CUMHURIYET- Columnist Hikmet Cetinkaya comments on recent political developments concerning northern Iraq ahead of possible US-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein. A summary of his column is as follows:
Don’t the US, Britain, France, Germany and Belgium know very well that Saddam Hussein is a dictator? Don’t you think there is a historical dishonesty in all this Iraq business?
Weren’t it they (the US and certain other European countries) which supported Hitler’s post-Versailles rise in order to counter Soviet socialism? Wasn’t it Britain which in 1922 signed an alliance pact with Iraq in order to balance out Iran? Saddam Hussein had yet to be born at that time.
Let me remind my readers what Sir Percy Cox, then Britain’s high commissioner for Baghdad, told Sheikh Ibn-Saud, the would-be Saudi Arabia king of the time, in a tent in the Arabian desert in 1922: ‘I’m the one who will draw the borders between Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.’ Indeed, he did just what he said. Today’s borders separating these countries were laid down at that time. Sir Cox did so because it was in the best interests of his country.
Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s (IKDP) foreign policy chief, said on Sunday that if Turkish troops enter northern Iraq by force, there would be clashes between them and the region’s Kurds. In fact, this is what IKDP leader Massoud Barzani has been saying since the very beginning of the Iraq crisis. A ‘Kurdish state’ in northern Iraq is what he has always dreamed of.
The Kurdish tribes in northern Iraq are dead set against the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) entering the region, and they are trying to urge the US and Britain to head off Turkey’s ‘interference.’ Maybe it’s just that the US and Britain are seeking ways to refashion a post-Saddam Iraq together with Kurdish leaders as a tripartite country.
It’s well known that Barzani has been cooperating with the terrorist organization PKK for some time now. Moreover, his nephew Ethem Barzani, the leader of the Hizbullah Party, has called on the PKK to conduct ‘armed resistance’ against the TSK in northern Iraq in order to secure the future of ‘Kurdistan.’
What about Kuwait? What was Britain’s point in creating such an artificial stump state just to Iraq’s south? Kuwait was established specifically to prevent Iraq’s becoming a Britain’s competitor in its claims on oil-rich gulf territories.
As time went by, Iraq began resisting the British mandate and dominance. In 1958, it ended the monarchy and declared a republic, and in 1990 it became the world’s enemy with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.
But didn’t the US and certain other European countries sell Saddam weapons of mass destruction during the country’s decade-long war with Iran? Using those very weapons, didn’t Saddam gas thousands of Kurds to death in Halepce?
What we are witnessing today in the Iraq crisis is nothing but historical dishonesty. It was the US which supported Iraq in the ‘80s against the regime in Iran. A similar thing is happening now in northern Iraq. Kurdish groups are being used against Turkey. IKDP leader Barzani is branding Turkish forces in the region as ‘invaders.’ The game goes on.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION