Turkey's attack in Iraq: another U.S. double-cross of Kurds?

Thousands of Turkish troops crossed the border into Iraq on the morning of June 6 to pursue Kurdish guerrilla fighters (Associated Press). U.S. and Turkish officials deny this report. What is undeniable is a massive Turkish military buildup on the Iraqi border and an escalation of Turkish government attacks against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting for self-determination for Kurds within Turkey.

The big question is: What is the role of the Pentagon?

Turkey, a member of NATO, is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Only the Israeli and Egyptian regimes get more money. Washington has collaborated with Ankara against the Kurdish liberation struggle for decades. The U.S. funded 80 percent of Turkey’s arms between 1984 and 1999, during the height of the civil war inside Turkey against the PKK. This brutal struggle left 37,000 dead, 3,000 villages destroyed, and some two million people displaced.

What may confuse some people is that today the Bush administration claims to champion the Kurdish people. The Kurdish region of Iraq is said to be supportive of the U.S. invasion and occupation. In the imperialist mythology of the war, the Saddam Hussein government’s attacks against the Kurds justified, in part, U.S. intervention.

Never is it mentioned that when many of these attacks were taking place, in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government collaborated with the Hussein government and supplied some of the weaponry of the Iraqi regime. It was only later in the 1990s, when Washington decided to wage war against Iraq, that the Hussein government became Public Enemy Number One, and the Kurds became a temporary U.S. cause célèbre.

U.S. words and U.S. deeds with respect to the Kurdish people have dripped with cynicism and hypocrisy for decades, and serve as a prime example of imperialist tactics of “divide and conquer.”

“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,” was how then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained the U.S. government’s double cross of Kurdish leaders in 1975. Kissinger had secretly funneled millions of dollars of military aid to Kurdish parties inside Iraq, via the shah of Iran, to promote a Kurdish uprising.

After Iran and Iraq resolved their border dispute, the U.S. withdrew its aid, and the Iraqi government, without opposition from the U.S., was given a clear field to wipe out the Kurdish fighters. Iraq’s military decimated Kurdish forces. Between 150,000 and 300,000 Kurds fled to Iran.

This was all revealed when the secret Pike report, issued by the Congressional Select Committee on Intelligence, was leaked to the press in 1976. The Pike report concluded that if the U.S. and the shah hadn’t encouraged the insurgency, the Kurds “may have reached an accommodation with the central government, thus gaining at least a measure of autonomy while avoiding further bloodshed. Instead, our clients [the Kurds] fought on, sustaining thousands of casualties and 200,000 refugees.”

The report added that for Washington, the Kurds were never more than a “card to play,” a “uniquely useful tool for weakening” Iraq.

Thirty years later, nothing has changed. Only the cynicism has gotten even more brazen.

Last August, the U.S. appointed a special envoy to the Middle East to specifically help Turkey counter the PKK. Retired Air Force General Joseph Ralston, former NATO supreme allied commander, has been working closely with Turkish generals and Iraqi puppets to try to eliminate PKK bases throughout Kurdistan.

Ralston likes to vilify the PKK as “terrorists” who don’t represent the Kurdish people. But the former general sits on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms maker. Lockheed Martin has profited famously from the U.S. purchase of billions of dollars of F-16 fighter planes, which the Turkish military is now using to terrorize the Kurdish regions. The State Department itself even acknowledged that F-16s were involved in “human rights abuses” in Turkey in the 1990s. Two weeks before his Mideast appointment, Ralston was named vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a Washington lobbying group that represents Lockheed Martin.

All this suggests that behind the public statements of the Bush administration distancing itself from the Turkish incursion stands naked imperialist interests which are hostile to all the people of Iraq and the Middle East, no less the Kurdish people than any others.