You have made a fine riposte to those who would elevate Sulimanyeh to a shining city on a hill, or the prize that justifies the half-decade of bloody fecklessness that has been our Iraq adventure.

That said, a reasonably stable condominium of family despotisms with parliamentary trappings strikes me as not so bad if one asks the question, “Compared to what?” As long as we don’t mistake it for a chalice, a half-full glass is a great deal better than the usual pile of shards.

All of that has to enter into the discussion of the “hope” of Kurdistan. I wouldn’t mind if sympathisers with the Kurds argued that a petty Kurdish despotism was providing a measure of order and allowing for some prosperity (less the costs of corruption), but then I would want to see them conceding that they had accepted that a regime providing some political stability was part of the reason why Kurdistan is doing as well as it is. They would have to acknowledge that stability, even when mixed with some measure of despotism, is better in the long-run than subjecting people to the post-Soviet “may the man with the largest militia or mafia win” approach to political and economic reform and calling it freedom. At the same time, they would have to consider whether a certain degree of despotism is unavoidable because of political culture, and if it is they would need to stop praising Kurdistan because it is democratic and free (since, in important ways, it is neither) and simply cite those areas where it has been successful.

In other words, it is not because Kurdistan is democratic that it is faring better, but because it has security and a local government that is in control. Whether some sustainable self-government eventually emerges out of the domination of the head families remains to be seen. If it does, that’s all very well. My larger point here is that we should not let certain overly enthusiastic assumptions about Kurdistan dictate how and where we redeploy. If we “invest” in Kurdistan by redeploying there and securing the border against Turkish incursions (at no small risk to our soldiers and the continued alliance with Turkey), as Sullivan suggests, we had best be sure that we are not making a bad investment. Talking happy talk about arcs of hope and Kurdish democracy is a good way to ignore the warnings and suffer bigger losses when the “investment” collapses.

“The Turks” may not want to mess with the growing cross-border trade, but the political and military elite may well put a higher priority on a certain idea of national security. If a government is provoked by events, especially terrorist attacks, nationalism can override better judgement about the actual national self-interest and make governments commit blunders that, judged coolly in retrospect, seem unbelievable. See, for example, the invasion of Iraq.

Of course Qadir has grievances. Those should be kept in mind with all dissenters against all regimes. When we meet the political dissenter who lacks all self-interest and resentment against the government he is actively opposing, it will be like finding a unicorn. Such people are forged by resentment and the self-interest of undermining the government that caused the resentment. However, dissenters are usually telling the truth when they describe a regime’s tendency to lock up its opponents, indulge in nepotism and corruption and concentrate power in a few hands. When people report, for instance, on the detentions of dissidents in Burma, no one thinks that this is purely made up because it comes from anti-regime sources. It may be exaggerated to some degree, which is why intelligence provided by dissenters and defectors is usually flawed (they have an interest in exaggerating things and distorting evidence, which undermines getting reliable information about what is going on) and not a good basis for taking action. (For a great send-up of the ability of “dissident” information to persuade a government to take action, Tailor of Panama is not a bad story.)

When it comes to most reports of abuses, though, dissenters don’t need to make these things up, because they are only too common. Where dissenters and defectors become less relevant is when they begin telling impressive-sounding stories, saying that “this government is a dangerous threat to the entire world and, oh by the way, would you mind installing me and my friends in power as the price for warning you about your imminent deaths?” The self-interest and biases of the dissenter, which tend to make their stories about the cruelties of a despotism more credible, are the same things that should set off alarms when they begin claiming that they know things about their former government that just happen to match nicely with the most paranoid fears of your policy elite.

Speaking of self-interest and biases, it is, of course, entirely in the interest of Talabani and Barzani to depict Kurdistan in the best possible light as a successfully reforming Near Eastern democratic society. Likewise, those boosting this image of Kurdistan are usually deeply implicated in support for the war and need to find something, anything, that makes that continued support seem justifiable. Since self-interest is everywhere, the thing to do is consider whose biases seem to be distorting their interpretations the most and to try to determine, as much as possible, what the whole story is. The instinct of pundits to say, “Well, at least Kurdistan is doing well” is understandable, but it is potentially misleading and causes us to mistake what we want to be true with what is true. That is a central part of how optimism confuses people. We may *hope* that such-and-such a thing happens, but when we begin assuming that the hopeful scenario is also a likely one, rather than an unlikely one whose improvement is incumbent upon actual human agents, we are engaged in a kind of optimistic fatalism–things will turn out all right because they just will. One problem I have with “freedom agenda” supporters is their conviction that freedom is natural, a default state that would quite readily flourish, if only it weren’t for, well, everything else in human existence. This causes them to expect freedom, when the normal thing to expect from political arrangements is some measure of unfreedom. Expecting the wrong thing, they are not prepared for what happens in most cases. Because they believe that everyone desires freedom–and desires it more than anything else–they have had great trouble conceiving of how it is that people might choose something other than that (even though most of history is filled with people choosing something else).

It is relevant that the man likely highlights the worst about Kurdistan because he opposes the current government, but then part of the reason why he opposes it is that they have a habit of imprisoning people, like him, who oppose it. As corrupt clan-based government goes, Kurdistan could be a lot worse, but I don’t know why anyone has to pretend that it isn’t like this. It is always possible that Kurdistan *could* improve, but one of the reasons why I don’t like optimism is that it encourages people to take improvement as being somehow natural or more likely than degeneration. Neither one is inevitable, but depends on the quality of the decisions being taken.

The Turks have their hands full with their own Kurds. I can see them crossing the border to sort out the PUK, but why they would want to sit on a hostile Iraqi Kurdistan is almost as much of a mystery as why Bush wants to sit on a hostile Iraq.

There’s apparently plenty of Turkish money in Iraqi Kurdistan and considerable trade. Why would the Turks want to mess with that, once their election frenzy passes?

Kamil Said Qadir, whom you link to, has his Chalabi-esque grievances. No doubt Kurdistan is something less than a Fabian socialist paradise, and some of Mr. Qadir’s complaints are justified. Our problem? Not hardly.

If we can leave the Kurds to work out their future without our troops and without a war with Turkey, and with a curb on the irredentism that might arise because related minorities exist in Turkey, Syria and Iran, a tolerable Kurdistan might be one useful shard from the débâcle.