The Hell?

Israel is training Kurds? This isn't going to end well.

The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq.

A report on the BBC TV programme Newsnight showed Israeli experts in northern Iraq, drilling Kurdish militias in shooting techniques.

Kurdish officials have refused to comment on the report and Israel has denied it knows of any involvement.

Because obviously, if you want a sustainable government in the heart of the Muslim world, your best bet has got to be tying yourself to Israel.

My guess is the Kurds have decided that "Iraq" as a state won't survive the American departure. They're probably right, but they've also obviously planned on some kind of Kurdish state surviving post-Iraq. That's... unlikely. The only thing that Shia and Sunni in Iraq agree on is that the Kurds can't have a state. Hell, it's something Syria, Turkey, and Iran all agree on too. Simply put, the Kurdish state will be a very short-lived creature indeed. If that weren't already true, the propaganda bonus of having the Kurds tied to Israel will guarantee that after the dust settles between the Iraqi Shia and Sunni, the victors will turn on the Kurds.

The big question for me is this: Israel and Turkey have been - perhaps until now - very close. As close as a Jewish and Muslim state can be, at any rate. Israeli politicians have publicly, and forcefully, defended Turkey against charges of genocide against the Armenians, among other things. But the one thing Turkey cannot abide is a Kurdish state on it's southern frontier. The Turks have already waged a Chechnya-style war against their own Kurds, killing 30,000, and the idea that Israel (Turkey's close ally) is arming the Kurds can't sit well.

So why is Israel doing this? I don't see any percentage in this unless a) the American government has demanded it, or b) Israel has (correctly, if coldly) decided that they're safer if Iraq is never put back together again.