How Should US policies be
It’s difficult for me to predict what the policy is going to be before we see all the places, all the names in place for who’s going to be formulating it. But I want to say a lot about what I think it should realistically be and what it could be within the realm of possibility. So that means that US policy under Biden is going to have a view towards US interest, but there’s a lot of leeway and variance in how US interests can be interpreted and viewed, right? So what you can go from like a Kissinger type brutal, real politic type conception of US interest to a view of human rights and collective security principles and multilateralism is also being good for US interests. Usually, there’s a mix of the two. It’s not that common that we experience extremes such as the Trump or Nixon administrations. Usually, we see a combination in how the US interests are viewed.
Iran and the Biden Administration:Background and recommendations to policy makers and the Kurdish parties
When we look at Iran and Iraq and the Kurds and Biden’s policy there, I want to talk about Iran first. Biden will want to renew the joint comprehensive plan of action, AK the Iran nuclear accord. That’s fine. There are a lot of good reasons why that bad deal is better than worse options but in renewing the deal Biden needs to avoid repeating mistakes that John Kerry and the Obama administration of which he was apart made when they originally negotiated the deal. Now obviously any possible deal to limit Iran’s nuclear weapon, capacity has to be limited to that issue. Critics of the Obama/Kerry era deal were as my mother would say a kind of dreaming in color. She used to tell me “tu Cerêve couleur” you dream in color, like, forget about it, right? So they were dreaming in color when they said the Iran nuclear deal needed to include issues not related to nuclear weapons and enrichments such as Iran’s conventional military capabilities, support for groups like Hezbollah, and so forth. The deal can’t include stuff like that. It wouldn’t have been possible, so they needed to remain separate. But the problem is that while Iran separated these issues when negotiating the Iran nuclear deal with the Obama administration and would not concede to any notion of including non-nuclear related conditions in the deal. The Obama administration, which included Biden acted as if other issues were indeed linked, acted as if they were linked in a way that favored Iran. What I mean by this is that they treated Iran sort of like a deer that might get spooked if they said anything about human rights in Iran, if they pressured Iran in other venues, and so forth. This even went to the point where during the negotiations, Obama canceled a major drug enforcement agency investigation into Hezbollah drug running and money laundering. Those Hezbollah operations included using car dealers in the US to launder money. He nixed that investigation less the Iranians get spooked and back away from the deal. Now that’s nonsense. It’s a recipe for the Iranians to walk all over the US and the negotiations. It rightly worried US allies in the region, which includes some Kurdish groups as well. The much better approach would be for the US to really separate nuclear issues from other issues, just like the Iranians did and demanded.
Now that means sure, negotiate a return to this nuclear deal, keep but proposing and pressuring Iran in other venues, just like they will proposing and harming the US. Now, what does that mean in practice, especially for the Kurds? I should think that means things like holding talks with legitimate Iranian, Kurdish opposition groups and other Iranian opposition groups. I’m not so sure about the Mujahedin e-Khalaq but there’s plenty of other good options. It means things like speaking up loudly about Iranian Human rights abuses and sanctioning them for such. It means things like helping US allies and not just States that are facing Iranian pressure or attacks. Now, hopefully, Biden is familiar enough with the region and with the Kurds to know this. Working with Iran on a resumption of the nuclear cord while working against Iran and other contexts should also help assuage regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and perhaps even some Biden critics in the US.
Now on the other side, various Iranian Kurdish political parties need to most of all, unify and speak with more of one voice. That’s always the problem on the Kurdish side It seems. But if they continue spending half or more of their time criticizing each other, the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, rather than the Mullahs in Iran, it’s hard for a Biden administration or anyone else to take them seriously.
Policies toward Iraqi Kurdistan and assigning a working group for the Kurds
Now for Iraq and Bashur, I just said a few comments about Iran and Rojhelat, but for Iraq and Bashur, I’m not sure if the way forward is clear. Most of all, a new Biden administration needs to pay attention and keep better channels of communication with the KRG, always open to asking them what they need amongst other things. And considering these requests. In 2017, the big sins of the Trump administration were to first ignore developments in Iraqi Kurdistan, and that was a bit the sin of the Obama administration beforehand, he did not want to hear about Iraq. So the first thing was to ignore developments in Iraqi Kurdistan, and then once they couldn’t ignore them any longer to not just stay neutral, but to declare the September of 2017 referendum illegitimate, for instance, which gave a clear green light for others to attack the Iraqi Kurds. Now, once the October 2017 attack on the Kirkuk occurred, then the US decided to stay neutral and in a conflict that pitted reliably, Iraqi Kurdish allies against Tehran, Baghdad, and the US-armed Shiite militias. The results were a huge setback for Pro-US Kurds in a win for Iran. Now, I suspect at least behind closed doors, the US in October 2017, did warn Baghdad against continuing their attacks into recognized parts of autonomous Kurdistan, as opposed to disputed territory like Kirkuk.
Now an alternate scenario back then in 2017 would have had a clear American warning against attacking Iraqi Kurds and to demand that outbid and Baghdad together enact article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, as opposed to unilateral grabs of disputed territories by either side. And that could’ve gone some way to resolving things more productively. Today, Biden takes office in January, getting a resolution to the Erbil- Baghdad budget disputes should be a real priority for the Biden administration helping with that. Kurdistan used to be the ‘other Iraq’, and one of the only bright spots following the 2003 invasion, but all that progress is threatened by economic collapse. Now, the Biden administration must not repeat the mistakes of the Trump and Obama ones by only paying attention to Iraq when too many things start blowing up. Now on the Kurdish side in Iraq, the same issue as always the same issue as with Iran, the lack of a unified voice democratic backsliding by the KDP [Kurdistan Democratic Party ] and [Patriotic Union of Kurdistan] who still have most of the Peshmerga answering to their respective parties rather than to the Kurdistan regional government. Corruption problems and Neo patrimonial family politics. These things all make it a lot harder for any outside actors. The US included as well as the EU and others to take the KRG seriously. Now, this is despite all the real and great accomplishments that the KRG can and should be proud of. Unfortunately, some western professional critics of the KRG, as well as, opposition parties in the Kurdistan region, aren’t always completely responsible. They regularly take these problems and exaggerate them by several orders of magnitude and policy people in Washington listen to this a lot and it hurts the region. Finally, I would like to add one more thing about what the Biden administration should consider doing. They should set up the State Department and other offices whose mandate focuses only on the Kurds. Currently, Washington’s bureaucratic working groups are always set up along state lines, like the State Department Group for Turkey or the CIA group for Turkey, the other one for Iran, the other one for Iraq, for Syria. And as a result of that, they always view the Kurdish issue through very state-centric lenses, and they often fail to understand what’s really happening or needs to happen in Kurdish regions.