Via Juan Cole this morning:

The LAT reports on the three bombings that roiled the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday and which its interviewees blamed on "al-Qaeda."

I am horrified at the loss of innocent life, and hate to see the incident used for politics. I would be very suspicious of assigning blame to "al-Qaeda" for this one. The bombs hit the party offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk as well as (Kurdish) policemen. The Kurds are trying to annex oil-rich Kirkuk province to their Kurdistan provincial confederacy. Turkmen and Arabs do not want to be annexed. Turkey does not want to see it annexed.

We now pause for some background notes.

One of the many horror stories told about Saddaam Hussein over the buildup-to-war years, and one that actually happened to be more or less true, was about his persecution of "ethnic minorities" in Iraq, particularly the Marsh Arabs in the South and the Kurds in the north. The flashpoint was always said to be the city of Kirkuk on the ill-defined "border" between the area historically occupied by Kurds and that of the rest of Iraq.

While experiments in using (lest we ever forget) US SUPPLIED POISON GAS were carried out in smaller more out-of-the-way villages, the campaign for Kirkuk was good old fashioned ethnic cleansing. Kurds are identifiable in part by their names. I'm not enough of a linguist to define just how, but you know the way it works anyway. Somebody named Cohen or Goldberg is most likely a Jew. One named O'Brien is probably Irish, et ethnically cetera.

So Saddaam passed a clever little law: If you lived in Kurdistan and had a "Kurdish name" you didn't get a ration card or other ID documents. Your choices were to pick a new, more "Iraqi" sounding name, or get the hell out of town, preferably to the north with the rest of "your people." Even, it was said, gravestones in the cemeteries were bulldozed down if they bore Kurdish names, where Arabic ones were allowed to remain. As Kurdish residents of Kirkuk were persuaded or otherwise induced to leave, More Desirable, i.e. mostly Sunni Iraqi, residents were moved in. The goal was to make Kirkuk a Sunni town, not a Kurdish one any more.

Well Saddaam is gone and it's payback/takeback time. As often happens with persecuted groups, the grim intent of the survivors is summed up in the public motto "Never Again" while the unspoken one is more along the line of "Where's Mine??" To pick up where we left off with Professor Cole:

There are lots of social forces that would like to hit the PUK over this issue, not just "al-Qaeda." The Kurds know that blaming the bombing on that organization (does anyone in Iraq really have Bin Laden`s phone number?) will gain them the sympathy of clueless Americans for their planned annexation. Everyone in the US now complains about the way we were spun by corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi. But it is seldom appreciated how much Kurdish leaders like Jalal Talabani and Hoshyar Zebari were involved in feeding the US loads of bull about Iraq. Their ultimate goal is partition of the country, and they are manipulating Washington toward that end.

Tell me again why we are paying for this with the blood of our young?