World Order Without Kurdistan, Oops America!

12-11-2018 8 Comments
KANI XULAM
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Fortune magazine annually prints the names of 500 American companies that are envied around the world.


If there were a magazine listing the top 500 American intellectuals, I would have suggested the name of Robert Kagan—in spite of his disregard for Kurds—for its next edition.

He has just published a new book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World. Short, concise and provocative—it urges its readers to vigilantly uphold the liberal world order for future generations.

It addresses the sudden disappearance of American leadership from the world's stage. It blames the Obama Administration for initiating the retreat, and the Trump Administration for completing it.

For a book, it has its memorable literary allusions as well: it quotes Mike Campbell, a character in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, who, when asked how he went bankrupt, responds, "Gradually, and then suddenly."

The world has always had issues, says Mr. Kagan, but now it is entering a period akin to the non-war years between 1918 and 1939 when nations only took care of their own— and then introduced us to frightening words like concentration camps, Holocaust and Kamikaze.

He feels Americans were lucky to have 1945 leaders like Roosevelt, Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and Kennan, who felt we inhabit a jungle and the "judgment of nature upon error" was not forgiveness but immediate death.

To make the jungle habitable and ward off errors, Roosevelt and Truman birthed the liberal world order and in the words of Acheson, the United States became its "locomotive" for the good of humanity around the globe.

Sadly, 10 million Kurds — their population at the time, were barred from boarding the liberal world order locomotive when it left the United Nations depot in San Francisco to spread the gospel of "individual rights, freedom, universality, equality — regardless of race and national origin, cosmopolitanism and tolerance."


Untouched by the grand new experiment called liberal world order, our colonial masters, Turks, Persians and Arabs instilled in us self-doubt and self-contempt to deny us agency in our lives. When some of us dared to experiment with freedom, Uncle Sam's weapons — sometimes Russian, were used against us to teach us a lesson in servility.


The word "servility" always stuck in our throat.

We much prefer freedom.

As our "luck" would have it, we connected with Henry Kissinger, a prominent champion of liberal world order, and asked him to give us a helping hand to expand the boundaries of freedom and liberty in Kurdistan and the Middle East. In spite of his promises, he emboldened Saddam Hussein to shed our blood like water. When asked why he had betrayed us, his response showed not only his heartlessness, but also, in one pithy sentence, the final epithet for the approaching death of the liberal world order: 

"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."

While the tottering liberal world order continues to side with our adversaries, some of us qualify, says Mr. Kagan, as children of its godfather, the Enlightenment. Those Kurds, the Marxists ones, believe in the promise of "justice and true equality" and want to see an "end to materialism."

But their dreams are hopeless — incompatible with human nature, adds Mr. Kagan. And yet he is grateful to its luminaries, such as Mr. Gorbachev, who let Estonians, Czechs, Armenians and many other nationalities free themselves from Russian bondage without a bloodbath.


Bloodbaths, alas, have been our ordeal in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Saddam's Iraq even likened us to rats and poisoned us with toxic gas while still enjoying robust relations with the United States.

Mr. Kagan, regrettably, is quiet on that sordid chapter of liberal world order. His silence is disingenuous considering his tenureat the State Department in those years.

But maybe there is some good news in the bad news that thisliberal world order is falling down like a house of cards.

"What happens in the Middle East doesn't stay in the Middle East," says Mr. Kagan. He quotes polling data suggesting the uprooted refugees of Syria and Libya provided grist for the propaganda mills of the neo-Nazi groups across Europe.

There is another way to help contain this intercontinental crisis. 

The Middle East remains a bastion of authoritarianism. Its offspring, Radical Islam, rejects the Enlightenment. 

The Kurds, including their Marxist elements, don't want to be refugees in Europe. Besides, to us belongs the record of helping reduce the fever of the world in Mosul and Raqqa.

We can do more, provided we are respected in return, and accepted as a member of whatever replaces the bankrupt liberal world order.

And then there is this observation of Malcolm X:

"We don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D. C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights."

His clincher: "We want it now or we don't think anybody should have it."

Can Kurds be castigated for experimenting with a little bit of Malcolm X?

After all, when you are brutally denied freedom for so long, you will grasp at anything to ward off its enemies to hasten the bright and balmy dawn of liberty in at least one corner of the world.

You could ask black Americans.

Kani Xulam is a political activist based in Washington D.C. He runs the American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN). 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.


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  • 15-11-2018
    George
    To summerize it all, make your move during superbowl or election years when entire US falls in total political coma.
  • 13-11-2018
    Château
    Kurds cry for freedom, the world is deef.We should just wait for the WWIII. Don't blame your leaders,don't blame each other, don't dispute over any matter that does not matter: indeed nothing matters. Just wait for the WWIII
  • 12-11-2018
    Guest
    Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other." I agree with him. Before all else, we are all a part of humanity, regardless of whether we are Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Persians, Russians, Asians, Europeans, Africans, Americans, or anything else we'd like to label ourselves as. Communication and the willingness to try and look at situations from different perspectives is the only way we are going to get to know each other, move forward as humanity in the right way, and live peacefully with each other in a sustainable way. I appreciate this writer's reference to history, it provides us with the experience that will help us make better decisions so that we don't repeat the bad decisions of those who have gone before us. Chapters in each of our histories, such as, slavery in American, the participation of the Kurdish Hamidiye Brigades in the genocide of the Armenians, Dekulakization by the Soviet regime, the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and the list goes on, all provide humanity with the experience, if we will learn from it, that will help us make better choices in the future that are in the best interest of all humanity; present and future.
  • 12-11-2018
    Unite
    If only posters are made out of every statement in this article and wallpaper every walls, billboards,buses and trains round the world with them. And if only the world would wake up one morning and read this cry of freedom. If only....
  • 12-11-2018
    The Reader
    Well written.Thank you
  • 12-11-2018
    Geziza K Eller
    As always well said!!
  • 12-11-2018
    walter
    When kurds respect one another, the world will respect them.
  • 12-11-2018
    Hansi Oemerian
    A well written piece. And I think we, the Kurds, should take a chapter from the Israeli playbook. "Don't wait for others to grant you, your rights/freedom. Grab it yourself!"