The Goat And the Butcher: Nationalism and State Formation in Kurdistan-Iraq Since the Iraqi War (Kurdish Studies Series)

This book describes the competition and struggle between nationalism (the goat), ethnonationalism, capitalism (the butcher), and the processes of state formation using Iraqi Kurdistan as a case study. In order to add coherence and lucidity to theoretical models, this study focuses on the processes of state formation in Iraqi Kurdistan and how they were affected by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003 to the middle of 2005. It analyzes the processes of state formation in Iraqi Kurdistan within the context of Arab (both Sunni and Shi'a), and Turkish nationalism. A third focus of the book demonstrates how Turkey, Syria and Iran, all with large Kurdish populations of their own cooperated, however unsuccessfully, to limit the development of Kurdish formation in Iraq on their own Kurdish populations and growing Kurdish ethnonationalist movements. In particular, attention is paid to Turkey's acquiescence to the Kurdish state formation developments in Iraq because of restraints placed on Ankara resulting from the U.S.' occupation of Iraq. The author argues that the inability of Turkey to play a strong role, militarily or politically in Iraq, impelled it to try to gain geopolitical position in that country by emphasizing economic and trade relations and by implementing policies suggested in the U.S.' Wider Middle East Initiative (WMEI) project. The author places his study within the theoretical context of the effects of "uneven development" and the competition between capitalism and nationalism, especially between the capitalist centers and the economic underdeveloped peripheries. He argues that the processes of state formation in Iraqi Kurdistan suggest that the emergent bourgeoisie had an advantage over popular nationalists, but his conclusions are tentative because of the unsettle situation in Iraq due to the U.S. occupation.