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Considering Kurdistan

Another Way to Stop Iran

March 6, 2011 by Michael S. Bernstam*
There is a simple way to stop Iran from its nuclear ambitions, a way less costly than war and more effective than sanctions. It is by the creation of Kurdistan. Even a mere non-binding declaration by the US Congress to consider an option to create Kurdistan should stop the Iranian regime in its nuclear tracks, forcing it to refocus its attention on its internal survival. As an added benefit, the Kurdistan option would have a similar disabling effect on Syria. Iran and Syria might then cease to be political entities.
The possible downside of this development is that it might destabilize and potentially break up Iraq and Turkey. This is a serious risk, but it could also open up new opportunities. Iraq and Turkey would face an added urgency in reaching mutually beneficial accords with their Kurdish enclaves. Their equitable resolution of the Kurdish problem would actually strengthen rather than weaken their national integrity.
This proposal represents the most equitable scenario that benefits all sides except the Iranian and Syrian regimes. If Iranian and Syrian Kurdish areas separate from their current states, they could join Iraqi Kurdistan in what would then become, in effect, an Arab-Kurdish confederation in Iraq. Iraq could become more stable, as Kurdistan has demonstrated its unifying influence on both the Shi’a and Sunni factions in the last several years and especially in the recent months during a governmental crisis. In general, since the new resulting borders in the region would better align the existing ethnic areas with their national statehood, the probability of inter-ethnic and internal civil conflicts in this volatile region should diminish. As for Turkey, under domestic pressures for a comprehensive and mutually beneficial Kurdish accord, the government would have to re-evaluate and reverse its drift away from its hard-won secular democracy allied with the West. Altogether, these developments would constitute a win-win situation both locally and globally, averting a military conflict with the West and improving human conditions in the region.

Background Facts on Iran
Contrary to the incessant pronouncements of its leaders, Iran is not a firm and stable nation-state, but rather a hodgepodge of disharmonious ethnic groups and religious denominations. Moreover, it is a hierarchical country with one dominant ethnicity and several subordinate ones. The politically dominant group, the Persians, barely holds its demographic majority status. According to recent data, of the 64.5 million people in Iran, the Persians make up 51 percent; the second largest ethnic group, the Azeris, constitute 24 percent; the Kurdish people make up 7 percent; about 5 percent are the Mazandarani people; Arabs take 3 percent; and the remaining 10 percent represent other minorities. These ethnic groups are largely concentrated in their own homogeneous regions of the country.
The Azeris seem to be better integrated than other ethnicities in Iran and even supply top leaders. This situation is not necessarily stable. The second largest ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the Ukrainians and the Croats respectively, may offer precedents. They were the first to share power in their multi-ethnic states and also among the first to split when the time was ripe. Along religious lines, the Sunni Muslims in Iran have been subjected to systematic legal and political discrimination from the dominant Shi’a Muslim denomination since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. For example, the Sunnis are banned from having their mosques in Tehran. Recent documents by the United Nations and Amnesty International point to increasing legal, cultural, and economic suppression of the non-Persian minorities, including the Azeris, in addition to the long-brutalized Kurds. Reports enumerate land and property confiscations, employment and education discrimination, movement restrictions, and other civil rights violations. In response, there has been growing ethnic discontent.
If this confrontation trend continues and the Kurdistan option is invoked, Iran can break down across its ethnic and regional seams and cease to be a political entity, as did the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. For example, there are about 15 million Azeris in Iran and 8 million in Azerbaijan proper. If Iran ceased to be a political entity, their reunification would become feasible. The relations between Iran and Azerbaijan have been tense since Azerbaijan’s independence in 1992, due to the latter’s support of Iranian Azerbaijani autonomy and talk of reunification. Besides the Azeris and the Kurds, the small Arab minority is also restless and is historically connected with Iraq. It is especially worth noting that most oil fields are in the Arab and Kurdish areas, not in Persia proper. A rump state of Iran would not be an oil exporter and would not be able to finance aggressions.

Background Facts on Kurdistan
One need only look at a map of the Near East to see why Kurdistan could play such a central role in the region. The Kurdish-inhabited areas cover the vast swathes of the Middle East from southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria through the entire north of Iraq, to northwestern Iran and deep into the Iranian hinterland. The Kurdish areas look like a large unrecognized country overlapping these four major recognized countries. With this map in sight, consider some rough approximations of numbers and facts compiled from international and national sources.
Kurdistan is the largest stateless nation on the face of the earth or the largest people without nationhood, depending on whichever definition one chooses. The Kurdish people are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, after the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks. Approximately 27 million Kurds reside in the contiguous areas of eastern and southeastern Turkey (about 14 million), northwestern Iran (4.5 million), northern Iraq (over 5 million), northern Syria (some 1.7 million), and elsewhere. They constitute up to 18 percent of the population of Turkey, 7 percent of Iran, 17.5 percent of Iraq, and 8 percent of Syria. These are sizeable minorities whose relations with the governments and dominant ethnicities of these countries have long been mutually hostile and sporadically violent. A tentative but progressing reconciliation of the Iraqi Kurds since the fall of the Baath regime is a telling exception. Overall, the Kurdish population is large, strong, and willful enough to jeopardize the integrity of any of these countries on the promise of their own. This is not my opinion, but rather a constant fear of the governments of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as evidenced by their intermittent policies of suppression and accommodation. In fact, the independent Kurdish Republic of Ararat did exist in 1927-1930 in northeastern Turkey and was violently crushed. The self-proclaimed Republic of Kurdistan (known also as the Republic of Mahabad) existed in northwestern Iran in 1945-1946. It became one of the first victims of the Cold War because it was supported by the Soviets and destroyed by the Shah who was propped up by the United States and the United Kingdom. Just imagine if the Kurdish 7 percent of the Iranian population and 8 percent of the Syrian population rise again, as they did in the past for their independence or autonomy, and join a free Kurdistan emerging in Iraq. This is a plausible rather than merely hypothetical possibility, and the associated risks and rewards of any such development for Iraq, Turkey, and other countries within and beyond the region need to be reckoned with, as I shall atttempt below. The simplest way to start is to view the emergence of Kurdistan as akin to the call option.

The Call Option
The birth of modern nation-states often works like the call option in finance: you have the right, but not the obligation, to buy the option’s underlying stock. The stock is the potential nation-state. If the stock turns out worse than you thought it would be and does not meet your standards, the option expires and the deal is off. This is the approach being applied to the creation of the Palestinian state. Before that, it was applied to the states emerging from the former Yugoslavia. The greatest precedent of the call option was the Captive Nations Resolution, passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959. It enumerated various nations of eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and east and southeast Asia under Communist rule, and declared recognition of their “desire for liberty and independence,” which, in a long-standing tradition, Congress saw as a deterrent to war and a foundation for the durable global peace. Thus stated Public Law 86-90. It took 30 years, from 1959 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for the list of the captive nations to begin to shrink. To ensure that this call option would not expire, every president from Eisenhower to Obama has designated the third week in July every year as Captive Nations Week.
George F. Kennan, the intellectual father of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War, pleaded unsuccessfully with President John F. Kennedy not to sign the annual proclamation and thus not to renew this call option on the grounds that it amounted to a call for the overthrow of existing governments. Indeed, it does, and this is exactly the point. Nevertheless, every successive President of the United States took the risk of applying this policy to the almighty Soviet Union and to nuclear-armed China against the realpolitik arguments of policy opponents. In comparison, extending the same policy to Iran and Syria carries lower risks even on realpolitik’s own grounds. Greater risks lie elsewhere—not in undermining Iran and Syria, but in the contagion effects on the stability of their neighbors, as discussed below.

The Kurdistan call
Meanwhile, let us recall the origins of the Kurdistan option. It was an idea in the American tradition of freedom and national self-determination. President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the idea of establishing the independent and integral state of Kurdistan at the Versailles Conference in 1919 but his proposal received little traction. During the Cairo conference of 1921 on the British Mesopotamian Mandate, Winston Churchill supported the idea of a smaller independent Kurdistan as a pro-Western state in the Near East. Other British policy makers, most notably the legendary T.E. Lawrence, took his side. But the British government, concerned about the effect on its empire, did not carry out this policy. Churchill later regarded this as a major mistake.
Nearly a century later, the United States and other willing countries can declare that they recognize Kurdistan’s right to exist if it opts for orderly reunification, representative government, full rights of ethnic and religious minorities, a regional settlement based on a mutually beneficial relationship with or within Iraq, and a peaceful arrangement with Turkey. These stipulations are not easy to meet, especially a Kurdish-Turkish accord, but this is the whole point of the call option. It creates incentives for the Kurdish political class to develop internal institutions and external policies up to the high standards of potential option callers. Mutually agreeable regional arrangements will not be a concession on the part of the Kurdish leadership, but a preparatory condition of the deal and, as such, in their own interest.
Which countries could initiate the call? The natural beneficiaries of the Kurdistan call option are the United States, Israel, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Gulf Arab states. Poland, the Czech Republic, and other former Soviet satellites may subscribe as a matter of principle and national assertiveness. Ireland and Greece might also find the option congenial. Generally, should the United States initiate the Kurdistan call, countries of the European Union are likely to be cautious but sympathetic to the idea, given their precedent with the states of the former Yugoslavia. The United Kingdom, despite its own complexities with Scotland and Northern Ireland, along with France, Germany, and Italy can be expected to join the United States shortly. Spain, Belgium, and Canada may be reluctant to support the option due to their own internal ethnic tensions. Japan could endorse the Kurdistan option early whereas Russia, China, and India would probably oppose it in order to forestall a secessionist precedent for their own ethnic and religious minorities. The lowest risks and the highest benefits of the Kurdistan call are for Israel, and it is perplexing that it has not already taken this position. As for the United States, if all options are on the table, there is an additional incentive: conveying to Iran the mere possibility of taking the Kurdistan option will be a more effective threat than all sanctions combined.

Risks and rewards
The key question in assessing the Kurdistan call option is to determine whether the benefits exceed the costs. Both the potential rewards and risks are substantial. To complicate matters, different policy analysts would give each item a different value and a different weight in the overall calculus. The following assessment is not a policy advocacy, but an attempt to itemize and weigh the risks and rewards of the Kurdistan option.
The rewards are obvious and immediate. First, the Kurdistan option implodes Iran. An impending independence of 7 percent of the population in an important area covering northwestern Iran would significantly weaken the central power in Iran. Unlike a military attack, which, as many observers suggest, might unify the nation, the Kurdish secession would create a contagion effect for other non-Persian minorities that constitute almost half of the country’s population. The government would have to concentrate on domestic political and social problems and on the very survival of the regime. This leaves little room for foreign adventures and nuclear armament. Ultimately, this development insures against a new war, possibly a nuclear war.
Second, the concomitant curtailment of foreign adventures disables terrorist states and organizations including Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. If the Kurdistan option reunifies the Kurdish people of Iran and Syria, it practically ends Syria as a terror-supporting state or even as a geopolitical entity. These outcomes, in turn, help liberate Lebanon from foreign and domestic terrorist domination, prevent another civil war there, restore its economic and democratic development, and return it to the map of the world as the trade and finance hub of the Middle East. The weakening of Syria and Hezbollah will strengthen the principal pro-Western and quasi-democratic alliance of the Sunni Muslim, Druze, and Maronite Christian factions and the integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. In parallel, since Iran, through its support of Hamas, is the biggest obstacle for the creation of a unified Palestinian nation-state, Kurdistan, by the force of history, becomes the shortest and surest road to the Palestinian nation-state, the security of Israel, and peace between the two.
Third, the Kurdistan option would contribute to the overall economic and social development in the Middle East. The Kurds are largely pro-Western except for some Communist Kurdish groups in Turkey. They are self-reliant, entrepreneurial, religiously, ethnically, and politically tolerant, secularly inclined, and socially modern. Their women, for example, enjoy equal rights to men. Kurdistan could exemplify modernization of Muslim societies. If the West wants to establish a regional role model for the new Middle and Near East, Kurdistan is a natural candidate. If the West wants to establish a secular Sunni Muslim republic that would countervail extremist influences, Kurdistan could achieve that purpose.
Fourth, in terms of realpolitik interests, if the West wants to establish a secure, stable, and friendly supplier of oil in the Middle East, Kurdistan can fill that role. Strategically, a pro-Western Kurdistan, either as part of a confederate Iraq or as a separate state, will be the bastion of security in the greater Middle East. Important now, it will be even more important in the future because chances that jihadist revolutionaries may take power in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere are not discountable.
The risks of the Kurdistan call option are also considerable, especially in Iraq and Turkey. First, in the absence of a mutually beneficial federalist settlement, Kurdish separatism and irredentism can destabilize and split each of them apart. Moreover, Communist and terrorist forces of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) hold sway in several Kurdish areas in Turkey. The Kurdistan option was unthinkable during the Cold War when Turkey was a crucial NATO member on the frontline. Now Turkey as a NATO member looks more like Portugal in 1975 when its pro-Communist government was slipping into the Soviet camp. Meanwhile, the majority of Turkish Kurds suffered displacement or hardship in a protracted conflict with the PKK and, judging by the available evidence, prefer a political and cultural autonomy within Turkey to secession. This mitigates the risk of Turkey’s implosion. Still, from the standpoint of Western security, Turkey is in an ambivalent situation. The United States and other Western countries’ call of the Kurdistan option may further antagonize Turkey and move it closer towards a political alliance with Iran and a domestic anti-Western, anti-democratic, and pro-jihadist shift. However, the Kurdish discontent is a long-standing issue which can be resolved only by the Turkish government and Turkish society themselves. The Kurdistan option would only increase the urgency to solve it.
Second, the fragile stability of Iraq may be further undermined. The Kurdistan option, especially a potential reunification of the Iranian, Syrian, and Iraqi Kurdistan, might strengthen the separatist factions of the latter. But this enlargement of the Iraqi Kurdistan would also give additional rationale for the Kurdish polity to stay within the new federalist Iraq because of the greater weight an enlarged Kurdistan could carry there. Ultimately, as in the case of Turkey, the relationship between the Kurdish minority and the rest of the country is a long-standing problem. The Kurdistan option inherits this problem and only adds urgency to solving it for mutual gains.
Third, the contagion effect of the Kurdistan option is bound to exacerbate the already tense inter-ethnic relations in various states of the Middle and Near East and the South Caucasus. The specter of civil wars has haunted this region since the establishment of their nation-states during the last century. A combination of the Arab-Kurdish confederation in Iraq, with the inclusion of the Iranian and Syrian Kurdistan, and a Kurdish autonomy in Turkey is thus the best orderly option to prevent potential conflicts. Iran and Syria will, of course, reject any Kurdish secession, be it total independence or a confederation within Iraq. Although the independence of Kurdistan avoids double standards and conforms to the standard of treating all ethnic and national groups equally, the Arab-Kurdish confederation looks more efficient in practical terms. This confederation is more secure than independence because the rump states of Iran and Syria would be too weak to attack this new Iraq and the Kurdish areas within it.
Fourth, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the states of the former Soviet Union such as Kyrgyzstan would be reasonably concerned about their own inter-ethnic stability. The US pursuit of the Kurdistan option would antagonize many of these countries. Alas, this cannot be helped as they have been angry at the United States for the same domestic reasons as those behind the recognition of the independence of Kosovo. In reality, the contagion effects of ethnic separations are usually confined to specific regions. The dissolutions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia caused several tragic civil wars, but they did not cause contagions beyond their regional borders.
Overall, the overwhelming risk is a potentially nuclear-armed Iran and the possibility of it causing regional and global conflict. Given this central issue, the life-saving rewards of the Kurdistan option seem to outweigh its serious risks.

A Turnaround
Recent events, namely the United States’s scheduled withdrawal from Iraq and Turkey’s drift away from a secular democracy, have made the Kurdistan option less risky. At the very least, these events mitigate the principal risks concerning Turkey and Iraq. The Kurdistan option would logically force Turkey to accelerate its accommodation of the Kurdish minority on the basis of the mutual realization that a federalist and cultural autonomy strengthens rather than weakens the stability and integrity of the secular Turkish state. The Kurdish autonomy will, in turn, strengthen secular forces in Turkey, especially democratic urbanites, the military, and the judiciary. It will also check its current jihadist trend. Most ethnic and social groups in Turkey will be better off as a result.
In Iraq, an urgent confederate Kurdish-Arab settlement will represent a viable alternative to a messy separation after the US withdrawal. The Iraqi tri-communal democracy of the Shi’as, the Sunnis, and the Kurds has been unstable since the beginning. Many influential observers including Vice President Joseph R. Biden have predicted that it may fail when US troops leave. The governmental crisis of 2010 demonstrated not only the rising influence of the Kurds in solving the problems of national politics, but also that this very rising influence has held Iraq together. Kurds played the role of mediator in the crisis, which has shown that their stakes to stay within the federation inside Iraq are commensurate with their elevated influence. An enlarged Iraqi Kurdistan that incorporates the Iranian and Syrian Kurdistan in an Arab-Kurdish confederation should enhance the Kurds’ incentives to keep Iraq stable, democratic, and pro-Western. This would mean fully accommodating the Kurdish autonomy within a federalist or a confederate settlement. The Kurdistan “call option” would also raise the stakes for Iraqi Sunni and Shi’a Arabs to stop sectarian violence and to cooperate in keeping Iraq intact.
The Gulf Arab states should welcome this development because it keeps Iraq whole and stable at the expense of Iran, which they fear. The United States and its allies would also benefit from the development of this Iraqi Arab-Kurdish federation or confederation. Those countries that would oppose the Kurdistan option in the first place would also object to this Iraqi federated expansion. However, this is why the Kurdistan “call option” is what it is: an option to take and realize only if it suits each given country’s interest. Kosovo, the future Palestinian state, and South Sudan are of the same institutional mold.
The Kurdistan “call option” is a rare option in which strategic and humanitarian considerations fully overlap. It is a way to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear state, prevent war, disable terrorist states and movements, reinstate Turkey, stabilize Iraq, and reform the Middle East. It is the best of all available options. And, maybe, it is one of the few good options left.
*MICHAEL S. BERNSTAM is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has served as an economic advisor to the Russian government, the Azerbaijani government, and the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. He is currently affiliated with the Iraqi Institute for Economic Reform.

HARVARD International Review