You’ve probably seen the news reports that the ‘Iraqi president’ has denounced the Baker-Hamilton ISG report. And this fact is being played in many new reports to suggest that even a key member of the Iraqi government thinks the report contains disastrous proposals. But that impression is highly misleading if you don’t know who Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s nominal president really is.
Talabani is the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two dominant political ‘parties’ in Iraqi Kurdistan, the other being the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party. I put ‘parties’ in quotes not to signal derision but because they are not parties in the ordinary sense of the word but something more like para-states with their own highly trained and able militias.
The relevant point is that the Kurds — very understandably — have never been happy in Iraq. The Kurds played a key role in getting us to invade Iraq in 2003 and their militias coordinated with coalition forces in the North. They need us there to maintain their de facto independence within Iraq or allow them time to consolidate it. The whole tangled story of our ties to the Kurds is immensely complicated, historically and morally. But suffice it to say that it is no surprise that Kurdish political leaders won’t like ISG report. And in this case, that’s what Talabani is, a key Kurdish political leader. The fact that he is the nominal ‘president’ of Iraq is an artifact of the collapsing efforts at a government of national unity.
