More News from Nowhere

On Sunday, 23 November, came a report in The Washington Post (the TV Guide of the chattering classes) that a mysterious arms shipment to the Iraqi Kurdish area took place in September. [1] Reportedly, three C-130 transports originating in Bulgaria brought a shipment of small arms and ammunition to the quasi-autonomous regional government in the north of Iraq.

The newspaper quotes the Iraqi interior minister as saying the shipment was unauthorized and would constitute a violation of Iraqi law, an assertion which merely reinforces what we already know: that the Iraqi central government would be strongly opposed to arms shipments to regional players that could thereby be in a better position to challenge the government's already tenuous authority. The Post also quotes a U.S. Brigadier General Luckey, who advises the Iraq government on arms purchases. Beyond saying he knows of no instance where the government authorized regional entities to purchase arms from abroad, he provides the reader no help in determining what the U.S. government knew, or whether it had in fact remonstrated with Kurdish authorities.

The paper's primary source is three anonymous U.S. "government officials" (possibly CIA employees, as the Post is not known as the CIA paper for nothing), who claim that they in turn were tipped by their own source in Bulgaria. But when did this source tip them? — before the shipment took off? Immediately after? Not until now? And in the case that these "officials" knew about the shipment for two months, why did they wait until now to inform the Post? Did they merely wait until after the U.S. presidential election loosened the grip of Dick Cheney and Co. over the bureaucracy, or is the story a warning that something is about to happen in Iraq?

The paper then burns through column inches of newsprint to belabor the obvious without advancing the story: yes, we've known for years that the Kurds are at loggerheads both with local Sunnis living in the north of Iraq as well as the central government. Left unmentioned is the critical question: qui bono? Obviously, it benefits the Kurds themselves to obtain the weapons. But who benefits from sending them, other than those with purely monetary considerations? Another equally important question is, why is the U.S. government so curiously and uncharacteristically passive about the incident?

Let us run through the check list of who does not benefit from militarily strengthening the Kurdish area in Iraq. Turkey, of course: that country sees Iraqi Kurdistan as the kernel of an independent Kurdish nation which could threaten the territorial integrity of the Kemalist Turkish state (a state which contains a substantial Kurdish minority). Not far behind is Iran. Iran has a similar (though lesser in extent) Kurdish "problem" within its territory which it has no logical reason to exacerbate. At the same time, Iran appears to be succeeding in partially satellizing Iraq; wouldn't it be better to have effective control of the entire territory of present-day Iraq (including the oil in the north) than to have to contend with a hostile independent Kurdish state?

It is hard to conceive of any Arab nation state in the Middle East having a motive to assist the Kurds, not only because of ethnic loyalties in play but also because of the terrible precedent a breakup of Iraq would have for the territorial integrity of their own states. As for other regional players, such as Russia, the notion of aiding the Kurds is too nonsensical to be maintained; it would have no motive whatever for establishing yet another pro-U.S. statelet (like Georgia), nor does it have a good reason to attempt to break up any state that does not contain a substantial Russian ethnic minority.

The position of the U.S. government is, oddly enough, the most ambiguous of all the countries mentioned so far. While the official position of the government is to maintain the integrity of the Iraqi state with its current borders, its policies since occupying Iraq in 2003 have had the effect, intended or not, of balkanizing the country. And it is psychologically plausible that officials in Washington and military officers on the ground in Iraq would tend to be indulgent towards an ethnic community in Iraq that (for once) is not spending its time trying to kill U.S. personnel. And some U.S. politicians, including Vice President-Elect Biden, have called for a "soft partition" of Iraq, which it is hard to see as leading to anything other than de facto independence.

Still, it is difficult to imagine the U.S. government seriously supporting independence because that would greatly increase instability not only in Iraq, but throughout the region (foremost with NATO ally Turkey). Long gone are the heady days of the Wolfowitz-Perle-Ledeen policy of creating chaos in the Middle East for its own sake, just to see what would happen. Right now, the watchwords for the Washington bureaucracy are keep the lid on, muddle through, and keep one's job (vide Secretary Robert Gates).

There is, however, one interested party in the Middle East for whom such cautionary maxims with respect to an independent Kurdistan do not apply. It is a party that has consistently favored the idea of transforming not only Iraq, but other Middle East countries, into a crazy quilt of Arab San Marinos and Andorras. Its intelligence operatives have been reported to have swarmed over the Kurdish territories of Iraq since the U.S. invasion. [2] Its expertise in gun-running (the basis of its founding) is second to none.

That party is Israel. Apart from the motive discussed in the previous paragraph, it has the means consistent with the known facts of the story. A country like Ukraine could conceivably sell arms to the Iraqi Kurds from purely mercenary motives, but would likely deliver them by organic means, an Antonov transport aircraft, perhaps. Leasing C-130s would simply increase the overhead cost, and heighten the risk of detection by U.S. agencies which are purportedly monitoring international aircraft leasing arrangements so as to track such illicit arms trafficking.

Israel has an extensive organic capability with respect to C-130s, and a long and colorful history, dating at least since the Entebbe operation more than 30 years ago, of operating them under the radar screen, both metaphorically and actually [3]. And it possesses protection far more valuable than any electronic countermeasures the aircraft might have, or skill the pilots might demonstrate.

The United States runs a massive air surveillance and air traffic control operation throughout the breadth of Iraq's airspace (Balad Air Force Base is currently the second busiest airport in the world [4]). The U.S. military operated a comprehensive air surveillance over Kurdish Iraq continuously for a dozen years before U.S. forces even invaded Iraq in 2003. Is it credible that three C-130s could slip into Kurdistan without intelligence warning, radar warning, or an air patrol detecting them? Yet American sources shuffle their feet, cough behind their hands, and mumble about how this one slipped through the cracks.

Balderdash. At least since the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, Israel has always got its way with the U.S. government, regardless of how criminal, destructive, or asinine the scheme might have been. (Remember the tragic-comic opera of Iran Contra? The grandiose imbecility of North, Secord, et al., may have been the catalyst, but a crucial aider and abettor was the government of Israel, already up to its neck in dispatching F-4 Phantom parts to its ostensible enemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, so as to confound its greater enemy Iraq). U.S. obsequiousness to Israel is a topic which requires no belaboring; suffice it to say that no brigadier general in Iraq is going to risk his career by being Dudley Do-Right in the face of the power of the Lobby.

As for the Bulgarians, they are no doubt the witless stooges in this farce, a pass-through for Warsaw Pact-spec small arms and ammo. Already they will have greedily fallen upon the few coins tossed to them in this caper. No one would expect anything different of them.

Like so many mysterious incidents, this one will attenuate into forgetfulness, even — or especially — if it leads to tragedy. How could it be otherwise? — citizens who never heard of the Tulip Bubble, the South Sea Bubble, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Long Depression of 1873, the Depression of 1893, the Panic of 1907, or the Crash of '29, even as they invested their illusions and most of their cash in the biggest bubble in world history, are hardly likely to care about an obscure bit of dirty work in a far-away part of the world even of whose approximate location they have no idea.

In the worst case, somebody else's kid will get killed.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] "Kurds in N. Iraq Receive Arms From Bulgaria," Ernesto Londono, Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2008.

[2] "Kurdistan's Covert Back-Channels," Laura Rosen, Mother Jones, April 11, 1007.

[3] Mike Harari, a Mossad operative in Panama during the rule of Manuel Noriega, was widely accused of being involved in gun and drug running, and was claimed in a contemporaneous Washington Times story to have departed Panama in a C-130 a few hours before the U.S. invasion.

[4] Wikipedia: Joint Base Balad.