kurds – Unspoken Politics

The action fallacy and Syria

The UK House of Commons finished marathon debate over authorizing airstrikes in Syria. The government motion passed 397-223. In 2013 the same body defeated a similar intervention bill, with a united Labour joined by minor parties and defections from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

It is not surprising that this vote will succeed, and do so by a considerable margin. The Paris attacks have turned dozens of Labour MPs into hawks. Jeremy Corbyn, the most anti-war party leader in recent memory, was unable to get his delegation into line. Ed Miliband, who led the opposition to the 2013 bill, also voted against airstrikes.

Corbyn is being pilloried by the press and by members of his own party, who has been given almost no breathing room despite an overwhelming mandate in his election.

This whole debate reeks of historical blindness. Corbyn and his anti-war brethren are just being consistent- 12 years ago the same debate occurred, about intervention in Iraq.

Is there a record of Western military intervention creating stable, secular nation-states?

No.

Was there an exit strategy before intervening in Iraq?

No.
Is there one now?

No.

Will an escalation of force undermine ISIS recruitment? Former hostage and journalist Nicolas Hénin thinks it’s a trap to rally support around ISIS.

The “good war” of today will be, just like Iraq, the “bad war” of a decade in the future. Each time a Noble Defense of Liberal Democracy(tm) turns into a bloody, expensive quagmire, there’s a whole round of editorials about a powerful lesson learned. Acquired wisdom will prevent the same mistakes.

I’ll forward the title of this post: the action fallacy. In times of crisis, it is always easier to defend doing something over not doing something. A wide range of people, including some of the Labour shadow ministry, see anti-war principles as weakness. Strength involves using people and money to destroy other people. Intervening in Iraq was worth creating free university, housing, investment in clean energy. Put this way- to dive into war with no evidence that it will improve the situation is to say you oppose programs that are guaranteed to improve a situation- not just in the United Kingdom, but Syria as well. For several million dollars you can build housing or turn one into a smoking crater.

Would ISIS exist in 2015 if there was no coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003? Highly unlikely, as its leadership in part are Sunnis who were displaced, and when the army was disbanded, they took their weapons and went home. If money was actually invested in creating a strong Kurdish state in northern Iraq, ISIS would never have been able to invade east.

The Western countries which are bombing (or will soon) talk about Western values and international cooperation. They’ve been completely unable to stop Turkey from bombing the Kurds, who are those secular anti-ISIS rebels that Westerners are always talking about. Never mind that the Kurds are the only thing keeping ISIS from having a long border with a NATO nation.

I’d like to finish by shaming one MP and praising another. Alison McGovern, a Labour MP who is voting for war but wants to couch it in humanitarianism, said this in her speech:

the biggest recruitment for vile extremism is want. It is dissatisfaction with the chances the world is offering you, whether in the back streets of Britain or the cities of Africa and the Middle East where young people find that the powerful in our world forget them far too quickly.

This is an awful chunk of hypocrisy, and exactly the sort of hawkish rhetoric you get from ostensibly liberal Democrats in the United States. The biggest recruiter for “vile extremism” are civilian casualties, creating the narrative that Islam is being attacked by a coalition of Western countries and needs people to come and save it. That ISIS is not in any way a genuine Islamic organization is irrelevant- violent intervention turns logical analysis on its head. Conflict narrows the focus of all involved. It stirs up the blood and legitimates cruelty.

Yet that’s not the most troubling part. It’s an argument about poverty being a key issue of the problem. This is in part true, and would make sense were it not in a speech justifying expensive military operations. Ending poverty requires money, which is wasted on weapons and a misguided form of ‘nation-building’ that failed to turn Iraq into a stable country. And many people in the Middle East do end up joining ISIS out of poverty- Western-created from warfare. The War on Terror has been a fourteen-year long lessons that attacking terrorism with military force both kills extremists and creates new ones. This ignores all the recruits from the West, including Paris, whose poverty is also Western-created through capitalist exploitation and inequality.

Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, had a speech that had its issues, but summed things up well here:

we are being asked to intervene in a bloody civil war of huge complexity, we are being asked to do it without an exit strategy and no reasonable means of saying we are going to make a difference

Good point, Alex.

The Kurdish experiment: democracy and freedom in the 21st century

Thousands of Yazidis were rescued in August by terrorists. Wait, I thought ISIS (Daesh) were the terrorists?

Oh they are, to be sure. Just that the United States government hasn’t been eager to admit that it wasn’t United States humanitarian intervention that saved these people hidden in those Iraqi mountains. It was the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, best known by their acronym, PKK.

Three PKK fighters pose with an captured ISIS tank. Taken August 25, 2014. — Three PKK fighters pose with an captured ISIS tank.
Taken August 25, 2014.

The PKK has a history of violent conflict with Turkey, which earned it a spot on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The past few years have seen one of the most radical political transformations in modern history. Led by their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK has ended their armed conflict and replaced that struggle with another. Something special is happening in parts of Kurdistan- the most daring democratic experiment of the 21st century.

Writing for The Guardian, David Graeber gives an idea of the political transformation led by the PKK and its Syrian sister party, the PYD:

But what has happened in Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the chance to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous territory, suggests this is anything but window dressing. Councils, assemblies and popular militias have been formed, regime property has been turned over to worker-managed co-operatives – and all despite continual attacks by the extreme rightwing forces of Isis. The results meet any definition of a social revolution.

These assemblies start at the lowest level, electing higher levels. Diversity is mandated, including women in positions of authority. Radical literature is discussed frequently in meetings. In some places, the non-state assembly structure is more powerful than the regular government. In some sense, the PKK is replacing the independent country they cannot have with a new sort of free society- one that comes from direct democracy and an end to oppressive institutions.

As Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR) published earlier this year, the PKK has gone through a earnest transformation thanks in part to the honesty of its leader:

Öcalan embarked, in his prison writings, on a thorough re-examination and self-criticism of the terrible violence, dogmatism, personality cult and authoritarianism he had fostered: “It has become clear that our theory, programme and praxis of the 1970s produced nothing but futile separatism and violence and, even worse, that the nationalism we should have opposed infested all of us. Even though we opposed it in principle and rhetoric, we nonetheless accepted it as inevitable.” Once the unquestioned leader, Öcalan now reasoned that “dogmatism is nurtured by abstract truths which become habitual ways of thinking. As soon as you put such general truths into words you feel like a high priest in the service of his god. That was the mistake I made.”

So many hardline Marxist-Leninist militias are unable to break out of their dogma, and they either forsake socialism altogether, or ossify into obscurity. Perhaps there is another way to move forward, to transform from a failed revolution to a thriving one.

Everything that is reprehensible about ISIS is countered by the Kurdish revolutionaries. Clearly they are not terrorists of the same ilk.

Female and male PKK fighters pose during training.

Thankfully the past day has seen CNBC post a short editorial with a simple title- “Why the US should take PKK off the terror list“. Put simply, the United States has gotten its ass saved by the PKK showing up to save Yazidi- especially after the US-trained peshmerga forces ran away after a brief fight with ISIS. For Western powers, the story of PKK should be positive- an enemy has become a friend. Not due to shifting alliances (the old Cold War mentality), but the transformation of a strong, dedicated group of people.

ROAR ends their feature with a call to action:

those of us who value the idea of civilization owe our gratitude to the Kurds, who are fighting the jihadists of Islamist fascism day and night on the frontlines in Syria and Iraq, defending radical democratic values with their lives.

The Kurds, in particular the PKK and the PYD, should be the talk of the radical left, and any that oppose what ISIS is doing to Iraq and Syria. But the Kurds are often ignored, and even moreso the democratic revolution that is going on in some areas. Let that not be the case. The Kurds are a stateless people, their history is one of cultural loss, genocide, and struggle- armed and unarmed. They have a story to tell us all, we only need listen.

Gnawed by enormous rats: three years of desperate conflict in Homs

Homs destruction: Damaged buildings in the Khalidiyah area of Homs — Central Homs in July 2013.
Credit Sam Skaine (AFP/Getty)

Patrick Cockburn for The Independent has been the only Western journalist in Homs during a bout of new violence. Homs was a key city in the initial rebellion and has seen constant shelling- hundreds of thousands are displaced and trying to avoid the fighting. Swaths of the city are a ruin (I posted a picture of the destroyed streets in the December snow).

Cockburn gives a vision of what Homs is currently like that I found haunting, speaking of

marks of total destruction are everywhere since this is one of Homs’s “ghost districts” where the buildings have been torn apart by shell fire and their walls are pock-marked with bullets so they look as if they had been gnawed by enormous rats. Where buildings survive, their doorways and windows are boarded up and they look abandoned.

The Syrian Army looks like they are close to defeating the last rebel pockets in Homs- ~400,000 civilians are in the rebel districts, causing aid disruptions. The Army obviously doesn’t want to feed armed rebels, and it’s difficult to feed just noncombatants.

Here is the January 2014 situation in Homs. Red is the Syrian government, Green is the opposition.

Conflict between the government and rebels exists all over the country. A talented young American has produced some maps of Aleppo that show how entrenched and divided the city is- the most important in Syria outside of Damascus.

Time flies- and sometimes we can forget how long this conflict has been going on. These rebel pockets in Homs have existed for almost three years- the American involvement in World War II was less than four. It is carnage, and a civil war that each day has more and more sides fighting amongst each other. It is tough to speak of an “opposition” since some groups oppose the government and the rebels equally- the Kurds control a large amount of territory and mostly fight al-Qaeda-aligned groups, who in turn fight other rebel groups as well as the government.

Over three million refugees– more than 1/8th the pre-war population. Don’t forget about the toll- more than those dead and wounded. It is immense.

The Kurds- the Syrian civil war’s third side

A group of YPG (Kurdish militia) fighters in Syria

The Kurds in Syria have declared an autonomous region in the northern and eastern parts of the country where they have large populations.

The announcement comes on the heels of battle successes against Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), among the most powerful of the myriad homegrown and foreign forces fighting the Assad regime.

Since the latest fighting between the Syrian Kurds and Al Qaeda affiliates broke out in July, the dominant Kurdish organization, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), has used its battle successes to burnish its image among Kurds and consolidate its hold over the region.

With a population of somewhere between 30 and 40 million, the Kurds are among the largest people to not have their own sovereign state. Saddam Hussein launched a bloody campaign against the Kurds in the northern portion of Iraq, after they sided with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War that lasted through most of the 1980s. Towards the end of the conflict in 1988 a large-scale gas attack killed several thousand people. A large number of Kurds also live in southern Turkey, where the far-left Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fought a long conflict for independence, which stopped earlier this year after a unilateral ceasefire (though the conflict may get hot again, over Syria). The PYD draws a lot of support from the PKK, and a lot of material support from the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, which has a relative level of stability and economic prosperity.

How groups create and reinforce their identity, and through that their claims to political autonomy or independence, fascinates me. And the situation of the Kurds is interesting- a very large amount of people forming important minorities in several separate countries. They form a third side in Syria, between anti-Assad and pro-Assad coalitions, but it doesn’t quite sync up. Mostly, the Kurds want control over the regions they inhabit, and thus don’t share the goal of keeping or removing Assad from power. By fighting ISIS and hardline Sunni militants, they are helping the Shite Assad in his campaign to defeat moderate and extreme rebel factions. However, at some point the politics of the region boil down to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Moderate rebels may fear or despise the al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters, but their mutual hatred of of the ruling regime always encourages cooperation as much as division. Kurds may be ambivalent to Assad, but need support to keep their territory together and keep connections to other groups in other countries open.

A couple months ago, when Western intervention seemed obvious, I attempted to draw a diagram of all the nations, governments, factions, militias, and coalitions in the Syrian conflict. Ultimately my piece of paper was a complete mess- and I know I left out a bunch of key and secondary players. The conflict is being fought until one or more sides is ground into dust, and the desperation brings an aggressive, merciless politics along with it.

In some ways, this is just the latest chapter in the Kurdish story- one of conflict and separation that predates the Syrian civil war by a long, long long time.

Neat. Plausible. Wrong.

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

-H.L. Mencken

All parties accept that the situation in Syria is deeply complicated. On one side (which I guess would be the group against the pre-war status quo) there continue to be non-violent protestors against Assad. They are mixed in rebel-held areas with Sunni militias supported by Qatar and perhaps Saudi Arabia, and radical forces of mostly foreign extraction like al-Nusra that want a Sunni state at the expense of moderates and other religious groups.

This contrasts with an Assad regime supported by (and protecting) the relatively small Allawite Shite minority. They are given strong support from Hezbollah and thus considerable support from Iran. They also get large amounts of sophisticated weapons from Russia.

This is not even going into the Kurds and their involvement in Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey as a NATO nation dealing with a refugee issues, whether escalation could lead to strikes inside the borders of Israel. Many other countries in the region have been supporting one side or the other, or tried to be neutral (Lebanon) but failed or had to deal with the massive refugee crisis which will not end anytime soon.

So when U.S military intervention shows up, remember that any solution to a complex crisis that is neat, elegant, plausible also has another attribute- it’s totally wrong.