WarSclerotic

Rudaw in English….The Happening: Latest News and Multimedia about Kurdistan, Iraq and the World – Should the Kurds Support Israel’s Attack on Iran?.

Every now and then, it is said that Israeli fighter planes will use Kurdistan’s airspace to reach Iran. This is a serious matter. It incriminates the Kurdish people. It automatically makes Kurdistan an Israeli ally. But Kurdistan is not an independent state. It does not have its sovereign airspace. Kurdistan doesn’t have an air force either, to join the Israeli attack.

It is a semi-autonomous region whose main goal is to maintain its own security and avoid any act that may endanger its hard-won political and economic stability.

The region has already received enough accusations of having relations with Israel. So I don’t think Kurdish leaders will do anything that will prove what the Arab world has been accusing them of for years.

If Israel decides to attack Iran, it will do so regardless of what the world thinks. Israel doesn’t need anyone’s permission or support — certainly not that of the Kurds — to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. All they need is to be sure that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.

The idea of an Israeli attack is not new. Israel has been working on it for a long time. It is said that they already have nuclear submarines lurking beneath the Persian Gulf, under Iran’s very nose.

One of Israel’s closest allies is the tiny state of Azerbaijan on Iran’s northern border. The two small countries enjoy very strong relations and it is likely that Israeli jets will take off from Azerbaijan to bomb sensitive Iranian sites.

But even without Azerbaijan or the Persian Gulf, Israel will, without a doubt, ignore any country’s airspace in order to reach its targets. To them the threat of a nuclear Iran and the survival of the Jewish state is more important than violating someone else’s airspace.

For now, an attack on Iran or the talk of it seems to have been put on hold until after the American presidential elections. But what should the Kurds do if this attack happens? They have no support to offer, and they have no means to prevent it.

What they can do is to hope that it will be a quick and decisive attack. Israel will do it for its own sake, but the outcome will serve the Kurds, too.

Around 7 million Kurds live in Iran and they will always be there. They will always struggle for their freedom and their rights. They have to deal with the government in Tehran either through arms or through negotiations. But it is difficult to negotiate with a nuclear power.

A nuclear bomb will give Iran impunity. Behind a nuclear bomb, Iran will bully the region even more than it is doing today. The Kurds hope that the international community will take their case more seriously, but if Iran goes nuclear, even that little hope will be dashed.

The nature of the regimes in Iran, Syria and Iraq is dictatorial and unfortunately Kurds know from experience how brutally those regimes use their weapons. So we should hope that none of our neighbors ever develop a nuclear bomb, not just Iran. And not only our immediate neighbors — we should in fact hope that no country in the Middle East, as far away as Yemen and Sudan, ever becomes a nuclear power.

They might never drop an atomic bomb on Kurds, but since we live right in the middle of them, since we have ambitions for an independent state and are often described as separatists, agents of the west, and infidels, we shouldn’t want these countries to have more than AK-47 Kalashnikovs. Even Kalashnikovs might be too much, given the mentality of these regimes.

Dictatorial states do not deserve nuclear bombs. In France, Britain, America or Israel, a nuclear bomb is a national weapon. Presidents and prime ministers come and go in a democratic process. But any regime in the Middle East will treat a nuclear bomb like a family possession.

If Bashar al-Assad was a nuclear power, the world wouldn’t be treating him with such a carefree attitude and would ask him to step down. With a demoralized army and rusty tanks he still defies the world. He threatens to use chemical weapons in the final showdown. So imagine what he would do if he had an atomic bomb. He would cling to it to ensure his clan would rule Syria for a thousand years. But in Operation Orchard in 2007, Israel attacked and destroyed Syria’s nuclear reactor and took care of that for everyone else.

If Saddam Hussein had a nuclear bomb, he and his sons and grandsons would have ruled Iraq for god knows how many years. With an army of hungry soldiers who didn’t even have money for a bus ticket to go home on leave, he harassed and threatened the entire region for three decades. Imagine what he would have done if he had a nuclear weapon. For sure his genocide campaigns would have continued to the last Kurdish child and the world wouldn’t dare to raise a finger.

But thankfully, in Operation Babylon in June 1981, Israeli F-16s destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactors outside Baghdad and nipped Saddam’s diabolical dreams in the bud.

Because of those Israeli attacks, Syria is weaker today, and it is easy to set conditions for the regime in Damascus. The Israeli attack of 1981 made it impossible for Saddam Hussein’s family to rule Iraq forever.

Therefore, a successful attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will only make it easier for the Kurds and the international community to deal with Tehran in the future. 

This entry was posted on September 18, 2012 at 2:52 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.