begin quote from:
The Kurds Are Grateful to Bush and Blair
| Wall Street Journal | - |
The
Chilcot Inquiry into Britain's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq
has renewed the debate over the war's legacy. The Coalition's failures
in planning, execution and intelligence are once more under a glaring
public spotlight.
- 19
The Kurds Are Grateful to Bush and Blair
Thanks to these two leaders, we are now the shapers of our own destiny and no longer have Saddam to fear.
ENLARGE
U.S. President George
W. Bush (L) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair walk together from
their meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, February 22, 2005.
Photo:
Reuters
I was one of the fortunate Kurds who fled Saddam’s Iraq. My family successfully claimed political asylum in the U.K. in the mid-1980s, when I was a year old. But for Britain, the country that I now proudly call my own, giving us refuge, we would have suffered the same fate as the thousands of Iraqi Kurds who weren’t as fortunate in the years that followed. Saddam killed more than 180,000 Kurds during his monstrous Anfal Campaign in the late 1980s, including 5,000 men, women and children who died instantly in the Baathist regime’s chemical attack on Halabja.
The Kurds are under no illusions. We have our grievances against the West. Various Western governments supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and it was the British who denied us an independent state in the peace settlement after World War I, even as they created several independent Arab states from the remains of the Ottoman Empire.
Kurds are conscious of a history that has often been less than kind to us. But we have embraced changes in an international order that is now far more favorable to us. The shift began in 1991, after the first Gulf War, when Saddam wanted to exterminate the Kurds after suffering defeat at the hands of the U.S.-led Coalition.
Related Articles
The no-fly zone is entrenched in the collective consciousness of the Kurds. The West came to our aid at our darkest hour, and the Kurds capitalized on this by engaging in state-building and democratic politics. This experiment was interrupted by a Kurdish civil war in the 1990s, but differences were mended to secure the Kurdish stake in the post-2003 Iraq.
So far as the Kurds are concerned, Messrs. Bush and Blair finished a job that was started in 1991. While the rest of Iraq became embroiled in sectarian war, the Kurds developed a stronger economy, better foreign relations and a growing middle class thanks to oil wealth and stability.
Challenges remain. There is a fiscal crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan. And Islamic State lingers by the border. Our region is unpredictable. Even so, the Kurds are now the shapers of our own destiny, no longer shackled by despots and power politics. We have hope and prospects. We owe that to an American president and a British prime minister.
Mr. Alaaldin is a Middle East specialist at the London School of Economics and an associate fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Kin
