king. And then (if history is anything to go by) they will either be abandoned or betrayed or completely destroyed by their newly adopted team.
There is no better example of this phenomenon than the Kurds.
The Kurds, for those who don't know, are a distinct Iranian ethnic group with their own language and culture. They inhabit the geographical region of Kurdistan, a mountainous area straddling southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and northern Syria. Unfortunately for the Kurds, Kurdistan is not its own country. This means the Kurdish people have been—barring some aborted attempts at Kurdish kingdoms, Republics and Soviet administrative units in the chaotic post-WWI period—without a state of their own for centuries.
Long desirous of autonomy, the Kurds have seldom had comfortable relations with the various governments ruling over their diaspora. The Turks, for example, refused to even acknowledge their existence, referring to them as "mountain Turks" until 1991.
In Iraq, meanwhile, the fight for Kurdish self-rule began escalating in the 1960s and continued escalating—with only brief periods of respite—through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. This round of struggle culminated in a genocidal anti-Kurdish campaign by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government employing ground offensives, aerial bombing, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation, firing squads, and chemical attacks (with chemical weapons provided by the US and Britain and Germany and France, of course). The campaign resulted in the death of 182,000 Kurds. It included the infamous chemical attack on Halabja on March 16, 1988, that killed 5,000 and injured 10,000 more.
Given this history, it is no surprise that the Kurds heeded then-President George H. W. Bush's infamous call in the final days of the Gulf War for "the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Taking his pronouncement as an implicit guarantee that the US military—already routing Saddam's forces in the Gulf War that did not take place—would back them up, the Kurds painted themselves in the American team colours and marched as dutiful pawns onto the chessboard . . . only to be brutally slaughtered by Iraqi helicopters, long-range artillery, and armored ground forces. The Bush Administration watched the slaughter take place, refusing to aid the very insurgency they themselves had encouraged.
This would not be the first nor the last time that the Kurds would be so cynically used, abused, led on, betrayed and abandoned by Uncle Sam. In fact, in a 2019 article on the subject, researcher Jon Schwarz identified eight separate times that the US had betrayed the Kurds, including a secret 1970s agreement between Henry Kissinger and the Shah of Iran to arm the Iraqi Kurds just enough for them to help bleed Saddam's government but not enough for them to actually win independence.
Another incident in this ignominious history of treachery involved the neocons cynically using the Kurds as a convenient excuse for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of all the traitorous acts in US/Kurdish history, this one was particularly galling. Arch-neocon Bill Kristol (aided by unlikely bedfellow Christopher Hitchens) took to C-SPAN in 2003 to assure the viewers that the US would not betray the Kurds this time ("We will not. We will not!"), only to publish an article in his Weekly Standard propaganda rag four years later explaining why it was absolutely necessary to betray the Kurds.
There is much more to the story, but you get the idea by now. The Kurds serve as perhaps the best single example of why no one should trust any king promising to support the pawns in their quest to capture a key square on the grand chessboard. It is a lie. The king will turn around and sacrifice his loyal pawns at his earliest opportunity.
Corbett is spot on with his analysis of what happened, the Kurds were encouraged to rise up and fight, they did, only to be betrayed by those that called for their help; American Empire.
Corbett is also correct to mention the “helicopters”.
I wrote this in 2005:
Fly on the stained wall of an armistice…
March 3rd 1991.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf meets Lieutenant General Sultan Hamid Ahmad at Safwan air base, hundreds of kilometres inside Iraqi territory, near the infamous Highway of Death.
After discussing prisoner exchange the following transpires (from previously classified transcripts of that meeting)…
GEN SCHWARZKOPF (US): Are there any other matters that the General would like to discuss?
LTG AHMAD (I): We have a point, one point. You might very well know the situation of the roads and bridges and communications. We would like to agree that helicopter flights sometimes are needed to carry some of the officials, government officials, or any members that is needed to be transported from one place to another because the roads and bridges are out.
GEN SCHWARZKOPF (US): I think the same thing can apply to the helicopter flights as to vehicles it we can just mark them on the side with orange.
LTG AHMAD (I): This has nothing to do with the front line. This is inside Iraq.
GEN SCHWARZKOPF (US): As long as it is not over the part we are in that is absolutely no problem. So we will let the helicopters, and that is a very important point, and I want to make sure that’s recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq. Not fighters, not bombers.
LTG AHMAD (I): So you mean even the helicopters that is armed in the Iraqi skies can fly, but not the fighters? Because the helicopters are the same, they transfer somebody or…
GEN SCHWARZKOPF (US): Yeah, I will instruct our Air Force not to shoot at any helicopters that are flying over the territory of Iraq where we are not located. If they must fly over the area we are located in I prefer that they not be gun ships, armed helos and I would prefer that they have an orange tag on the side as an extra safety measure.
LTG AHMAD (I): Not to have any confusion these will not come to this territory.
GEN SCHWARZKOPF (US): Good.
And so it came to pass that they allowed Saddam to fly armed military helicopters over Iraq. From that point on, right up to the beginning of the southern no-fly zone in August 1992, a total of eighteen months, Saddam ruthlessly slaughtered tens of thousands of Shiite and Marsh Arab Iraqis in southern Iraq.
His tool of choice? Armed military helicopters…
It was either a stupid but innocent negotiating mistake by Schwarzkopf or a deliberate yet unspoken understanding that a weakened Shiite movement would be good for both parties.
I really feel better thinking that it was a stupid mistake.
Poor Shiites, they were screwed by the Turks, the British, the Ba’ath Party and now the Americans.
The Kurds got their no-fly zone in April 1991, only one month after the ceasefire.
But by April 1991 the Kurdish uprising had already been quashed by Saddam, in no small part because of the same helicopters that Schwarzkopf permitted for another one and a half years in the south.
Now, just before the Iraqi army surrendered in 1991, the country was sliding into anarchy, so I tried to get my hands on a gun, as you do.
My Kurdish friend, Arkan, did his best to help. This again from 2005.
Time to buy a gun
As the Gulf War raged on, at the urging of the American administration and Coalition forces, two new conflicts erupted inside Iraq.
The Kurds in the north decided this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain autonomy from a weakened Saddam, so they went for it. Organising their forces and taking control of many Kurdish cities.
The Shiite majority, predominantly in the south of Iraq came to the same conclusion.
With Saddam’s army severely depleted both groups made significant gains. As Coalition forces progressed north, through Kuwait and towards Baghdad, the Shiite revolt picked up steam. Many Shiite civilians managed to collect the weapons of deserting and retreating soldiers and begin to form groups of militia, targeting Saddam loyalists ranging from troops to Ba’ath party members.
Even though the Coalition declared a ceasefire in late February the Shiites and Kurds kept up the fight. Unfortunately for them, Saddam would regroup and viciously crush the Shiite revolt. He tried to do the same to the Kurds, with some success but even though the Americans had abandoned both groups in their darkest hour, the half measure that was no-fly zones worked to save the Kurds from total annihilation, as their no-fly zone was implemented immediately after the end of the Gulf War. The Kurds were able to retain much of what they controlled and went on to develop Kurdistan, the only functioning democratic government in the Middle East. Saddam for the first time could do nothing about it.
The story was different in the south. The southern zone was not created until August 1992 giving Saddam over one and a half years to total decimate southern Shiite and Marsh Arab communities. When the no-fly zone was eventually implemented it made little difference to those it was aimed at protecting.
It was during this turmoil, with rumours of a Shiite revolt marching towards Baghdad that I started to think I need a gun. It was clear to me that a side effect of the uprising will be anarchy, looting, murder and rape. What was I going to do about it? We didn’t have family elsewhere in the country we could flee to.
I decided that all I could do was get myself a gun and defend us until the bullets ran out. I expected I would need to kill people. I was getting myself psychologically ready, if that is ever possible, to kill in self-defense.
We were all descending into darkness.
I went to talk to Dawood [my mother’s cousin], Mineshe’s son, about him trying to get me a machine gun or even a handheld from some of his soldier friends. He wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea but promised to make some enquiries. Nothing came of it.
I spoke to my Kurdish friend, Arkan, who had been serving in the army for the past two years are dropping out of high school. From him I got my hands on packet of 0.22 gauge bullets. Now all I needed was the gadget to fire them. I never did manage to get one.
It turned out I wouldn’t need one as the Coalition stopped 150 kms short of Baghdad. The Shiite uprising wasn’t strong enough to progress any meaningful distance closer to Baghdad. The Coalition retreated back to the original Iraq-Kuwait, this gave Saddam the “half-time” break he needed to regroup and go after the Kurds and Shiites. He had limited success with the Kurds, but he won the ball game with the poor Shiites.
There is continual debate as to whether the Coalition should have “finished the job” and removed Saddam in 1991. That is a very hard question to answer. You first need to understand that Iraq is really three cultures rolled up into one. Or put another way, three different countries packaged as one and kept together by a vicious, malignant dictator.
The Kurds in the north, the Shiite majority in the south and the minority Sunnis sandwiched in the middle.
The coalition rightly assumed that with the removal of Saddam no new leader would emerge to unify the country and keep it intact. This was a problem for them for all the wrong reasons.
In the absence of such a leader you would end up with an independent Kurdistan, something the US ally Turkey was and still is not happy about. They have had their own and very long history of Kurdish persecution.
A broken-up Iraq would lead to an oil rich Shiite dominated south that would most likely closely align with Iran. Another scenario the American were not happy with.
So what did they do? They left Saddam in power, imposed sanctions for over ten years that had the sole effect of starving the Iraqi population. Saddam and his cronies still continued with the lavish lifestyles and brutality, uninterrupted.
Fast forward three years and the US administration decides to remove Saddam and inject “democracy”. What happens? Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites go at it all over again.
In simple English, civil war will either lead to three separate countries or “best case scenario” a very loose federation of three distinct “states”. This is a scenario the Kurds and Shiites would love. The biggest problem for the Sunni’s is that most of the oil is in the north with the Kurds and south with the Shiites. The Sunni’s will end up with lots of desert and some sheep.
That being said, I have always believed that had Saddam been removed in 1991, civil war would have broken out and quite possibly we would have either been hurt or simply stuck in Iraq, never to leave. Keeping Saddam turned out to be a great decision for our family but quite possibly a horrible decision for the country.
Saddam would stay in power; the country would calm down and we would leave to Jordan in August 1991.
What can I say? Thank you America!!
The 2005 version of me was grateful for having escaped Iraq and for America’s role in that escape.
But the 2022 version of me was quite different. Still grateful for the escape, but…
Missiles & Syringes - Lies are Unbekoming (substack.com)
American missiles freed me to poison my kids with American syringes.
Why they are the way they are doesn’t really matter. They just are.
And what they are, is not the good guys.
It turns out there are no good guys.
I watched the The Covenant with my son recently, and spoiler alert, there’s a happy ending with Gyllenhaal’s character going back to Afghanistan to save and extract the Afghan translator that had once saved his life. The final scene is with all of them, including the translator’s wife and young child, sitting in the helicopter that had come to save them and take them back to the US. It’s great Empire propaganda, that I still somehow enjoy.
I turned to my son and said, “someone should tell the translator and his wife that they are going to need to inject their child with 72 doses so the kid can go to school…they might not want to go.”
Somehow it always ends with an injection…
Anyway, back to the Kurds and one last story to wrap this post up, again from memories I wrote down in 2005.
Dawood
Dawood [my mother’s cousin] would have been about four years older than me and was a smaller, better looking version of his father. A mischievous streak combined with a killer smile. The girls loved him.
Dawood never was one for school either and before long he was drafted into the army. This would have been around 1984.
There were two wars going on in Iraq at that time. The war that Saddam started with Iran in 1980 and the internal war between Saddam and the Kurds that had been going on in one form or another since the Baath party took control of the country in the 1960’s.
The Kurds are an interesting people. They are mountain people that you find in the area connecting Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. They are not Arabs. They speak their own language, Kurdish, which is a distant derivative of Persian. They are fiercely independent and have been fighting for that independence since there were Sumerians in the area. Thousands of years! So Saddam was just another tyrant in a long, long list of tyrants they have been fighting with.
My best friend, Arkan, was a Kurd. A tall, wide young man at the time, he was proud and very intelligent. A great chess player. A lot of the chess I know today (in 2005) I learnt and practiced with him.
Kurds have always been the butt of most jokes in Iraq. They are Iraq’s Irish. But when you looked at the top ranked chess players in Iraq, they were all Kurds. A very smart bunch of people who have proven their smarts by what they have achieved in the Northern autonomous part of Iraq. While the rest of the country rages in chaos, the Kurds have a functional democracy and a booming economy. All they ever needed and wanted was to be left alone.
Dawood was drafted and sent to the Northern part of the country. He was stationed with a small group of soldiers on top of a small mountain on the border between Iraq and Iran. They would have had Iran in front of them and the Kurds behind them. The proverbial rock and hard place.
It was the Kurds that got them.
Word got back to Mineshe and his family that Dawood’s unit had been hit. Many were dead and his status was unconfirmed. We couldn’t believe it. There was something invincible about Dawood; we couldn’t believe that he was gone. No one officially came to say that he had died but as time wore on I think most of us thought that he had.
I remember Dawood’s best friend, Zedoun, with his arms around Dawood’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe. He was smelling his best friend’s clothes and sobbing uncontrollably.
Mineshe seemed to lose an inch, and was not his whole self, he became quieter. His sisters and mother just kept crying.
Then about two weeks of hell later they heard that there were rumours of survivors from the Kurdish strike on Dawood’s unit. Who, what and where were still unclear but there was some hope that he might have been taken prisoner.
Over the next few days, it was confirmed that Dawood had survived. He was the only one to do so.
Not long after, they received a letter from him saying that he was in one piece, unhurt and being treated well by his Kurdish captors. The Kurds must have taken a liking to him, that killer smile again! They let him go after about two months. Obviously, everyone was happy to have him back, they partied for a few days and heard all the stories, but Mineshe never regained that lost inch.
We heard of how David’s unit had been ambushed at night by a Kurdish group of Peshmerga. Peshmerga is what we called a Kurdish soldier, because of their tenacity and mountain fighting skills they were similar to commandos and considered a cut above the typical Iraqi soldier.
We heard how everyone else had died and how he had managed to keep fighting until this ammunition ran out. Like his father before him, he had stood up to the crowd by himself and not backed down. I think the Peshmerga respected him for that. Whatever the reason, they took a liking to him, treated him well and let him go.
He would have been at home for 3-4 weeks before he had to go back to “work” again. Over the next few years, he would see action at the Iranian border and when the Gulf War started he was redrafted and served some time in Kuwait.
All in all, he would have spent the best 10 years of his life fighting Saddam’s wars. He wasn’t the only one, there are many, many men in Iraq that have served up to 20 years and more in Saddam’s armies and they are the lucky ones that survived!
But the bright side is that he survived, went on to marry his teenage sweetheart who lived next door and still lives in Baghdad with his 3 children (as at 2005).
I loved Dawood. It was hard not to.
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