Regrets for a Minor American Role in a Major Kurdish Disaster

By Lee F. Dinsmore

Kirkuk in 1952 still reflected the fading Turkish influence of the vanished Ottoman Empire. A team from an historical society in Ankara visited there around that time, recording Turkish songs long forgotten in the land of their origin, but still sung in northern Iraq. Kirkuk was in the Mosul vilayet, one of the three administrative provinces into which the territory known in antiquity as Mesopotamia had been divided and ruled for 400 years, from 1517 to 1917, by the Ottoman Turks. Now called Iraq, it was an amorphous region. Ethnically, its inhabitants were settled and nomadic Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians in diaspora, and Jews. Geographically, the Iraqis were and are mountaineers, desert dwellers, and marsh dwellers. Occupationally, they were nomadic herdsmen, village farmers, and urbanites. Their principal common denominator was proximity to each other. Some spoke each other's languages: Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Kurdish and even Aramaic, the language of Jesus, around Iraq's northernmost border with Syria.

The most recent of their foreign colonizers had been the British, who had had a hand in naming Iraq, drawing its post-World War I borders, and setting up, in 1921, its first government, a monarchy. In 1952 its young king, Faisal II, was very much a creature of an uncle's tutelage and of a British education.

Having left Cairo and a position with the Egyptian YMCA for the US foreign service, I was assigned within weeks to Kirkuk to open and run a United States Information Service (USIS) branch responsible for a library, student exchanges, mobile film units and cultural events. Corning from Egypt, my accent was foreign but understood, because Egyptian films are seen throughout the Mideast, and the Egyptian radio's influence was ubiquitous. For me, the spoken Iraqi Arabic was for a time nearly unintelligible.

My introduction to the seldom-heard political feelings of the Iraqi man in the street came about a year after my arrival, when demonstrators angry at Britain and the US gutted the Baghdad USIS library and offices.

(Saddam Hussain was then a teenager, but it was the environment in which he became politically active.) Britain's empire was well past its post-World War II decline, but the US, seemingly eager to assume "the burdens of empire," had become the Iraqi monarchy's closest international friend.

I settled eagerly into my role in this scheme of things during my first two years in Kirkuk. In a Land Rover I brought into mountain locked Kurdish villages American propaganda films. Not all were political. Some gave useful medical advice. Some were mere entertainment. On horse or donkey trips, with a Kurdish guide, I traveled over high passes into remote villages for talks with the men. Conversations continued far into the night, accompanied by tea and coffee warmed in the pots next to a fire on the ground. It was just a mountain variety of the kindness and hospitality that characterizes all of the peoples of the vast and varied Middle East.

In 1957, the Department of State sent me back to Iraq, this time to open a consulate in Kirkuk. It was to be a "listening post," as well as to issue visas to US-bound Iraqis, to provide consular services to Americans working in Kirkuk's oil fields and on development projects throughout Iraq's north. The US, by then, was the principal actor in the "Baghdad Pact," one of several misguided American attempts after World War II to corral mismatched nations around the world into alliances to "contain" the Soviet Union and "international communism."

In July 1958, Iraqi army officers violently overthrew the monarchy with which we were by then intimately associated, killing the youthful king, his hated uncle and the strongman prime minister, and establishing a republic. It was a frightening time for American representatives in Iraq, resulting in evacuation of "non-essential" embassy staff and families, an unceremonious end to the Baghdad Pact, and show trials of former government officials not already executed. In November 1958, four months after the revolution brought Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qassirn to power in Iraq, the American Consulate in Kirkuk was closed on orders of the new government, as were the only other three consulates in the north of Iraq those of Turkey, Iran and the United Kingdom.

Having been transferred to the embassy in Baghdad, I became the object of surveillance, followed by a man who occasionally greeted me in Kurdish (a language not used by government officials in Baghdad) when circumstances brought us into close range. It was, perhaps, his way of saying, "that's why we are interested in you."

What had the brief American official presence in Kirkuk done for US-Iraqi relations? The Iraqi Kurds were a dissident people (now numbering, at most, 4 million of an Iraqi population of 18 million), with a language in common with their Kurdish cousins in Iran, Turkey, the Soviet Union and Syria. In the Iraqi government view, they could be influenced by contacts with American officials to continue their resistance to Iraqi Arab hegemony.

And it was true that Kurds welcomed the contact with American officials. To them, our interest in them had to mean that we were interested in their aspirations: not just autonomy within Iraq but, eventually, a state of their own on their own land. It was equally true that US officials understood not only Kurdish aspirations, but how they would interpret American interest. American officials, nevertheless, continued to keep in touch over the years with Kurdish activists, despite the knowledge that it was extremely unlikely that any US government would take steps that would infuriate its allies, the Turks, Iranians and, in those years, the Arab Iraqis.

Meanwhile, Israel had long reckoned that to use the Kurdish longing for freedom to destabilize and harass Arab Iraq was to enhance Israeli security. In the 1960s, Israel and the shah's Iran combined to do just that. In the 1970s, they did it again, this time with US support through the CIA.

All these later connections and manipulations came long after I had left Iraq near the end of 1961. But the years spent in Kirkuk and in Kurdistan, in friendly association with its people, undoubtedly contributed, even if ever so slightly, to Kurdish hopes—against hope that ambivalent US policies regarding Iraq might some day work to Kurdish advantage. For having played even a minor part in that deception, one can only be sorry.

Lee F. Dinsmore was US Consul General in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when he retired from the foreign service in 1973. Now living in Elcho, WI, he is active in US-Middle East educational exchange projects and speaks and writes on Middle East affairs throughout the Midwest.