Jay Garner knows Iraqi Kurdistan. First appointed to the region following the Gulf War, the retired U.S. lieutenant general has returned to the region countless times -- most famously when he was pulled out of retirement to lead U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. He was quickly succeeded in an expanded version of that role by L. Paul Bremer, but has since remained an active commentator on the region and the U.S. strategy there.
Speaking from Iraqi Kurdistan by phone, Garner discussed recently reported tensions between Kurdish leaders and the Iraqi government with Foreign Policy's Elizabeth Dickinson. As U.S. forces begin their long pullout from the country, Garner warned that Sunni-Shiite relations are far more fragile than those between Arabs and Kurds, that there are no stirrings of independence in the north, and that former U.S. senator and sitting Vice President Joseph Biden's call for what many described as a "soft partition" of Iraq would have served the country well.
Foreign Policy: As someone who has worked extensively with the Kurds, dating back to the 1990s, how is Iraqi Kurdistan?
Jay Garner: Well, compared to the rest of Iraq, it's incredibly stable. I'm sure your readers don't know this, but there hasn't been a soldier either killed or wounded here since 1991. There's never been a contractor or foreign businessman attacked here, so it's more stable than most of the places you live in the United States.
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FP: Given the region's history of autonomous governance, can you talk about how the Kurdistan Regional Government works and how well its institutions are established?
JG: The autonomy is part of the Iraqi Constitution, so there can be no question about the autonomy. It's like asking someone in the [U.S. National Rifle Association] if they have a right to bear arms. Yeah, they do -- there's an amendment that says they can do that. Autonomy is in the Iraq Constitution, not the Kurdish Constitution, but the Iraqi Constitution -- voted on by the Iraqi people.
FP: How did you think about where the Kurds would fit into the political arrangement of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003?
JG: You gotta remember, it started before 2003. When the Turks would not let us move through Turkey, we, the United States, solicited the Peshmerga [Kurdish militia] as our allies, and they helped our forces in 2003 against Saddam Hussein. They were part of the coalition of the willing. [A] hell of a lot more Peshmerga fought than French, you know that?
I think the Kurds knew they had to be a part of Iraq, of the Iraqi government. They knew they couldn't be independent. I talked to the Kurdish leaders in early April [2003], and they were adamant that they had to be part of the new Iraq. I never saw a movement on their part to be independent. But they did demand that they keep their autonomous region, because they had written the Constitution back in 1992; they had had their first elections back in 1992; they had set up a parliament in the early 1990s; and they had their own governmental system. They didn't want to take that apart, and I don't blame them, because they had a well-run, well-structured government.
You might notice that when we began to put together the Iraqi government, you ended up with a Kurd as the president, a Kurd as the foreign minister, a Kurd as the deputy prime minister, and a Kurd as the chief of staff of the Army, because the Kurds were the only ones in Iraq who knew how to govern and lead, [and] because they had been doing that for 12 years.
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