Peter W. Galbraith's Reading List

"This is a book by Ariel Sabar, whose family came from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Jewish population of Iraq with very large in 1940; a quarter of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. But the partition of Palestine sparked increased repression of Jews in the region and led to a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq, including the author’s father. In the Arab parts of Iraq, Jews were fired from their jobs, had their property confiscated and were brutalized. But, in the Kurdish regions, there were no pogroms. On the contrary, the Kurds grieved the exodus of their Jewish neighbors. Within the region different religious communities–not just Muslims, but also Yazidis, Christians and Jews–are considered a constitutive part of Kurdistan. The Kurds have a long tradition of multicultural, multi-religious tolerance. The Kurds would argue that they go back to the Medes, [to the eighth century BC.] But these are cultural identities. I suspect that if you did a DNA analysis of most ethnic groups, you’d find many different ethnic strands among many members. But there is no doubt that the Kurds are an ethnic group with ancient roots."

"This is one of the textbook-type histories of the Kurds written by a historian. It’s a very good book for somebody who wants a fairly comprehensive survey of Kurdish history. One of the disadvantages of not having your own country is that you don’t have the archives and scholarship to write your own histories. There are not many surveys to choose from. This is one of the few, and it’s quite good. It’s important to understand that the way in which a national identity is defined in the Eastern Hemisphere—Europe, Asia and the Middle East—is quite different from how we look at it in the Western Hemisphere. In the Western Hemisphere, national identity goes with geography. In the United States, it doesn’t matter whether your ancestry is Greek, African, English or Chinese. Regardless, you are an American. This is true throughout the Western Hemisphere, including South and Central America and most of Canada. It is one reason why there is so little separatist sentiment in the Western Hemisphere, aside from Quebec. Everybody can belong to a geographic space if they live there. But in the Eastern hemisphere, the concept of nation, of nationality, goes with ethnicity. That’s how it is with the Kurds. They are citizens of the four countries among which they are divided, but they have a national identity as Kurds. So if you are a Kurd living in Turkey, you you are a Turkish citizen but you are not a Turk. This way of defining a nationality always makes people who are not from the dominant ethnicity feel as if they are second class citizens, and this fuels separatism."

"This is by a wonderful journalist named Aliza Marcus. It’s an account of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, the most prominent Kurdish movement in Turkey and one of the most difficult for us to wrestle with. It’s the story of how a party founded in Turkey in 1978 has waged a 35 year insurrection against the Turkish state. The PKK was declared to be a terrorist organization by Turkey, by the European Union and by the United States. In the case of the European Union and the United States, this is a political designation aimed to appease Turkey. The PKK is not like what we think of as terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. The leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, has a cult-like following, which Aliza describes. He began as somebody seeking to create an independent Kurdish state based on Marxist principles, with himself as a leader rather in the model of Joseph Stalin. In fact, the younger Öcalan bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Stalin. After Turkish special forces captured him in 1999, he underwent a transformation in beliefs. While in prison, he read the works of a Vermont philosopher named Murray Bookchin who advocated secularism, gender equality, radical environmentalism and communitarianism. These ideas were picked up by Syrian Kurds. In Northeast Syria, there is strict gender equality in all official positions and in order to make it work, the Kurds have created two positions for each executive job. There are co-prime ministers, co-mayors, and co-party leaders, one male and one female. There are women generals in the Syrian Democratic Forces and many of the fighters are female. The SDF was the main force fighting the Islamic State. In my last visit to Northeast Syria, I visited a TV station where everyone from top management to the cleaning staff, including all the anchors and all the reporters, are women. Marcus’s book, although a little dated–it doesn’t include what’s happened in Syria–is one of the few definitive works on this unique ideology and the history of the PKK. He’s swallowed Erdogan’s line on the PKK, that the Syrian Kurds are nothing more than PKK terrorists. They’re not. It’s true that they were influenced by Abdullah Öcalan and there are people who were in the PKK, but the Syrian Kurds created their own statelet and there’s been no evidence of a single terrorist act on Turkey originating from Kurdish-controlled Syria. There is, however, plenty of evidence of Turkey facilitating infiltration of terrorists into Syria. I’ve interviewed quite a number of ISIS fighters and family members and every one got to Syria by going through Turkey. That’s because the Turks intentionally looked the other way. When Trump says “they are no angels” it’s just a way for Trump to excuse himself for having betrayed an ally who lost 11,000 lives fighting the Islamic State on our behalf."

"Samantha Power first came to the public notice for her work on the American response to genocide in Bosnia, or to be more precise, the lack thereof. The title, A Problem From Hell is a quote from Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s congressional testimony about the situation in Bosnia, explaining why the United States couldn’t do anything to stop the genocide there. She was a young reporter during the Bosnia war, but she looks not just at that genocide but at earlier genocides. These include the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians in the First World War and Saddam’s genocide against the Kurds. She describes how Saddam destroyed every village in Kurdistan and gassed the Kurds. The US Senate actually tried to stop the genocide by imposing comprehensive sanctions on Iraq, unanimously passing The Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988. The Reagan administration opposed even weak sanctions, even as it agreed that Saddam had used poison gas on the Kurds. They thought, as matter of realpolitik, that Iraq was more important to American interests than the Kurds and that with the end of the Iran-Iraq War there’d be great business opportunities in Iraq. That didn’t turn out well. The Reagan administration gave Saddam a free pass after he destroyed all the villages of Kurdistan, murdered 180,000 Kurds, and used poison gas. Not surprisingly, Saddam thought he could get away with anything. And, on the 2nd of August, 1990 he invaded Kuwait. I was just in Syrian Kurdistan at the end of September, ten days before Trump greenlit Erdogan’s action. One of the people I met was a young woman, Hevrin Khalaf, the founder of the Future Syria Party, which was intended to bring Kurds, Christians, and Arabs together. In our meeting, she asked me ‘will the United States support us?’ I had to tell her, ‘with our current president, we don’t know.’ Now we know. She was pulled out of her car, brutally beaten, and shot a few days ago. There are 200,000 people who have fled their homes there, hundreds of Kurds are dead. Turkish forces are filming themselves executing Kurdish prisoners, posting pictures of themselves with dead Kurds. These are war crimes. These are crimes against humanity."

"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."