The enduring image of the fall of Kirkuk is the Humvee. The advancing Iraqi forces rolled into the Kurdish-held city in them and the outflanked Peshmerga clambered aboard them to flee. The US-manufactured military truck is the vehicle of choice for America’s friends in conflict with America’s other friends. Humvees retail for £170,000 but the symbolism is free.
Washington’s shapeless, Janus-faced policy in the Middle East is easy fodder for cynics and reactionaries. These Yankee Doodle imperialists bluster into centuries-old tribal disputes thinking they can impose their clean-cut version of democracy on the Arab world and rebuild Rhode Island on the Red Sea. Look where it ends — in the tasty irony of US-trained Iraqi troops turning on US-armed Kurdish defence forces in an oil-rich land America was supposed to have liberated over a decade ago.
Even if we scorn this sneer-passing-as-critique, advocates of US global leadership and an interventionist foreign policy cannot look away from events in Kurdistan.
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