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: Read more…