Left mostly to civilians, PKK volunteers, and others Kirkuk fell to Iraqi troops and Iran-based militias in a matter of hours. Iraq is seeking to take back the oil-rich region from Kurdish control.
US stood by and did nothing.
President Trump recently announced a shift in policy in Iran, which would include designating IRGC as a terrorist organization, responding to Iranian militias engaged in terrorism with harshness, and preventing Iran's expansionism in the region.
Well, today's assault on Kirkuk following the recent independence referendum and a week of tensions, threats, and attempted negotiations was the first test of our commitment to the new policy and we failed it.
We have allowed Iraqi forces, armed with US weaponry, and on the dole from the US government for many years, as well as Iran backed militias, adversarial to our efforts in the region and inimical to US interests and those of her allies, to attack an ally who has stalwartly backed us in our fight against ISIS, showed an openness to Western values of democracy and liberalization, and a strong interest in a growing alliance with the United States.
Furthermore, we have hypocritically allowed the source of the many factionalist troubles in the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot treaty, to continue dictating the present and the future of the region, effectively killing the dream of self-determination, moving away from colonialist maps, and towards a future, where nations can forge their own paths and choose their own governments. Foolishly, we have also allowed a large supply of oil to end up in the hands of groups backed by an expansionist regime, and committed to terrorism and domination of the region.
It would have taken but one phone call from President Trump to stop Abadi's forces from entering Kirkuk, bring all parties to the table for a negotiation, and resolve the matters civilly, peacefully, and diplomatically. Instead, we have allowed our ally, the Kurds, to be publicly brutalized and humiliated by the presence of the enemy forces in the city they helped liberate from ISIS.
And the head of this operation is none other than the fearsome Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, who plays a key role in the intelligence and the IRGC, the very organization President Trump just designated as part of Global Terrorists organization, enforcing the law he signed as part of the sanctions package on Russia, North Korea, and Iran earlier this year. We had multiple opportunities to nab Soleimani in the last few years of the Obama administration, but let him get away, liberating him from the sanctions lists, and allowing him to cut weapons deal in Russia, in violation of our own security interests.
I need not tell you what is likely to happen when someone like Soleimani is in charge. But let's not leave the matter to our imagination. Let's look at Iran's treatment of its own significant Kurdish minority - treatment that includes disproportional executions, facilitation of drug flow into the regions, frequent denial of civil rights, and brutal torture of even peaceful human rights activists. Our failure to stop Soleimani from playing an active role in the fall of Kirkuk, as well as our lack of will in enforcing both our own existing laws and the newly articulated policy by the White House shows that our interest in stopping IRGC is significantly less than our apparent interest in appeasing Abadi, Erdogan, and various Arab states vehemently opposed to the existence of a Kurdish state.
Besides showing ourselves once again as a poor ally to the one group that is openly embracing our interest in liberalization, diversity, and enlightenment in the region, we are also shooting ourselves in the foot by opposing an important buffer state against Iran and increasingly bellicose Turkey, who would likely have positive relations with Israel, could be a good trade partner, and could move the region in a positive direction through its commitment to education and business investments. There's only one thing that's worse than betraying good allies, and that is betraying our own constituents. Americans and Congress have shown strong opposition to the IRGC, articulated by the sanctions signed into law this summer. We were explicitly promised the end of the Obama administration's failed appeasement posture and the beginning of a stronger, more assertive US that looks out for US national security interests above all else. Instead, we are getting more of the same - failure to contain an organization we just designated as terrorist, spread of strife and needless violence in the one part of the region that showed signs of promising stability, and endless deception over what standing up to Iran means in practice as opposed to what we were led to believe we were getting.
I urge President Trump to listen to good advice not from former and still interested oil executives, but from regional and national security experts well familiar with the dangers of IRGC and Erdogan's neo-Ottoman ambitions, to take all action that would get Abadi to back off, to secure Kirkuk against invasions, and to have Soleimani taken into custody or killed, as the head of a terrorist organization that he is. That is the only way to show our commitment to our new policy on Iran, and to secure our national security interests and those of our regional allies, and to be taken seriously on the international stage by friends and foes alike.
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