Killing Hope by William Blum

Author:William Blum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

39. Iraq 1972-1975

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work

Into the land of ancient Mesopotamia reached the long arm of the CIA, and the Kurdish people of the Zagros and Taurus mountains, but a few decades removed from the life of nomads, joined the Agency’s list of clients.

In May of 1972, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, went to the Soviet Union to meet their Russian counterparts. Afterward, Kissinger told a press conference in Moscow that the two nations had agreed to defuse the tensions in the Middle East and “to contribute what they can to bringing about a general settlement … such a settlement would also contribute to a relaxation of the armaments race in that area. … Speaking for our side,” he added, “I can say we will attempt to implement these principles in the spirit in which they were promulgated.”1

Kissinger and Nixon were moved by the spirit for perhaps 24 hours. On their way home, they stopped in Teheran to visit their friend, the Shah of Iran. It seems that Iran and Iraq were embroiled once again in their perennial feud—a border dispute and the like—and the Shah asked his pal Richard for a little favor. Could he help arm the Kurds in Iraq who were fighting for autonomy? Just generally heat things up so as to sap the Iraqi resources and distract them from Iran?2

Anything for a friend and loyal ally, said Richard Milhous, two weeks before the Watergate burglary and still on top of the world.

The Shah was quite capable of arming the Kurds himself, and in fact was doing so to some extent, but the Kurds didn’t trust him. They trusted the United States and wanted to be armed by them. Several years later, the congressional committee known as the Pike Committee, which investigated various CIA operations, put it thusly: “The U.S. acted in effect as a guarantor that the Kurds would not be summarily dropped by the Shah.”3

Before long, the CIA was reaching into its warehouses and a range of Soviet and Chinese small arms and rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition were on their way to the Kurdish rebels, the Communist origin of the weapons being a standard means of ensuring the standard “plausible denial”. Ultimately, the military aid was to total some $16 million.

The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group, Muslim but, unlike most other Iraqis, not Arab. Their people are to be found primarily in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. For decades, the Iraqi Kurds had been engaged in intermittent warfare against the government in pursuance of a goal of “autonomy”, a concept not terribly well-defined by them, it being clear only that it fell short of being an independent state, perhaps.

The political history of the Iraqi Kurds in their recent past was a baffling piece of patchwork. Ten years earlier, they had been in close alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, such that when the ruling Ba’ath party began to persecute the Communists, they took refuge amongst the Kurds.

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