TROUBLE

OKay, you're about to read a comment I made in the next post, which is correct on its face but apparently wrong contextually.

I'll explain -- apparently there really is deep trouble between the Kurds and the Shia, and the Kurds are nervous enough to start playing the seccession card. This comes up when the Kurds request certain guarantees be written into the UN resolution, but the Shia veto it.

How serious this is only becomes apparent in a separate article detailing a letter the Kurdish leaders have written to President Bush. After listening to the Shia go on for weeks about their intention to remove provisions in the Constitution guaranteeing the Kurds veto powers, the Kurds are about ready to walk -- or, at least, are ready to threaten to walk, which may be something different.

Shiite leaders have said repeatedly in recent weeks that they intend to remove parts of the interim constitution that essentially grant the Kurds veto power over the permanent constitution, which is scheduled to be drafted and ratified next year.

The Shiite leaders consider the provisions undemocratic, while the Kurds contend they are their only guarantee of retaining the rights to self-rule they gained in the past 13 years, protected from Saddam Hussein by United States warplanes.

In their letter, Mr. Talabani and Mr. Barzani wrote that the Kurdish leadership would refuse to take part in national elections, expected to be held in January, and bar representatives from going to "Kurdistan."

That would amount to something like secession, which Kurdish officials have been hinting at privately for months but now appear to be actively considering.

But here's what makes no sense. On the one hand the Times' reporter here, Dexter Filkins, master purveyor of doom and gloom, writes:

The turning point for the Kurds, the source close to the leadership said, came last month when Robert Blackwill, President Bush's special envoy to Iraq, told the two Kurdish leaders that no ethnic Kurd would be considered for the post of either president or prime minister.

After that, Kurdish leaders began preparing to cut their ties to Baghdad. In an ominous sign, most of the senior leadership of both Mr. Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Mr. Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party had left Baghdad Tuesday and gone to the Kurdish areas.

But if that were true, if they were really preparing to pull the plug as opposed to posturing, then why did the Kurdish militias agree to disband?

Granted, those fighters might still be available to the Kurdish regional government as I read this -- but why go to the trouble of giving the new PM a big political victory?

Comments

[DaninVan]

Uh, oh. The Turks aren't going to like this at all.