Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East
by Quil Lawrence
Walker & Co., 384 pp., $25.95

Until recently, the media has not focused attention on northern Iraq. The secular democracy, economic success, and relative peace of the region have been overshadowed by the suicide bombings and death squads of the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the south. In contrast, the north is governed by the Kurds, an ethnic group comprising one-fifth of Iraq’s population. Their stable government is the embodiment of the neoconservative dream to reshape Iraq, a lonely success in an endeavor that has far too few of them.

In Invisible Nation, Quil Lawrence discusses how the success of northern Iraq is in many ways a happy accident, enabled by a series of auspicious events. While much in Iraq has fallen short of American expectations, the Kurdish region in Iraq has exceeded earlier hopes. Yet Lawrence warns that the success is a tenuous one, dependent on continued American protection.

The Accidental Success Story
The Kurds are a fair-haired people who speak a language distinct from those of their Turkic and Arab neighbors. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, arbitrary borders divided the Kurds amongst Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Iraq’s six million Kurds were systematically oppressed, the victims of multiple extermination campaigns under Saddam Hussein, including the notorious use of poison gas on the city Halabja. In neighboring Turkey, the government seeks to eradicate the Kurdish culture through forced assimilation. Although most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, their primary allegiance is to the Kurdish nation, not toward any religious sect or doctrine.

Because the Kurds are pro-Western, secular, and democratic, their interests align conveniently with those of the United States. Northern Iraq’s oil industry is helping to fund the region’s own development, and the Kurds are eager for the U.S. to build a permanent military base on their land. In short, the Kurdish region of Iraq is the closest embodiment of the grand hopes that Bush administration policymakers had held for Iraq at large.

However, the success of Kurdish northern Iraq, according to Lawrence, is largely the accidental result of a turn of events that, at first, seemed unfortunate. In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States was engaged in heated negotiations with Turkey, a NATO ally, to use Turkish land as a base of operations. The Turks feared mass Kurdish flight from an occupied Iraq, however, and refused to cooperate. If Turkish troops had accompanied American forces and occupied northern Iraq, the development of a semi-autonomous and democratic Iraqi Kurdistan would have been impossible. Lawrence wrote that “Failure to win Turkish assistance in March of 2003 may go down in history as the luckiest thing that happened to America in Iraq, but it would take years in retrospect to realize it.”

An Uncertain Future
Iraqi Kurdistan is not without flaws: It serves as a base of operations for the PKK, a Kurdish separatist organization responsible for terrorist attacks within Turkey. Having spent much time among the Kurds as a journalist, Lawrence developed an attachment to them that is evident in the book; the culpability of Iraqi Kurdistan in harboring members of the PKK is only mentioned in passing. Turkey insists on striking back against the PKK within Iraq’s borders, but the U.S. has been wary of allowing Turkey to use military forces to undermine the one stable region of Iraq.

The presence of 200,000 Turkish soldiers on the Iraq border, more troops than the U.S. has in all of Iraq, underscores why the Kurds depend on American protection. For now, most Kurds do not want independence; they are thriving in the new Iraq and believe that secession may, in fact, threaten their newfound freedom and prosperity. Nonetheless, they continue to hope for a Kurdish homeland in the future, but only after they have grown stronger and can both contain the fallout from the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the south and withstand Turkish pressure.

Without American support, independence is fraught with danger. Turkey’s intentions to destabilize Iraqi Kurdistan are clear. Furthermore, it is no secret that Iran, Syria, and the factions of southern Iraq covet Kurdish oil wealth. Lawrence poses a question that the United States must answer: “Will America abandon the budding democracy it accidentally helped to create?” Lawrence provides a compelling account of how the recent successes in the Kurdish came to be. Given the accidental nature of many of those successes, there is no guarantee that they will continue. ]]>