Anti-Climacus

ON IRAQ: An excellent article from Slate:

"Kurdish leaders fear that Saddam takes them very seriously and may retaliate against them if war comes. But they also worry that they are taken more seriously in Baghdad than they are in Washington, where it is a priority to avoid angering the Turks, with their traditional fear of all things Kurdish. President Bush recently found time to see three Iraqi opposition intellectuals, but not the Kurdish leaders who were in Washington at the same time, such as Barham Saleh, the prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Such slights, real or imagined, fuel a suspicion in the minds of the Kurds that the United States is happy to use them as a propaganda symbol but is determined to deny them any real influence before or after an American invasion of Iraq. The Kurds view this as deeply unfair. The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, ruling respectively Western and Eastern Kurdistan, control a state the size of Switzerland and each have armies of 15,000 men (and these can be rapidly reinforced by tens of thousands of tribal militia). They point out that, alone among the Iraqi opposition, they are elected democratically and have strong popular support. The only other powerful anti-Saddam force on the ground, long allied to the Kurds, is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group based in Iran and Southern Iraq that is also backed by Iran and has about 5,000 fighters."