Kurdish delight: a flawed case for an independent Kurdistan.

• Author: Hirsh, Michael
• Position: The End of Iraq - Brief article - Book review

The End of Iraq By Peter W. Galbraith Simon and Schuster, $26.00

Criticizing George W. Bush for his mistakes in Iraq nowadays is the anthorial equivalent of taking on the Washington Nationals. As a challenge, it's just too easy to be interesting, or sporting. While commentators still squabble over the details--which was worse, Rttmsfeld's decision to put in too few troops or Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army? Yada yada yada--the disastrous errors made in invading and occupying Iraq are already confirmed historical fact. They are disputed by no responsible or knowledgeable person, outside of a small circle of Kool-Aid sippers in the White House. Some new books, like Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, have supplied a wealth of fascinating new detail, but for the most part, the critics have had their day.

Peter Galbraith, like others before him, dwells at great length on these mistakes in his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. But not surprisingly, he adds little to this discussion since he did not have a front-row seat either reporting or making policy in post-Saddam Iraq. For the most part, he rounds up the usual footnotes--the same articles in the same major media publications and books that are now trotted out for every critique of the Iraq war. Where Galbraith did have a front-row seat, however, was as an advocate for Kurdish interests. And what is distinctive about his book is that these interests clearly constitute his No. 1 agenda. The End of Iraq is basically an argument for the breakup of the country, as a means of giving his Kurdish friends their long-deferred dream, a state of their own.

Galbraith doesn't quite admit to this agenda, and in my view, that is the main problem with the book, which grew out of a series of long articles he wrote on the same theme for The New York Review of Books. He brings some important historical perspective to this argument: As an ambassador and official at the Dayton peace talks, he also had a first-hand view of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and he suggests that the dissolution of Iraq has the same kind of inevitability to it. Indeed, it will even be the most humane way out, he says, the only effective prophylactic against endless civil war.

But Galbraith's pro-Kurdish sympathies suffuse the book, and it seems a little too pat that his solution to the problem of Iraq aligns perfectly...