Business is Business

Each time Saddam Hussein's thugs would go into a Kurdish village, not only would they raze every building to the ground, but then they would set mines throughout the villages and the surrounding fields "to ensure that farm boys would lose a leg, or worse, as soon as they started cultivating their ancestral land again." So writes Michael Soussan in his book Backstabbing for Beginners, adding that "one of the UN's most useful services to the Kurds involved demining, mine awareness campaigns, and the provision of prosthetic limbs to the injured."

The only security these villagers had was the "no-fly" zone imposed on Saddam by the U.S. and Britain, but which was considered "illegal" by the UN, because it was never approved by the UN Security Council, since Russia refused to vote for it, because their vote had been bought by Saddam, who sold the Russians one-third of his oil at below market prices.

However, the Kurds were also what seems to me to be the ultimate Macchiavellian pragmatists. They allowed Saddam's smuggling operations to pass through their territory, and, in fact, took a healthy cut of the cash. An estimated $13 billion in profits from this smuggling went into the pockets of Saddam Hussein. Fuel went across the border into Turkey, where it was resold; also by pipeline into Syria, and by ships along the Iranian coastline, and by trucks into Jordan.

Senator Carl Levin disclosed the practice in 2005, after receiving E-mails from the Treasury Department. Nevertheless, the Bush administration "ignored the phenomenon (Jordan and Turkey were U.S. allies). Some of that oil even ended up as fuel at U.S. gas pumps, after it was resold on the international market to American oil companies." Soussan asserts that there is "an underworld of international corruption that makes our world economy go around."

This smuggling route was the Kurd's only major source of ready cash - except for the drug trade, specifically heroin, from Iran and Afghanistan, which also passed through Kurdish territory.