I point out that there is one other map with a Kurdistan on it -- the one drawn up by Lawrence of Arabia. A lot of trouble might have been avoided if the Foreign Office had paid him any attention...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lawrence_map800.jpg

I'm not sure of the political consequences of their ambitions or even if its possible without inviting their destruction from their enemies, butt I have to say that I am down with the Kurds. The ME needs more folks like them. I wish them luck. They seem to understand democracy and tolerance and even good accountable government. I have no idea how these folks have disentangled themselves from the endemic radical dysfunction of their region. All that matters is that we support them. To me they are the best hope for sanity in that region.

I'm all for Kurdistan proper, but this seems a little reminiscient of Brazillia.

Along with all this shiny happy-happy stuff, maybe someone should mention the massive corruption and human rights violations in Kurdistan, or is it OK if our allies do it?
5 seconds with google and "Kurdistan corruption" gives 287,000 hits. From Wash Post"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082001317.html"
"In Mosul, a city of above 1 million convulsed by violence, and the hundreds of villages that stretch across a vast plain to the east, many residents fear both the insurgents and the men who are fighting them. The Iraqi army forces in Mosul are dominated by four Kurdish battalions, according to Sinjari.
Since the Kurdish fighters entered the region in November following the collapse of the 7,000-man Mosul police force, U.S. officials and Iraqi humanitarian organizations have received formal complaints that hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and others have been picked up in raids or off the streets and transferred in secret to prisons in Kurdistan, the semiautonomous region controlled by the two Kurdish parties.
The growing reports of the missing stretch across an arc that spans the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders, as desperate families search for relatives who have disappeared into a maze of Kurdish-run prisons.
The Kurds are holding detainees in the Kurdistan cities of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk, Akrah, and Shaklawa, according to human rights activists, political leaders and released detainees.
The total number of prisoners is unknown. Sinjari declined to give figures. In June, the U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases in Kirkuk alone. Sunni Arab and Turkmen political leaders in the city estimated there were more than 500. Wisam al Saadi, deputy director of the Islamic Organization for Human Rights, said in the last two months 120 families from Mosul have lodged complaints but many more are afraid to come forward.
"
From those leftists at the Nation comes another view of these Stalinist-style show projects which so entrance Totten ...
"More typically, political life in Kurdistan is about power, patronage and corruption. Two secular nationalist parties rule Kurdistan: The western half of the region is controlled by the older, more conservative Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), run by Massoud Barzani, who inherited the party from his father and now monopolizes its key functions with his many Barzani clansmen. In the east the newer, formerly socialist Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani is in charge. The PUK is the more secular and less clan-oriented of the two, but both groups draw on family and tribal ties and neither has a coherent ideology. A smattering of Islamic, leftist and minority ethnic parties also hold some seats in local and regional government.
From 1994 to 1999 the tension between the KDP and PUK erupted into fratricidal civil war. At its peak, Barzani even brought in Saddam Hussein's troops to overrun Talabani's PUK stronghold in Sulaimaniya. The war left rank-and-file Kurds deeply cynical about Kurdish leadership and organized politics in general.
Now all the important things in Kurdistan come in twos--one for each party. Each party has its own regional Cabinet. All ministries are duplicated. There are two incompatible cell phone systems. Two sets of TV and radio stations, two party-controlled universities. Barzani heads the regional government, while Talabani takes the largely ceremonial post of Iraqi president in Baghdad.
What the parties do share with each other and most of the Iraqi political class is a culture of corruption. As in the rest of Iraq, oil money flows easily while bookkeeping is minimal: According to various audits, between $5 billion and $12 billion in oil revenue has simply gone missing from state coffers. No one really knows how much has been stolen in Kurdistan. But the signs of graft are everywhere.
At the KDP's Ministry of Economics and Administration I met the meek young Bashdar Habib, general director of planning and follow-up. His office has the feel of a tacky hotel suite--plastic flowers, gray-and-pink splatter-patterned wallpaper. There are no books or reports anywhere. He sits at his desk reading the KDP newspaper. He has been here for three months but cannot give me even the most basic or general numbers about the Kurdish economy because no one has given them to him. He has a bachelor's degree in finance and no experience in economic planning.
He is apologetic and takes me to meet the director of finance, the older, more commanding but still quite amateur Rasheed Hassn. In that office the story is the same: Little is happening, no numbers are available. Then there is a business interruption. A clerk has a bill for several hundred thousand dollars from a contractor, and it seems that the firm in question may have already been paid but maybe not. No one is sure. Meanwhile, Barzani's associates are investing huge sums in stadiums, empty shopping malls and luxury housing developments with capital from who knows where. These bizarre, mostly empty trophy projects surround Kurdistan's two headquarter cities, Erbil and Sulaimaniya.
But this corrupt order--in which clan, party, state and commerce all merge and overlap--is not without benefits for the average Kurd. Vying for the loyalty of common people, the two parties are engaged in a patronage-based cold war in which jobs, houses, pensions, generators, new schools and health clinics are used to win votes, influence and obedience. As one farmer explained it: "Sometimes the parties are judged by how they serve the people."
In the PUK-controlled village of Greda Boor, not far from the area where KDP influence starts, Akran Anwar Karem and his family are winnowing the chaff from seed onion. "We'll plant these again later," he says. Given that Saddam leveled this village during the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, conditions could be worse. He points out a new school and clinic but complains that the promised electrical lines are a year late. He'd like some fertilizer as well.
If the petroleum-funded patronage system can serve a weird redistributive function, it also has a punitive side.
"We have mud houses that we build ourselves," says Nazwad Muhiadin, who farms cucumbers and tomatoes in a flat, hot KDP-controlled village north of Kirkuk called Sheran. "The KDP built those brick houses for its supporters. When we went to the other party to get a big generator, the KDP threatened to take it from us, so we don't have one."
The party patronage system has also served to stall the official Kurdish agenda of neoliberalism--that is to say, the US occupation's program of mass privatization. Despite the free-market bromides mouthed by party hacks, they continue doing things the old-fashioned way. Many of the nonpetroleum sectors of the economy--cigarettes, cement, utilities and carpets--are still state-held. Education and healthcare are free. The government employs 35 percent of the workforce, and 60 percent of the population receives some sort of pension or government assistance. The land reform of the early 1960s has not been rolled back. All of this bolsters the power of the parties. It also means that the region lacks the truly grinding poverty marked by dump scavenging, begging and mass brigandage that plagues much of the global South."

"Along with all this shiny happy-happy stuff, maybe someone should mention the massive corruption and human rights violations in Kurdistan"

Try googling corruption, human rights violations, and White House.

Kurdistan isnt perfect, but its easily the most liberal, progressive culture in the middle east (outside of Israel). Considering the ongoing war and the Arab Sunni history against them, i take any charges leveled against the Kurds with a grain of salt. Nasty things are certainly ongoing on both sides, but i'll take the Kurds any day over the Baathists. Lets not forgo the good for the perfect.

His office has the feel of a tacky hotel suite--plastic flowers, gray-and-pink splatter-patterned wallpaper. There are no books or reports anywhere.

Plastic flowers and tacky hotel decor? Oh, horrors! That's a sure sign of Stalinism.

A short history of the Kurds in Iraq

Arabization has been going on since the 1920s, ever since the Kingdom of Iraq was created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire by the United Kingdom. But it was intensified after 1975 after the Algerian Agreement between Iran and Iraq, under which the Shah cut his support for Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Kurds are forcibly evicted from their homes in Kirkuk, Mosul and other oil-rich regions of northern Iraq unless they agree to have their registered nationality changed to Arab. If they refuse, which many do, they are expelled from their homes, usually with only a few hours to gather their possessions and turned north, to the Kurdish enclave in the north. Arab families are lured from the south to the vacant Kurdish homes in the north with money, land and pickup trucks, all confiscated from the displaced Kurds. It is estimated that more than 8,000 families live in Binislawa. That's more than 50,000 people.

NATO went to war in 1998-99 in Kosovo and Yugoslavia to prevent this kind of stuff.

But changing his ethnicity isn't all Wahab was expected to do. The Iraqis demanded he join the elite Jerusalem Brigade, which now holds positions about 20 km outside of Arbil. So named because Saddam has said this fighting force will be the one to liberate Jerusalem from the Jews, the Kurds say that the road to Jerusalem runs through Kurdistan. Wahab was being told he must be prepared to make war on his own people.

Since he refused all this, he was expelled, along with his wife, his mother and his eight children. Now they all live in a tent, and they might be considered the lucky ones.

- In 1983, 8,000 Kurds were "disappeared" by the Iraqi regime.

- In 1987-88, 180,000 people disappeared or were executed under the Anfal Campaign. "Anfal" is a principle from the Koran and it allows the looting of a non-Muslim population when Muslims conquer them.

- In 1988, Halabja became a nightmare when Saddam used chemical weapons against women and children, killing 5,000 people in about 15 minutes. More than 10,000 people were injured and the region suffers from lingering health problems. In all, more than 200 villages were gassed and no one is sure how many people died. There have been no studies on the after-effects of the chemicals on the population or the environment.

So, Wahab is understandably anxious to see Saddam go. "If Saddam is overthrown, I would run back to Kirkuk!" says Wahab. "My family has been living there for 300 years."

The Kurds are currently being slandered by Arabists like Juan Cole and pro-Arabization "journalists" like Justin Raimondo. These writers, like the leftist "Nation" have been opposed to our actions in Iraq and to the American government for years.

There's a war going on. The Kurds (and the Jews, Christians, the Zoroastrians and the black Africans) are opposed to the current Arab/Islamist campaign of ethnic cleansing that has left millions dead and homeless. Writers like Cole, Raimondo and some Leftists have chosen to be on the side of "Arabization", the ethnic cleansing campaign that has left millions dead and homeless. Their writing reflects that.

Well Mary, if we're judging by these grand standards, I have an Armenian friend who might have a bone or two to pick with you about the supposed innocence of the Kurds.

I have an Armenian friend who might have a bone or two to pick with you about the supposed innocence of the Kurds

I never said the Kurds were 'innocent'. No culture or society that has managed to survive to this point could be called innocent.

I said that the Kurds were fighting Arabization, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that has killed, displaced and enslaved millions. Do you disagree with that?

Yeah I do. I think its a bit innapropriate to lump Saddam's Arabization of N. Iraq in with all other displacements of peoples by Arabs. It's sloppy, reductionist, and all too convenient.

For one thing, it confuses what was a very localized and systematic process with a greater trend, one many other civs share. The effect of which is to undermine the Kurdish arguement (since they are the chief party in one of the greatest massacres of all time)-- That is-- if your goal is to defend the Kurds.

Of course that isn't your goal though, now is it?