Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East

"Lawrence is an NPR reporter who spent a lot of time in Iraq and the Middle East. It’s a reporter’s account of his interaction with the Kurds and their struggle for an independent homeland. He gets a huge part of the story right and he really understands that what the Kurds always wanted is independence. There’s a wonderful episode in the book when Quil recounts driving with Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who at that point is the president of Iraq. The Bush administration always described Jalal as Iraqi to downplay Kurdish aspirations for independence. Talabani, who was a very good friend of mine, says to Quil as they are driving into his home territory, “Welcome to my country.” And at that point Jalal was president of all of Iraq. But Quil understands that Talabani does not mean Iraq, but Kurdistan. So Quil gets a lot of the key details of the last 30 years for the Kurds and he tells the story of that period well. My first book, The End of Iraq , was partly a memoir of my experience in Iraq and Kurdistan. Unintended Consequences looks at what emerged from the Iraq War, a war that President George W. Bush said was intended to combat an “Axis of Evil,” by which he meant Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It’s a metaphor that was geometrically challenged—since an axis is between two points and not three—but also historically challenged. The Berlin-Rome Axis in World War II was a pact between allies while, at the time Bush gave his axis of evil speech, there were no more bitter enemies in the world than Iran of the Ayatollahs and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The US invasion brought to power in Iraq—through democratic elections—Shiite religious parties that Iran had sponsored for decades, including one actually founded in Tehran. So now there is a Baghdad-Tehran axis, and Bush created it. In fact, Iran’s closest ally in the world is Iraq. Successive American administrations never like to admit that. The classic response to a foreign policy error is not to admit error and do something different, but to double down. Since the invasion and since Iran’s allies took power in Iraq, we’ve been consistently supporting Iran’s allies. In terms of what he does (as opposed to what he says) Trump might be the US president most helpful to Iran. In 2017, in an operation planned by Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s al Qods force, Trump let an Iraqi Shiite militia use American supplied Abrams tanks to attack the Kurds. Abu Mahdi Muhandes, the Shiite commander with the American tanks, is a US-designated terrorist, having been convicted of blowing up the US Embassy in Kuwait in 1983. And, while Trump let Iran’s proxies use US tanks, he refused to provide these weapons to the Iraqi Kurds, even though they have been America’s most reliable ally in this part of the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And, of course, Iran and its client Bashir al Assad are the big winners from Trump’s decision to pull out of Northeast Syria. On October 6, Syria was effectively divided between an American allied Kurdish zone controlling one third of Syria and an Iran allied government zone controlling the other two thirds. Today, Iran’s allies control all but a small part of the country. So we continue to strengthen Iran, and to do its bidding, at the same time as Trump is pulling out of the nuclear deal on the grounds that Iran is a malign force in the region. It’s bizarre. I don’t think anything in human affairs is completely inevitable. But what I do think is close to inevitable is that when a people in a geographically defined area consistently, persistently, and overwhelmingly desire to make their own state, sooner or later they’re going to get their own state. I don’t think that you’re going to see stability in the Middle East until the Kurds have their own state, at least in Iraq, and perhaps also in Syria."