Kurds Ready To Make Their Move?

by Steve

I have been away for the last two days visiting a college with our daughter (sigh), and am just now back in town. Having said that, I will be away from home next week in the Big Apple on vacation, and will post from Manhattan if the opportunity presents itself. I wanted to touch on several disparate topics very briefly in one post tonight, if you will allow me.

For those of us who thought the likely end result of our invasion would be the partitioning of Iraq and a slide into destabilization and sectarian warfare, give yourself a medal. It looks like the Kurds are ready to create a Kurdish state as we draw down, and will grab Kirkuk and perhaps Mosul by force after destroying the hapless Iraqi security forces that try to stop them. The Kurds are already cutting their own deals with their oil resources, without the approval of the central government, so they have signaled that any attempt by Baghdad or the US for that matter to assert any control over their oil is a nonstarter. Someone in the Bush Administration and at the AEI and PNAC can perhaps tell us the benefits of an oil-independent Kurdish state causing heartburn for Turkey, an Iranian-controlled oil-rich Shiite state to the south on Saudi Arabia’s border, and an out-of-control Sunni triangle spawning new Al Qaeda terrorists in the middle. And all of it with oil that we’ll never see. I don’t think that was the way Big Oil and Dick Cheney drew it up at the Energy Task Force meetings back in 2001. (Hat tip to Georgia10 at DailyKos)

Take a look at this piece in tomorrow’s Telegraph in London, and note the quotes about how the White House, from an ideas and policy perspective, is “exhausted” and no longer looking for large conquests but rather small-ball, achievable victories. It sounds like Bush is reading the Dick Morris, V-chip laundry list of little-minded initiatives because they know they have shot their wad and are done.

Lastly, back to the NSA spying story. One story being floated last week was that the Administration felt the process of getting a warrant from the FISA court was too cumbersome, and that is why they just went around the court. Now it turns out that as we move farther and farther with each passing year from 9/11, the court has modified more and more of the Administration’s petitions, finding that probable cause did not exist with the petitions as filed. What was it about the Administration’s requests in 2003 and 2004 that the court felt didn’t meet the probable cause test? Could it be that the Administration’s targets in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the aftermath, and during the election season of 2004 were different than their targets in the midst of the terrorist-hunting years of 2001 and 2002? Even author James Bamford says the Bush Administration wanted more and more targets.