We praise Kurds for keeping order. Do we want to know how they do it?

Reader N. writes that the Kurdish autonomous zone does not have insurgents or kidnappings, according to an article in Reason. He sends these excerpts from the article:

In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they’re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it’s safe to live, and to invest and build.

But to carve out their breathing space, the Kurds have adopted discriminatory policies that would make any liberal-minded Westerner squirm. It remains to be seen how the contradictions will sort themselves out in the long run. But the outcome is important, especially if Kurdistan reaches the day—and it seems increasingly likely that it will—that it breaks entirely free of Baghdad and declares independence.

And what kind of discrimination are we discussing? The article continues:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.

The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.

N. comments:

Even allowing for exaggeration and wishful thinking on the part of a writer for Reason, it is clear that the Kurds have decided not to participate in the jihad, at least not at this time. But look at how they are avoiding all the troubles of Baghdad: they don’t let in any Arab who wants to come, they watch those that do, and they hunt down and kill any that come to carry out jihad or otherwise cause trouble.

Gosh, could there be any sort of lesson for the West, here?

Scott writes:

I read with great interest the article and was especially struck by these two paragraphs:

“It’s [the relationship with the American military] certainly better than their relationship with Arabs. The Kurds may be the most liberal of Iraq’s three dominant ethnicities, but they’re the quickest to impose illiberal laws on everyone else. I learned that when Omar and Mohammad Fadhil, the bloggers behind Iraq the Model, drove up to Kurdistan from Baghdad to meet me at my hotel. They never made it. The Peshmerga told them Arabs were not allowed to enter the region without a Kurdish escort.

“It was racial profiling at its worst. The Fadhils did nothing at all to deserve that kind of treatment. Two upstanding citizens were not allowed to visit a region in their own country for no reason except that they’re Arabs. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Political Freedom ranks Iraq the third freest Arab-majority country, after Lebanon and Morocco. Yet freedom of movement, one of the most basic freedoms, still doesn’t exist. It’s a one-way limitation too: Kurds can visit the north, center, and south of Iraq whenever they feel like it.”

The author can’t get beyond his disapproval of what he calls “illiberal” measures such as racial profiling “at its worst.” He seems oblivious to the fact that the reason Kurdistan may be relatively peaceful is because of such strict profiling. To him, the hurt feelings of the Arab bloggers who were turned away appear to be too high a price to pay. That a few Arabs may otherwise be let in who would blow up a bus, hotel or marketplace does not figure in his analysis, although it’s obvious the Kurds are thinking this by implementing such strict measures. Once again, the liberal value of “non-discrimination” is elevated above common sense security concerns.

Although it is described as profiling “at its worst,” it’s hardly that onerous when considering the Arab visitors would be permitted if accompanied by a Kurdish escort. Lastly, the author depicts the Kurds as hypocrites, saying that they can visit “north, center, and south Iraq whenever they feel like it.” That is obviously false, given that the author himself stated in the opening lines of the article that he and his Kurdish guide “would be dead” and would not last “two hours” in Baghdad on account of his Kurdish license plate.

There are lessons to be learned in this story, but I doubt that the author has learned them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 22, 2006 10:30 AM | Send