A Kurdish State?

Shlomo Avineri echoes my feelings on the situation in Iraq vis-a-vis the Kurds.

There is nothing holy in the commitment to "preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq." Preserving the territorial integrity of a country makes sense only so long as the country itself remains a coherent entity. When this is no longer the case as turned out in the last decades with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia legitimacy disappears and other alternatives have to be sought.

The only thing that stands in the way of Kurdish self determination is realpolitik: Turkey, with its repressive policies toward its own Kurdish minority, would not tolerate a Kurdish state carved out of northern Iraq.

But just as Israeli claims cannot trump Palestinian rights to self-determination, so Turkish claims should not allowed to trump the rights of the Kurds of Northern Iraq to a polity of their own.

And after its ambivalent role in the Iraq war, Turkey carries much less weight with the US than before.