This week, plumbing new depths of obsequiousness, the Obama administration dropped Iran and Hezbollah from the “Worldwide Threat Assessment” terror list. I doubt that any NRO reader needs a refresher on Iran and Hezbollah’s roles in terrorism; I’ll just remind you that Hezbollah is an Iranian puppet that started its life bombing the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, and that long before the Charlie Hebdo murders, Iran sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses. (Imagine a world where the Charlie Hebdo murderers had nuclear weapons.)
As far as de-listing terror groups goes, though, there is a candidate to consider. Because, as we warm up for a fight over next year’s budget, Congress can consider another approach to thwarting Iran’s bomb plans: giving Tehran problems at home. Angry-Kurd problems. Congress should look at authorizing money for PJAK, the Free Life Party of Kurdistan.
The “Kurdistan” in question is northwestern Iran; while the Peshmerga fight the Islamic State, PJAK is fighting the Islamic Republic. PJAK is dedicated — reportedly — to creating a “democratic and federal government” with “self-rule” for “all ethnic minorities of Iran, including Arabs, Azeris, and Kurds.” I say “reportedly” because PJAK doesn’t seem to have a website or a published manifesto. Per the U.S. Treasury, it’s a terrorist organization. But that might not be entirely fair.
So far as I can tell, just three countries regard PJAK as a terrorist group: two that are fighting Kurdish nationalism, Iran and Turkey, and one that is sucking up to Iran and Turkey, the United States. There were rumors — even an accusation from Dennis Kucinich — that, during the Bush years, the U.S. was supporting PJAK’s fight against Tehran. However, two weeks after President Obama took his oath of office, and four months before his “new beginning” Middle East tour, PJAK was designated a terror group. Any assets it had in the U.S. were frozen, and Americans were prohibited from working with it.
The Kurds, 30 or 35 million strong, deserve the return of their homeland, which was sliced up and given to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Ideally, idealism would be motive enough for the U.S. to give the Kurds support; happily, the national aspirations of Iranian Kurds coincide with our anti-proliferation policy. PJAK is fighting the mullahs; Tehran is spending money and energy fighting PJAK. The only reason not to give PJAK assistance would be some sort of jaw-dropping diplomatic fantasy.
“The friendships and the bonds of trust,” said President Obama in 2012, “that I’ve been able to forge with a whole range of leaders is precisely, or is a big part of what has allowed us to execute effective diplomacy.”
This, of course, was just before Hong Kong and Russia refused to return Edward Snowden, Putin invaded Ukraine, and Germany, France, and Italy defied the U.S. to join a new Chinese World Bank. It was after Mr. Obama was recorded disparaging Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, after he let Islamists supplant American ally Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and after newly minted American vassal Moammar Qaddafi was deposed and killed. So much for Obama’s world-leader mutual-admiration society.
Obama went on, listing some world leaders, including Turkish prime minister Erdogan, and saying: “I think that if you ask them . . . [they] would say, we have a lot of trust and confidence in the President. We believe what he says. We believe that he’ll follow through on his commitments. We think he’s paying attention to our concerns and our interests. And that’s part of the reason why we’ve been able to forge these close working relationships and gotten a whole bunch of stuff done.”
Mr. Obama certainly has a crystal-clear vision of how beloved he is.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Obama singled out as an especially close friend, has almost singlehandedly dragged Turkey away from the liberal, Western, democratic system it has had since Ataturk, and set it on a path toward corrupt, totalitarian Islamism. Obama visited Turkey on his first overseas trip as president; in 2011, the L.A. Times reported that Obama talked to Erdogan more frequently than to any other foreign leader except David Cameron.
In a joint Obama–Erdogan press conference in 2013, during which Obama credited his Turkish counterpart with giving him parenting tips, Obama praised Erdogan’s “efforts to normalize relations with Israel.” Mr. Obama was evidently unaware that before Erdogan took power, Turkey had completely normal relations with Israel, dating back to 1949. In 2013, Erdogan crushed anti-authoritarianism protests in Istanbul; 22 Turks were killed, more than 8,000 were injured, and nearly 5,000 were arrested. A week after the protests began, Obama responded through Jay Carney, who said, “Look, all democracies have issues that they need to work through . . . ”
After the Charlie Hebdo murders, Erdogan blamed the attack on “the West” and raided the offices of a Turkish newspaper that planned to republish some of Charlie Hebdo’s material. Last September, Erdogan refused Obama’s request to use Turkish airbases to launch American attacks against ISIS. This February, he refused again.
In Turkey’s east, which is heavily Kurdish, the Kurds, their language, and their culture have been bitterly repressed. Since 1984, the Turkish government has been at war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, a leftist militia. PJAK is, in essence, a PKK offshoot.
The reason the United States won’t support PJAK is our president’s relationship with Erdogan, which seems to straddle the line between meaningless and nonexistent, along with the equally profound relationship Obama hopes to have with Iran’s mullahs. But PJAK is trying to wage a guerrilla war against Tehran; anything Tehran invests in fighting PJAK won’t go to its nuclear program, its ICBM program, or its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and North Africa. So this is too big an opportunity to overlook.
Of course it’s possible that there is relevant, disqualifying PJAK data outside what is publicly available — irreparable, Stalinist leftism, perhaps; who knows. But Congress ought to find out. Because if the only thing stopping us from sharpening a thorn in Khamenei’s side is an Obama fantasy, then some aid to the Kurds ought to be written into the GOP’s budget. And remember, the budget can’t be filibustered.
Write your congressman.
— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.