The Bush administration is quietly and not so quietly trying to undercut the Kurdish identity.  This is no exaggeration. In all their official and no-so official references to Kurdistan, American officials make the point not to mention the K-word--Kurdistan.  Theirs is indeed a vocabulary designed to preserve Iraq as an Arab entity and give the Kurds at best a subordinate role.  The administration's intellectual ally, the Nixon Center, has even gone as far as lecturing the Kurds pompously on why Arabic, rather than English, ought to be their second language; in the words of Damjan De Krenjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev, who probably until very recently couldn't even locate Kurdistan on a map, for the Kurds not wanting to learn Arabic is tantamount "to embrace their resentments" (Financial Times, Nov. 20, 2004).  Writing from the gaudy corridors of the American academy, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole advocates in all serious the scraping of the very idea of Kurdistan as a cultural and geographic entity in favor of an Iraq organized around its 18 provinces, something even Saddam's pan-Arab agenda never dared to raise.  What makes this kind of thinking possible is not the resources of logic and dialect and a willingness to give a story a fair hearing but the willingness to suspend all that, as Paul Bremer was in the habit of sheepishly doing every time the Kurdish situation was on the agenda. 

Boston Globe's Thanassis Cambanis (Nov. 14, 2004) and The Independent's Charles Glass have recently found out with relative ease (Nov. 23, 2004).    Not making an effort to understand the Kurdish reality is to engage in a colonialist enterprise of the worst kind: disregarding a people's right to be heard.   

moshea@repub.com, Nov. 20, 2004).   Continue reading...

The Kurds have suffered terribly at the hands of Sadaam, and haven't been dealt with fairly by Washington. Again, I don't understand enough of it yet but I expect that our Kurdish friends will help us understand their point of view and what the real issues are.

I am both puzzled and saddened by this news. Sometimes we forget how much symbols can mean to people who have been deprived of the right to display theirs.

The kurdish flag is a symbol for freedom, for the krudish freedom fight in the last decades. The flag was forbidden udner Saddam now the Americans want to do the same?

The Americans have to respecet the Kurdish nation, because the only nation who respect the Amricans in Middel east are the Kurds.