Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The mother of all Trojan horses

There is a joint meeting of European Union and Arab League foreign ministers in Athens today. Athens is actually not a bad place to sit and think about the disaster that collective policy failure has created in Syria over the last 3 years, and now spilling over into Iraq, and sometime soon into the eastern Mediterranean. Anyway, here's part of the joint statement of the ministers on Iraq --

In particular, the LAS (Arab League) and the EU call on the Government of Iraq and the Government of the Kurdistan region to combine their political and military forces in order to restore security to Mosul and Nineveh. 

So their proposed solution is Kurdish participation in an assault on the 2 provinces bordering the autonomous Kurdish region, and in which Kurdistan would have the proximity and the morale to maintain control -- unlike the Iraqi security forces.

Haven't the very serious ministers therefore essentially called for an expanded Kurdistan as a bulwark to the absence of control in northern Iraq? What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE: The Kurds didn't wait long to cash in their chips. They've taken over Kirkuk.