The Loom of Time, page 35
Or there was another alternative. As the head of an independent media organization, who was a survivor of Saddam’s genocidal Anfal campaign, told me, repeating the words of others I spoke with: “It is better to have one dictator rather than many, like now.” Alas, the “many” little dictators of the moment were not even self-made men, but the sons and other descendants of the likes of Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, who had lived in the mountains and had real charisma and capabilities. Kurdistan, among so many other things, was a story of family decline.
* * *
—
“A smooth, gradual transition away from the two clans is becoming harder to imagine. Instead you could have a rough transition, such as violence, a coup d’état, what have you,” said Stam Saeed, a tall and sophisticated young man with an Apple watch who aspired to write about Kurdistan for publications like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and who spoke knowingly about Machiavelli and Thucydides. Saeed was the chief of political research for the Change Movement, a small party in the parliament that had been around a long time and had its own problems. His reasoning for a “rough transition” was simple: “if nothing is happening, then something awful may happen.” The explosive elements, he explained, were there to see. There was a Salafist movement in the mosques. The young and connected generation wanted a better life and had little interest in stories about heroic struggles in the mountains told by their grandfathers. Trust beyond the family barely existed. “You can bribe a judge and get anything you want done. There is no rule of law, no transparency. The half of the population that is middle class is slipping deeper into debt. The PUK,” he continued, “is so internally divided that violent clashes between the factions are possible, as is a conflict between the PUK and KDP.” Saeed did say that a possible alternative to a rough transition was a new political movement led by a populist or charismatic leader, someone who could rise above the clans and capture the imagination of the public and wipe the slate clean.
In this vein Saeed mentioned Barham Salih. If Salih left the presidency of Iraq in Baghdad and returned to Kurdistan, he might qualify as such a messianic figure. Salih was one of those blessed men, a technocrat, like Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan, who had innumerable international contacts and was deeply Westernized, oozing erudition. Thus, outsiders were in awe of him. The question was, however, not whether he could hold a seminar at an Ivy League college, but could he work within a deeply corrupt and thuggish system to force change. Ashraf Ghani wound up fleeing Afghanistan rather than fighting the Taliban. Salih, on the other hand, had spent years in both the PUK and the Iraqi government following the 2003 invasion. He had real bureaucratic skills and was adroit at infighting. He had also tried his hand at running Kurdistan before as prime minister and thus had learned useful lessons. Therefore, the comparison with Ghani was not altogether fair.
Though the future was ultimately unknowable, it seemed hard to believe that the current stasis was permanent. I kept in mind that Sulaymaniyah and eastern Kurdistan were poorer and more dissatisfied than Erbil and western Kurdistan, where the real money and development were, and where I would also get the Kurdish government point of view.
It was time to leave Sulaymaniyah and listen to others in Erbil.
* * *
—
The drive northwest from Sulaymaniyah to Erbil took three hours. Mountains rose like sawtooth granite cathedrals flecked with snow, overlooking dark green pastures. A towering ridgeline extended to the horizon, as though a curtain were drawn against the sky. Flanks of smaller mountains tumbled down into folded valleys, with cows and sheep munching on grass in a riot of steep-angled hillsides. In some places the curvature of the terrain looked as smooth as marble. Here and there on stony outcrops were villages constructed of undressed cinder blocks, with the men in jamanas and baggy trousers and the women covered in hijabs. Rivers and streams were mirror-like in their cold clarity. The road wasn’t bad, despite the half-a-dozen checkpoints manned by men in full kit and assault rifles. The scenery could not have been more dramatic. At the point marking the division between the PUK- and KDP-controlled areas, men scanned my passport, as though I were traveling from one country to another. As soon as I passed the checkpoint into KDP-controlled territory, billboard pictures of Masoud Barzani replaced those of Jalal Talabani.
In KDP territory there was much more construction, with brightly painted bulldozers at work, along with better built houses and many slick roadside advertisements. Finally the car descended into an utterly flat plain where the city of Erbil sprawls in a grid pattern.
Erbil, a city of 1.5 million people, is twice the size of Sulaymaniyah. This was a real global city, compared to the sandpaper, archaeological mien of Sulaymaniyah. I saw a vast panorama of tall and well-built apartment houses, landscaped boulevards with new overhead road lamps, and well-engineered overpasses and underpasses. In some cases the glittering domes signified shopping malls rather than mosques. There were international chain hotels, gated communities, and cafés like those in Silicon Valley and Abu Dhabi. The dynamism was almost Asian. In Erbil at least one could compare Kurdistan to Malaysia. Prices, as I was to learn, were exorbitant. This was where all the oil money was, and where the Kurdish government was, and consequently where all the foreign diplomats and other officials came to live and do business. It was clear from the lack of development in Sulaymaniyah and the rest of the PUK area that Kurdistan was a misnomer. There were really two Kurdistans in northern Iraq, one better run and richer and the other worse run and poorer. Billboard pictures of Masoud Barzani lined Erbil’s roads. He was the de facto ruler, even as his son, Masrour, was officially the prime minister. Again, one dictator seemed better than many.
Erbil was two cities, though: the so-called gold zone where all the development was, and an older part centered around the seven-thousand-year-old Citadel, a steep glacis originally occupied by the Sumerians and Assyrians from early antiquity, and stormed by the Mongols in A.D. 1258. Here was the bazaar that took you back decades in dress and manners. Not only were there Kurds and Turkmen, but many Arabs who had fled Iraq proper for the relative safety and opportunities of Erbil. I noticed no Westerners besides myself in the old part of town. Erbil had been discovered by the oil and international development communities, which kept to themselves. But it still lacked the security required for global tourism. The night before I arrived, a barrage of Iranian missiles had hit the area near the new U.S. consulate here. Thus, as in Jeddah, I felt privileged to be visiting an old city still off the holiday map, as it were: in this case buildings and fortress walls that were a delicious confection of Turkish, Persian, Byzantine, and Kurdish styles.
And yet despite its ancient treasures adjacent to topflight hotels, cafés, and restaurants, this place was still Kurdistan. Better governance in Erbil compared to Sulaymaniyah only went so far. At the city’s fanciest hotel, receptionists asked me if I could pay for my incidentals in cash rather than with a credit card. Everywhere in Erbil it was still a cash economy.
* * *
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“Most Kurds don’t trust banks. They don’t know what a bank is or what it does. They have no idea about credit cards. They and their ancestors grew up fighting one or another of the surrounding states, so their circle of trust is narrow. They are suspicious of government in general. It’s a generational thing. Only the young and connected even know what plastic is.” The speaker was an official in the Kurdish regional government in Erbil who preferred not to be named. That way he could talk more freely about corruption.
“Both sides, the KDP and PUK, misuse budgets. Corruption within the government is hard to deal with. Actually the least corrupt branch of government is the ministry that deals with the peshmerga, because the peshmerga are supported by the Pentagon and other foreign defense ministries, so their finances are regulated somewhat by international militaries. Otherwise, the Kurdish Regional Government has made some progress in ending double salaries and other abuses, but there is a long way to go. Also digitalization is ending some of the corruption and leading to reform. But it is a long-term process after years and decades of massive corruption that goes along with a weak or nonexistent history as a modern state.”
The official pointed out that the Barzani and Talabani clans had fought a bloody civil war between 1992 and 1996, in the wake of Kurdistan’s obtaining de facto independence from Iraq when the Americans instituted a no-fly zone against Saddam. The civil war has led to suspicion ever since. He told me that the Kurdistan Regional Government could do little about the comparative lack of development in Sulaymaniyah “because of PUK chaos,” mentioning the coup in July 2021, when Jalal Talabani’s son, Bafel, took tenuous control of the party. In sum, “you need institutions. It is only with strong institutions that give you the option to decentralize decision-making, which is the mark of modern governance. The KDP,” he went on, “was still in the stage of a strong individual leader, Massoud Barzani, because institutions in Erbil are weak. The PUK is decentralized, but with weak or nonexistent institutions, so there is chaos in Sulaymaniyah.”
* * *
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Mohammed Shareef taught politics at the University of Kurdistan in Erbil. Because he had grown up partly in the United Kingdom and made trips back and forth between there and Kurdistan, he was able to see changes over the years and decades. “I do see progress here. I do see maturation toward a liberal system. However landlocked Kurdistan may be, and however dependent we are on ruthless enemies like Turkey and Iran, people in Kurdistan are basically free to live their lives as long as they stay away from criticizing certain individuals.”
“The bureaucracy is more polite,” he went on, “more efficient; visiting a government office is less of an ordeal than it used to be. You quietly take a ticket and wait your turn. Years back people would crowd around a bureaucrat pleading for attention. Because of increased travel abroad, the culture is slowly evolving along Western lines. People are more demanding of government. Given the oil wealth, they want more of something akin to a ‘nanny’ state. Government is a mirror of the culture of a population, and the culture here is little by little improving. Women’s rights in Kurdistan” have been undergoing a slow revolution, he said. Though, as others told me, even as there were still strict taboos concerning sexual relations, the taboos against dishonesty, laziness, inconsistency, and other such things were much weaker.
But Shareef told me that with all of Kurdistan’s problems, “absolutely” you could not compare Kurdistan today to the sufferings of the Saddam era. People with memories remain grateful to the Americans for the no-fly zone and for removing Saddam. The Iraq War is not so unpopular here, he insisted, an amazing thing for an American to hear. Only those who are relatively young and lack usable memories, he explained, complain that the Saddam era was better, especially whenever their salaries are not paid or they suffer economic deprivations. Of course, the issue was the old one of the simple passage of time coupled with demands for a better life that accounted for the occasional nostalgia for the Ba‘athist regime, a regime that fewer and fewer Kurds had actually experienced. Meanwhile, I happened to be in Kurdistan on March 16, 2022, thirty-four years to the day after Saddam’s March 16, 1988, poison gas attack on thousands of Kurdish civilians in the town of Halabja. At 11 a.m., all the traffic in Erbil stopped and all pedestrians stood still, observing a few moments of silence to commemorate the event. The memory of the Baʽathist terror state was still strong.
“Iraq,” Shareef summed up, “only exists in the mind of the State Department. Too much water has flowed under the bridge since the no-fly zone in 1991. Whatever Kurdistan’s problems, Baghdad and the other cities in Arab Iraq are far more unstable and insecure. The younger generation of Kurds in the schools and in the universities are studying English and not Arabic. Nobody wants to visit Iraq.”
* * *
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Niyaz Barzani, the head of foreign relations for his relative, Kurdish president Nechirvan Barzani, doubled down on everything that Shareef said.[*] “Iraq is a very sad story,” Barzani began. Even during the decades before the 1958 coup and certainly afterwards, “there was never an extended period of stability and prosperity except at the expense of one ethnic or sectarian group or another. The biggest problem with Iraq is that no one has ever been loyal to the institutions of state. The loyalty has always been to one group or another. As of now we don’t have an Iraqi government except in name only: we have a Shi‘ite regime, that’s it. In Iraq proper, the real elements of power and intimidation lie outside government.” And government, he might have said, is all about monopolizing the use of force.
Barzani added: “The U.S. decision to remove Saddam was the right decision. You gave the Iraqi people the chance to live a different story, to break from their past. Unfortunately, they did not take the opportunity.”
I wish I could have believed him. The problem is that it is very difficult for any nation or large group of people to break from its past. And foreign policy should be about a nation’s interest, not a political science experiment.
* * *
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Even if the situation in Iraq was much worse, Kurdistan was still badly governed. Two clans-cum-gangs and weak institutions essentially defined it. Yet it wasn’t particularly repressive. And minorities were well treated. Life was normal and predictable. Meanwhile, Kurdistan’s much bigger neighbors—Iraq proper, Syria, Turkey, and Iran—were either lawless, as we know in the case of Iraq; at war in the case of Syria; suffering vast economic mismanagement in the case of Turkey; or both terrifically repressive and also mismanaged in the case of Iran. Whereas Kurds incessantly complained, people on the other side of the border in any direction were often altogether miserable. Life here was normal, just disappointing. Life nearby was often intolerably unsafe. The Kurds, given their history, were not doing too badly. But no one with whom I spoke was at all satisfied with the current domestic situation. In their universal demands for better government there were grounds for hope.
Skip Notes
* The presidency in Kurdistan was largely ceremonial. Much more power resided with the prime minister, Masrour Barzani. And Masrour’s father, Massoud Barzani, had to approve all big decisions.
Chapter
10
SAFAVID IRAN
Unlike the states of the Fertile Crescent, which are all artificial creations of the twentieth century, Iran is synonymous with a significant geographical feature, the high-altitude Iranian plateau, protected by seas and mountains. Like Egypt’s Nile Valley, Iran is heir to a singular language and civilization in a variety of forms going back millennia. Iran’s distinctiveness is further enhanced by being virtually surrounded by non-Persian peoples.[1] Age-old Iran was the archrival and political-cultural opposite of the Greek city-states and Alexander the Great, much as it was the archrival of the West, the Arab Gulf states, and Israel. Ever since Herodotus, for reasons of geography and civilization, Iran has been at the center of world history, and has been the seat of great empires—Achaemenid, Sassanid, and Safavid—stretching from the Mediterranean to the borderlands of India and China. Indeed, the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus and Darius in early antiquity can be considered the first true empire and universal government in recorded history. Under both the shah and the ayatollahs, Iran, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, believed it had the historical, cultural, and moral authority to shape the Greater Middle East in all the areas where Persian empires once held mastery.[2]
Though Iran may have constituted an imperium reaching back to antiquity, it was the early modern Safavids at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with their introduction of Shi‘ism as a quasi–state religion, who bequeathed to Iran “an uninterrupted political identity” and the beginning of a standardized state long before the age of modern nationalism, notes Yale professor Abbas Amanat. The Safavids accomplished this, in part, by forgoing claims to eastern Anatolia, southern Mesopotamia, and swaths of Central Asia, thus giving Iran sustainable borders, based largely on the Sunni-Shi‘ite split.[3] In other words, Shi‘ism got to define Iranian nationhood more than did the concept of ancient Persia. Of course, that is now in the process of being flipped on its side, as a postrevolutionary upheaval in the Iran of the 2020s will have the effect of reasserting a secular Persian identity to go along with this era of global cosmopolitanism. Therefore, think of what I henceforth have to say as a postmortem on clerical Shi‘ite Iran.
* * *
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In the beginning, the religion-based state-building spirit of Safavid-cum-Shi‘ite Iran was somewhat similar to what the two other so-called gunpowder empires of the early modern age, the Ottomans and the Mughals, were doing for Turkey and India. The Safavids themselves constituted a Sufi order of Kurds, Turkomans, and other minorities in the northwestern, Azeri Turkish part of Iran near the Caspian Sea, who went on to extend their rule throughout the Iranian plateau and its environs at the turn of the sixteenth century. Thus began the long march to the modern era of Shi‘ite revolution.
