Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Across the aisle in the PUK, Barham Salih also stayed on in the capital, still working desperately to convince Baghdad and Washington that the Kurds believed in Iraq. His title in the latest government was deputy prime minister, but Salih remained the consummate inside man, with his office as well as his home in the center of the Green Zone, not far from the palace serving as the American embassy. Like Zebari, Salih was caught in the middle, with Kurds back home wondering why he had expended so much effort in Baghdad, and the Arabs and internationals in Baghdad never quite believing that he wanted anything more than the time and money necessary to declare Kurdish independence and pull out. Salih stuck to his party line and never let on if he was tired of repeating it.

  "We all want independence, but we think, genuinely so, that if Iraq becomes a democratic federal state, it is so much better for [the Kurds]—with all the resources of this country, a bigger entity," he said.

  Indeed the Kurds' slice of the Iraqi pie had measured to 17 percent of Iraq's oil revenues, a mountain of cash that would be the envy of many countries in the region. While the constitution had allowed the Kurds to authorize new oil exploration in their region, the proceeds from any new wells would still go to Baghdad for redistribution. And Salih quickly laid out the madness of declaring independence: Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Arab Iraq would all declare war, with the Turks invading almost immediately to preempt the spread of a "Greater Kurdistan." Kurdistan's oil would be landlocked by hostile forces, and the Kurds wouldn't even have a refinery capable of meeting their own gasoline needs, much less getting rich off the stuff. An independent Kurdistan would unite the region in opposition, and it would lose the one friend it had: the United States. In fact, more than any other group, Salih said, the Kurds needed to keep Iraq going along the American program of federal democratic rule.

  "The mother of all ironies is that the perennial victims of the state of Iraq may end up being the saviors of Iraq," he said. But with mortars landing daily even inside the Green Zone, it sounded a tall order. Salih added a disclaimer, "The Kurds will not be the cause of the breakup of Iraq; it will be the Arabs. And if they decide to break it up, there is nothing we can do about it."

  If America left prematurely—before Iraqi security forces were up to the task of maintaining order—Salih predicted first that Iraq would fall to civil war, and then spark a regional war across the Middle East between Shi'ites and Sunnis, between Arabs, Kurds, and Turks. From Baghdad, it seemed impossible to think that the Americans could ever consider pulling out, not with such a tense standoff in the region. But in Washington, as even Republicans starting finding language to distance themselves from President Bush, it seemed impossible to contemplate staying. The 2006 midterm elections turned on the issue of Iraq, and the Democratic Party won back both houses of Congress. President Bush immediately accepted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. The 2008 election season begun immediately, also pivoting on plans to get America out of Iraq.

  WATCHING FROM THE hills of Kurdistan as Iraq trembled in daily explosions felt oddly like watching from America. The violent images on television transfixed the Kurds, and though they felt a safe distance away, they couldn't help but wonder what consequences lay in store. If Iraq fell apart, would it take them with it? Would America stand by the safe zone it had created fifteen years earlier? Would their own leaders rise above their petty rivalry to secure a peaceful and even a democratic future for the ever more visible nation of Iraqi Kurds?

  Seeing that they were the only functioning part of the country encouraged the KDP and PUK to cooperate, and the rivals refrained from fighting over a few key posts in the Kurdistan Regional Government. Nechirvan Barzani led the KRG, with his uncle Masoud acting as president, but after the December 2005 elections, they had willingly filled some key ministries with independent and PUK Kurds. Ali Bapir's Komala Islami party held seats in parliament and the environment ministry—a token post to say they were part of Kurdistan's government.* Masoud Barzani's chief of staff, Fuad Hussein, had worked with the CPA and then for Talabani, who sent him over to Masoud. The all-important Kurdish oil ministry went to a PUK man, Ashti Flawrami, apparently chosen for his expertise, not his affiliation. Hawrami got right to work, using some of the same international consultants to work on Kurdistan's oil law as had negotiated the Iraqi constitution. Also unified was the Kurdish representation in Washington, where Qubad Talabani pushed the agenda of the Kurdistan Regional Government, declaring with a smile that his boss's name was Nechirvan Barzani, one of the men who had sent him running up a mountainside ten years earlier.

  Qubad had briefly shared the post with a KDP partner, but soon took over the operation himself. He kept in constant contact with Nechirvan, and the two men gave the impression that the next generation of Kurds would work together. Qubad's job description only included the KRG's concerns in the United States, but of course he helped coordinate whenever his father came to Washington or New York, and often collaborated with Hoshyar Zebari's staff as well. Just as his father had slowly slipped into a much larger role than he had signed on for, Qubad evolved from the Kurdistan liaison to the de facto Iraqi ambassador. Iraq's official embassy to Washington, the same run-down building near Dupont Circle, had been a revolving door, eventually taken over by a secular Sunni businessman with no pull in Baghdad's Shi'ite government. Qubad, on the other hand, had a direct line to the president of Iraq and almost a decade of experience in Washington. During his time alongside Barham Salih he earned a sterling reputation for information with minimal spin. Qubad had been meeting with U.S. presidential hopefuls since the 2004 elections, and Dick Cheney's office regularly called him on his cell phone for advice.

  Qubad lobbied both sides of the congressional aisle, with the goal of making protection of Kurdistan a political litmus test in Washington, like Israel or Taiwan. The Kurds had even sought out Israeli advisors to show them how it was done, and eventually in June 2004, the Kurds turned to a top Republican lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers. After paying the small sum of $29,000 for one month's representation by the Washington insiders, the Kurds had secured $1.4 billion of leftover frozen funds from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. Results were near instantaneous—in the final days of the CPA, three U.S. helicopters delivered the cash to the Kurds' central bank in Erbil, in bricks of new Benjamin Franklins, weighing fifteen tons.2 The Kurds kept BG&R on the payroll, and soon saw another familiar face—Robert Blackwill. The former ambassador whom Condoleezza Rice had picked as her point man on Iraq had left the public sector, waited the mandatory "cooling off " year, and then gone to work as a lobbyist for the Kurds.

  Success had its problems though. The Kurds' strength spooked the Arabs, and Nechirvan Barzani kept holding Baghdad's feet to the fire—for example, making sure that Iraq delivered Kurdistan's 17 percent of the oil profits in current oil prices, pushing one hundred dollars per barrel in 2007, and not at the twenty-six dollars per barrel when the deal was made. And while Iraq's oil minister, Hussein Shahristani, failed to push through a national hydrocarbons law, he did find time to decry the Kurdistan regional law as illegal. Nechirvan fired back that the KRG was following the one law that had been ratified in the new Iraq.

  "Everyone in Iraq voted for the constitution and all these articles are a constitutional commitment. No government in Baghdad can deny this. We are patiently waiting to see how the constitution will be implemented," Nechirvan said.

  The oil law negotiations had broken down in December 2006, with a draft that the Kurds had signed off on sitting on Shahristani's desk in Baghdad.3 Disputes settled around the KRG's authority to sign its own deals, and whether the government in Baghdad would have a right to veto them. There was also a difference in philosophy—the Kurds were pro-American, pro-investment, and willing to make attractive deals in order to get foreign companies into Kurdistan as soon as possible. They had made oil a priority and put their best technocrats on it, as well as hiring some outside experts. Shahristani, on the other hand, ha
d no experience in the oil sector and apparently got the post only because of his close ties with Ayatollah Sistani. His Baghdad office was subject to pressure from many directions—from those against autonomy in Kurdistan, and from others who opposed any and all foreign profit from Iraqi oil. In late January 2007 the Iraqi government announced that the law was finished, but when the Kurds read it they found all of their hard-fought concessions had been deleted. The dispute went public, and it took a month for the KRG and Baghdad to get back to the language they had been working with the previous year; then negotiations froze again. Winter turned to spring and to summer, and no deal. Shahristani's office claimed they were still consulting with important experts in Baghdad and even said vaguely that they wanted to make the new oil law conform with a later version of the constitution that might emerge someday. With oil at its highest price in human history, Kurdistan's oil minister Ashti Hawrami, was pulling his hair out.

  "Ninety, one hundred dollars a barrel and our oil stays in the ground! And everybody else who competes with us: flourishing with money for investment in their own country as a result of the boom in oil. And we, month after month, have less production. It's a crime—the Iraqi people deserve better," Hawrami said.

  Hawrami pushed ahead with the Kurdistan projects, but what frustrated him was the rest of Iraq. The KRG planned to be pumping new crude by 2008, and had contracts for more exploration, drilling, and even a new pipeline. Hawrami said the KRG's actions were all in line with the Iraqi constitution and therefore wouldn't be in conflict with any law Baghdad eventually passed. New oil discovered in Kurdistan would go out of Iraq through the central government and be divided—83 percent for Baghdad and 17 percent for the KRG. Likewise, Hawrami insisted, the rest of Iraq should also be pumping at capacity, and giving 17 percent of that to the KRG. Instead Iraq's production was stagnant and the fastest-growing sector seemed to be the massive smuggling of Iraqi oil to Iran.

  European, Canadian, and Turkish companies had already begun exploration for new oil in the north, but the deals stayed under the radar until September 2007, when a Texas-based company with ties to the Bush family, Hunt Oil, signed a deal with the Kurds. Baghdad screamed again that the deal was not valid, but even the major oil companies started to wonder if access to the fraction of Iraq's oil in Kurdistan was better than waiting for peace in the land above the titanic oil fields to the south. Hunt denied it had made any consultation with the White House, but later admitted to a meeting at the State Department, where diplomats warned the American company that the deal might be null and void once Iraq passed a federal oil law. But Washington wasn't deaf to the siren of one hundred dollars per barrel for American companies, or Iraq's potential to bring down the price if its oil got on line. In October 2007 the State Department suggested the government in Baghdad simply use Iraq's old Saddam-era oil law and sign some contracts.4 The two systems would have to be homogenized at some point to both fit under Iraq's constitution.

  But the constitution itself was looking endangered. The Sunni Arabs, of course, had never really supported the document, and the Kurds were the only ones to ever mention it. Their insistence on following the constitution seemed almost a provocation in Arab Iraq—especially the provision mandating a referendum on the city of Kirkuk before the end of 2007. While everyone knew the vote was impractical—no census had been taken in Kirkuk since 1957—the Kurds felt they couldn't back down from the commitment, especially since skipping the Kirkuk referendum might be the first blatant violation of the Iraqi constitution. As the end of the year approached, the Kirkuk referendum was quietly kicked down the road, leaving the Kurds to wonder what strength remained in the Iraqi constitution's other provisions. Kurdish officials promised that a high commission in Baghdad would get the measure on track early in 2008, but the referendum started to look like it might be added to the Kurds' list of forgotten documents full of promises.

  The fact that they knew the referendum was on the rocks didn't prevent the PUK and KDP from posturing about it. When Talabani said Kirkuk was the "Kurdish Jerusalem," Barzani declared it "the beating heart of Kurdistan," each one trying to seem more of a patriot. Barzani had won a clear point when he banned the Iraqi flag in the Kurdish region until a new flag was designed to replace the Ba'athist symbol. The Arabs and the Turks were outraged, the Kurdish street delighted, and Talabani could only nod in approval and quietly fly an Iraqi flag wherever he traveled as head of state.

  The divisions between the parties were more than rhetorical. Despite their political rapprochement, the PUK and KDP still had separate militias. The Kurdistan Regional Government still waited to unify the ministries of defense, finance, justice, and the interior. With plenty of mature political talent, Kurdistan's bipolar system had no future. The KDP had stability at the price of stagnation; the PUK's coalition looked like it might end or at least splinter with the retirement or passing of Talabani. Even as he struggled to assert his role in Baghdad's government, Talabani had flown home to Sulimaniya in the fall of 2006 to settle disputes among his lieutenants, when the PUK's first internal primary resulted in violent clashes between commanders. His son Bafel appeared keen to follow his father into the PUK leadership, but by year's end Talabani's longtime deputy, Nawshirwan Mustafa, formed his own separate party for the Kurdish parliament. Optimists saw the beginning of a multiparty system in Kurdistan; others feared chaos as Jalal Talabani's health began to look fragile.

  Also looking fragile was the American commitment to stay in Iraq. In December 2006 the long-awaited bipartisan Iraq Study Group released its report. Congress had appointed the group to canvass the world's Iraq experts, under the leadership of Republican godfather James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton. From the Kurdish perspective, the report could have been called "The Arabists Strike Back." Among the group's members (including Robert Gates, who then replaced Rumsfeld as secretary of defense) were all the rational, realist voices that had let the Kurds down in 1991 in the name of regional stability. Somehow, in their deep study of Iraq, they had neglected to visit the Kurdish north, and none of their "experts" were Kurds. Their recommendations, blended into a soft pap by committee consensus, said nothing about federalism and favored central government control as a step closer to national reconciliation. They also stressed negotiating with Iran and Syria, and the Kurds looked once again like a big, but still expendable, bargaining chip.

  The Kurds breathed a sigh of relief when President Bush completely ignored the ISG report and instead announced plans for a troop surge to take control of Baghdad. Their leadership cooed even more when the Americans finally accepted Kurdish help and announced that two brigades of pesh merga would form part of the surge, helping the Americans try to clear and hold some Baghdad neighborhoods. It seemed that America finally wanted to reinforce the success of the Kurdish region and take advantage of what its stability could offer. Ambassador Khalilzad flew north to open a trade fair in Erbil. A large number of Iraq watchers in America had begun to think that if Iraq were to fall apart, Kurdistan might be the one salvageable part. But the Kurds couldn't help fearing that this surge was the last gasp of the Bush administration in Iraq. The realists on the Iraq Study Group waited to clean things up with whoever took the White House in 2008, Republican or Democrat.

  Khalilzad moved on sooner than that, to take the post of ambassador to the United Nations in 2007. He spent some of his last days in Iraq on an overnight trip with Masoud Barzani to the sacred hills around Barzan village, after celebrating the end of Ramadan with both Kurdish leaders at Jalal Talabani's new house on Lake Dukan. Khalilzad looked right at home in Talabani's gilded reception hall, sitting between Talabani and Barzani. Both "Zal" and Mam Jalal wore tailored blue suits; Masoud sat more comfortably in his pesh merga fatigues and turban. They joked in English and Farsi (Khalilzad's mother tongue is Dari, which is closer to Iranian Farsi than Kurdish), pausing to greet the endless stream of Kurdish VLPs who came to call. Khalilzad's relaxation was patent after so long in Baghdad, and he smiled widely w
hen some of Talabani's guards asked to have their photo taken with him—surely this was the only place in Iraq where anyone would dare hang such a photo. Even as their oldest friend in the Bush administration, Khalilzad voiced the Kurds' lingering fears.

  "The Kurds have only one friend: their mountains," Khalilzad said, a bit theatrically. "Now at least they tell me they have greater confidence in the U.S. But there's a sense of insecurity that's there. The Kurds say, 'The Shi'ites have Iran, the Sunnis have the rest of the Arab world, who do we have?' That does come out in the conversations. Any statement made that is not abundantly clear in favor of them, they get insecure."

  Khalilzad allowed that plenty of forces in the region wanted Kurdistan to fail—chauvinists, he called them, the same word Kurds always use to describe Arab racists. "The tradition in this part of the world is for whoever is dominant to oppress the other. If the [Kurds] can make it work, that will be a different model. That's why it's so difficult. It hasn't been done for a long time in this region."

  The Kurds looked like they had a decent shot at making it work, but Arab Iraq continued to slip. General David Petraeus returned to Iraq in 2007 as commander of the U.S. military effort and was cast as the administration's savior, ahead of the troop surge, which eventually brought total troop levels back up near the number that invaded Iraq in 2003. The surge made some military gains in Baghdad, but like squeezing a balloon, it pushed insurgent activity out to the provinces, and sectarian divisions only hardened. American troops made a breakthrough by helping Sunni tribes against al-Qa'ida-inspired fighters, but feared the tribes might turn their guns on Shi'ites later on. The Shi'ite factions continued to infiltrate Iraq's security forces, but in areas under Shi'ite control, violence broke out internally between rival militias. No country in the region was immune to the spillover—in Jordan and Syria millions of Iraqis appeared seeking refuge. Saudi Arabia watched in fear as they saw Iran's influence grow in Baghdad, and the war of words between Washington and Tehran heated up. As the Bush administration accused the Iranians of exporting bomb technology to Iraq, the Shi'ite Iraqi government kept clear lines of communication open with the Shi'ite religious government in Iran.