Monday: Raising Cane’s Tuesday: Griffith Stadium Wednesday: Kurdistan Thursday: Friday:
We had a lot of political discussions at our Austin College fraternity
table in Slater’s back in 1991-92. The Rodney King incident was a big
one that year, as was Ross Perot and the upcoming election. Another
frequent topic was the recent Gulf War. Michael Dickens was likely at the table for more than a few.
You may know Mike as an offensive lineman on the 1991 Roos football
team that went 6-4. The 2019 Roos are 2nd in conference and stand at
4-2; they could very well match that winning season with a win on
Homecoming against Hendrix next Saturday. Kirk Hughes,
the “Voice of the Roos,” will have the call at Louis Calder Stadium.
Kirk, I’m looking forward joining you in the booth for another
AC-Hendrix game this year. Thanks for what you do.
While many at
that Slater’s table had opinions about the Gulf War, I may have been
the only one at the table to witness it. Because of both the size and
politics of the conflict, some bombing runs actually originated in
Spain, where I was studying abroad in 1990-91. The United States
military had four Spanish bases at the time near four cities: Zaragoza,
Madrid, Sevilla, & Cadiz. We could distinguish the bombers in the
air leaving the base near Madrid from other commercial aircraft.
Those Gulf War discussions at Austin College focused on the decision to
halt the war after the liberation of Kuwait. Most at the table were
frustrated with the halt. I was a strong supporter of the decision.
One argument at that table for continuing past Kuwait always had my ear
though. Fighting Sunni extremism in Iraq might benefit the Kurds. I’ll
admit. It was personal. An Austin College Summer Symposium on Foreign
Policy class run by Shelton Williams
brought me face to face with the Iraqi Ambassador with TV cameras
rolling just weeks after the invasion. I brought up the 1988 Anfal
genocide perpetrated by his boss in Baghdad; he blamed Tehran. See the
comments for the story.
The Kurds have a saying. They have no
friends “but the mountains.” Their bad luck is mainly geography and
numbers. The Kurds are a minority in four countries and a majority in
none. Those four countries have historically been ruled by unsavory
regimes in Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. As the United States
has attempted to curry favor with one regime over another over the
decades, Kurds have been consistently supported and then sold out by
Washington.
Austin College Kangaroos died in World War I fighting
regimes allied with the Ottoman empire, and one of the principles of
Woodrow Wilson’s “fourteen points” was a replacement of those empires
with the concept of a nation state. Although Wilson did not
specifically mention the Kurds, he made it a point to write that
non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire should be “assured of an
absolute unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” Poles and
Czechs benefited from these American principles 100 years ago. The
Kurds are still waiting.
I was opposed to the 2003 War in Iraq
for the same reasons as 1991. However, even the biggest mistakes can
have unintentional side benefits. As American troops moved north from
Baghdad to Mosul, the Sunni extremism which had terrorized Iraqi Kurds
slowly came to an end. Kurds in Syria, Tehran, and Turkey were still
under threat, but Iraqi Kurds were able to carve out an autonomous
homeland as American troops in northern Iraq located and then ended the
brutality of Saddam Hussein’s sons.
Interestingly, I knew a US
soldier who was there at the time Uday and Qusay Hussein’s terror came
to an end. Michael Dickens, who had been sitting around that Slater’s
table with all of us in 1991, was a US soldier who made his way from
Baghdad to Mosul in 2003. To this day I am intensely grateful that he
emerged from that conflict alive, unlike thousands of US troops and
hundreds of thousands of civilians in the region. A fraternity
president, after all, does not like it when one of his pledges does not
make it home.
Mike’s team was stationed near a Kurdish town in
northern Iraq. His team would often “turn off the highway and drive up
to the mountain where we ran missions.” Those missions sometimes
included a rendezvous on hilltops with Peshmerga troops; the Peshmerga
are the Kurdish armed forces who have been fighting for their homeland
for decades. Mike sent me this photo of a part of his team in front of a
rusted anti-aircraft artillery piece not far from that town of Kurds.
The civil war in Syria provided a second opportunity for Kurds to
escape the brutality of one of the four capitals. Like Baghdad, now
Damascus would be unable to impose its will on the Kurdish nation. This
time, however, an autonomous Kurdish state was born with just a bare
minimum of US treasure and practically no blood. Where the creation
Iraqi Kurdistan was long and painful, the creation of Syrian Kurdistan
was nothing but upside. That was the case until two weeks ago, when
Washington greenlighted another member of the “unsavory four” to launch a
war and brutalize the Kurdish population in Syria.
But like many
disasters, there is a silver lining. The Kurds who are currently
fleeing and dying in their Syrian homes at the hands of a foreign
occupier at least have a place to go:
Iraqi Kurdistan
It’s
not an easy journey to Kirkuk and points north. It might require
avoiding Turkish invaders in Syria and Sunni extremists in Iraq.
However, there are mountains along the journey, and the Kurds have
friends in the mountains. The Kurdish town in Iraq where Mike’s team
operated is today the site of a Kurdish refugee camp. 12,000 Kurds live
there; nearly all escaped the violence of Turkish oppression against
Kurds within Turkey. Sadly, they’ll likely soon be joined by Syrian
Kurds escaping that same Turkish violence.
This summer, I climbed
a mountain with a bunch of Austin College Kangaroos. We summited the
14,000-foot Mt. Sherman (yes, we chose this one intentionally) in
Colorado. Some had a faster pace than me, while others were slower. I
stayed with the one guy who went up the mountain at my speed: Mike
Dickens, the US soldier who fought with Americans allied with Iraqi
Kurds and fighting Sunni extremism between Baghdad and Mosul. Thank you
Michael Dickens for coming back alive from the border of Iraqi
Kurdistan to help get me up that mountain in Colorado. Will catch you
at a future Homecoming.
The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. However, while the two safe havens have now unfortunately become only one, we can be thankful that there is still at least one. Godspeed & good luck to the Syrian Kurds fleeing towards the mountains of northern Iraq. You have friends in Mike & me, two Austin College mountain men.
