NOTE: This is a copy of an e-mail exchange. The language is not as tight as perhaps it should be.
"One more such victory [over the Romans] and we are undone." --Pyrrhus, 279 B.C.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA
Date: Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 9:07 PM
Subject: Re: Ned McDonnell says hello and thanks Chargé XYZ d'Affaires
To:
"One more such victory [over the Romans] and we are undone." --Pyrrhus, 279 B.C.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA
Date: Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 9:07 PM
Subject: Re: Ned McDonnell says hello and thanks Chargé XYZ d'Affaires
To:
Dear Chargé XYZ d'Affaires,
Thank you for writing back. My interest in the Kurdish region stems from two thoughts:
Thank you for writing back. My interest in the Kurdish region stems from two thoughts:
- my brief experience in the region occurred in 2005 during which several officials asked me why the U.S. would not support an independent Kurdistan (i.e., Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk and Erbil); as well as,
- the festering sore of the Transitional Administrative Law, the only two segments of which were grand-fathered through to the current Constitution.
As to the latter, the T.A.L., in Article #53, stated, "The Kurdistan Regional Government is recognized as the official government of the territories that were administered by that government on 19 March 2003 in the governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Kirkuk, Diyala and Ninawa...." When I read this clause in 2004, my jaw dropped; when it was grandfathered into the Constitution in 2005, my jaw dropped again. A ticking time bomb; yet, no one seemed to notice -- among the FSOs, the training and equipping military command or anybody else.
I have reviewed some maps for the territory the American viceroy carved out for the K.R.G. They indicate, in some cases, Mosul being just inside the Kurdish zone; and, with others, just outside. Though I have no idea which map is accurate, I suspect that the Arabs in Ninawa and the Kurds are looking at two different maps.
With the battle for Mosul beginning and now the Shi´ite militias coming into support the Iraqi Army, I wonder if we are headed for two battles for Mosul:
- one to drive drive out I.S.I.S. (mainly, Shi´ite militia-men fighting Sunni extremists); followed by,
- a second between the Arabs and the Kurds.
We may end up seeing less a battle of attrition than a series of battles leading to the destruction of Iraq as we remember her.
I hope this e-mail finds you to be doing well.
The underlying idea being discussed is the one of 'nested autnonomy' for the Kurds in which each Kurdish enclave in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey would remain an integral to its host country but enjoy an autonomy permitting people in each enclave free passage to the others. A regional currency would be backed by a basket of the host nations' currencies, weighted by an average of the percentages of land and population distributed among the countries. The goodly senior diplomat raised many objections (tax rate disparities; massive flight of repressed and impoverished Kurds into Iraqi Kurdistan, et al.) that made this idea a bridge-(way)-too-far.
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