FLYING THE NAZI FLAG
Michael D. Evans
The Iraq Study Group (ISG), also known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission, was a 10-member bipartisan panel appointed in March 2006 by the United States Congress to assess the US-led Iraq campaign and make policy recommendations. The group, named for its co-chairmen, former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, released its final report in December 2006 to a very mixed reception.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani summarily rejected the report, calling it "very dangerous" to Iraq's sovereignty and constitution. "We can smell in it the attitude of James Baker," Talabani told CNN, blaming George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state during the 1991 Iraq war for leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
He also criticized the report for recommending that thousands of former officials from Saddam's ousted Baath Party serve in Iraqi government posts.
The report also recommended that US combat troops be withdrawn by early 2008 and that the US should seek help from Iran and Syria to stabilize the country. This last recommendation was breathtaking, considering that Iran and Syria are doing their utmost to destabilize Iraq by smuggling in weapons and terrorists and fostering a horrific campaign of suicide bombing.
One of the more bizarre recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report was that the flag of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party fly once again over the northern territory of Kurdistan. Not only is this the only region of Iraq where the war on terrorism has been won, but the Kurdish people has been waiting since the end of World War I to live in peace in a promised homeland that was carved up among Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Expectedly, the flag proposal was summarily rejected both by the Kurds and by the central Iraqi government as a grave insult to the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Kurds murdered by Saddam with the one WMD he used freely on his own countrymen: poison gas.
In January I visited the Kurdish province of Northern Iraq and met with the speaker of its democratically elected parliament, Adnan Mufti. I asked him about terrorist attacks in his city of Erbil, one of the largest in Iraq. “Terrorist attacks?” he smiled. “This city has not had a terrorist attack in more than one and a half years.”
This was astounding, given the fact that suicide bombers murder dozens of Iraqis in Baghdad almost daily. It was a testimony to the Kurds’ fierceness in defending their freedom, even though they were supplied with mostly obsolete World War II-vintage weapons while some $400 million in modern US arms has been spent elsewhere in Iraq. Then I asked him what he thought of the Iraq Study Group criticizing the Kurdistan region for not flying the Iraqi flag.
Mufti stopped smiling. “This was the same flag planted in more than 5,000 villages that were gassed by Saddam,” he replied. “We have a constitution and our region is democratic. We should we fly the Iraqi flag? Would the US ask the Jews that suffered in the Holocaust to fly the Nazi flag? We refuse to honor the ‘Hitler’ who gassed our people; we want the new flag that has been approved by our constitution.”
Not surprisingly, he also rejected the ISG’s proposal that two terrorist states, Iran and Syria, “meddle in our affairs.”
As the US struggles to redefine its war goals in Iraq, it would do well to focus with greater moral clarity on the one great success story of the campaign so far: the establishment of a functioning democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan. This is where a quarter of Iraq’s population live in stability – and where not a single American soldier has died in battle.
In Erbil I also looked into the eyes of Kurdish women who still mourn the deaths of their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. In tears, one confronted me: “Your American media mock us and ask, ‘Where are the weapons of mass destruction?’ Tell them to come here and we will show them. These weapons are in our blood and in our souls. We will take you to the mass graves."
However, as the result of a heinous plot by the late and unlamented dictator, many Kurdish widows do not have a gravesite to visit. Saddam had their loved ones’ bodies destroyed, knowing that Islamic law would prevent their widows from remarrying without evidence of their deaths. In this way, he planned the eventual extinction of the Kurdish population – zero population growth assisted by genocide.
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction killed more than one million Iranians during their war of the 1980s – but also nearly 200,000 Iraqi Kurds. This is apparently one of those crimes against humanity that the world just does not see – or sleeps through – while it is happening, and ignores its lesson when a newer, bigger barbarism comes along: the worldwide jihad of Islamist terrorism.
In this ongoing world war against terrorism, we can take heart from the success of the democratic Kurdistan Regional Government, whose own flag proudly displays the image of a shining sun, as if to light our way.
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