Hey Middle East, I’ma Try Somethin’

Map of Kurdish-Occupied Areas

(Map ganked from TheKurds.net)

I have no degrees in history, political science or comparative religion. I have no diplomatic or military experience. I do, however, sometimes think relatively logically, and I try to check my sources most of the time. Therefore, in matters of Resolving Intractable International Problems, I feel I am more qualified than, say, Sarah Palin, and significantly less qualified than, say, everybody else. But I get a thought and it wants to be shared, so here it is:

MY PLAN TO FIX TERRORISM AND ALSO OTHER STUFF

The Kurds have an incredibly raw deal in many ways. There’s that business with Saddam Hussein killing thousands of them with poison gas, but that’s just the icing on a large, ugly historical cake. They’d really like to have their own nation, apparently. So what about this:

Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia all give up some of their most Kurdishest of regions, temporarily. Say, for a fifty year trial period. Draw up a contract and everything. The Kurds get to govern this region. It’s only limited sovereignty, though. Certain powers, including the power to Take It All Back If The Kurds Don’t Deliver, are reserved for the donor nations during the trial period.

During those years, the Kurds do the following two things:

1. Prove that they can govern their new territory by way of some economic, political, and other progress metrics, including human rights (i.e., how do the Kurds treat the people who are suddenly the minorities in their region?)
2. contribute guerrilla-fighter know-how, lots of policepersons and/or soldiers, diplomatic skillz, negotiators, community-builders, liaisons, and whatever else might be useful to anti-terrorism efforts in the donor nations. Thus, the amount of land conditionally donated to the new Kurdish state by each nation might depend on how much they needed fifty years of highly motivated Kurdish human help in reducing terrorism.

This would need to be funded. The donor nations would have to pony up proportional to their ability and need, of course, but the UN (probably with lots of US funding) would need to foot a large part of the bill. The UN could also be the watchdog, making sure everyone held to the contract. This “bill” would not only include outfitting and training the Kurdish personnel (which would be LOTS cheaper than doing the same for American personnel), but would also have to involve a lot of state-building within the hoped-for Kurdish region.

As the fifty (or whatever) years drew down, the UN would evaluate whether the Kurdish proto-state had kept enough of the conditions of its bargain. If not, then power would revert to the original donors, but the Kurds would now have a much-improved place to live, even though they didn’t really run it anymore. Or maybe someone would renegotiate the contract. But if they had done what they said they’d do, the Kurds would gradually return to their new homeland, now with full autonomy.

I think there could be lots of benefits, such as:

• The Kurds get a homeland
• Maybe a civil war or two gets prevented, down the line
• Anti-terrorism efforts are advanced (by people who are a lot more local than us)
• Ties are formed between the Kurdish state and its neighbors, as well as between the neighbors themselves
• The Kurdish state gets infrastructure, human-capital, and other support to get off to a good start
• I get a lucrative consulting job in Washington because of my awesome idea to fix part of the Middle East, thus assuaging my fears of becoming an unemployed ex-junior-professor

Does this sound expensive? It is. But my less-educated-than-everyone-but-Sarah-Palin guess is that the long-term cost would be less than the costs incurred by fifty more years of business as usual. And seriously, we are going to be in Iraq another half century, anyway, so why not make some kind of a reasonable long-term plan for improving things while we’re there, in ways that will make everyone (including us) safer? Maybe not this plan. But some plan.

Sometimes I think American foreign policy is like my housecleaning habits: short-sighted, based on fantasies about messes cleaning themselves up.