‘ANY AMERICAN WHO HATES GEORGE BUSH IS CRAZY’

You're looking at the oldest continuously occupied city in the world.  For 7,000 years, people have been living in what is now called the Citadel – the same people who live there now:  the Kurds.  The Citadel is the center of Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

I am writing this from a hotel room – with wireless Internet! – overlooking this most ancient of cities.  The sense of history here is enormous.  A couple of dozen miles northeast of here is a wide flat plain called Gaugemela, where in 331 BC, the 40,000 Greek soldiers of Alexander the Great met the 100,000 Persians of Darius III.

Utilizing a battle strategy so masterful it is studied by all students of warfare, Alexander destroyed the Persian army, killing 50,000 at a loss of 4,000.  Darius fled and was killed by his own generals, who surrendered the entire Persian Empire to Alexander.  The Kurds celebrated their liberation from Persian tyranny, and thanked their god, Yazdan, and his prophet, Zoroaster, for Alexander.

Today, they thank Yazdan for George W. Bush.

For thousands of years, the Kurds have struggled and fought for their freedom.   They enjoyed freedom for a couple of centuries after Alexander, and then came the Romans.  With the fall of Rome they saw a couple more centuries of liberty, and then came the Arabs – far worse than the Romans for the Arabs forced the Kurds to accept their religious invention of Submission, the Arabic word for which is Islam.

They finally managed to beat off the Arab conquerors at the end of the Middle Ages, but then were divided and subsumed in the 1500s by the "Osmanlis" or Ottoman Turks, who again demanded they submit to Islam.

For 400 years the Kurds fought the Osmanlis, and when Turkey was on losing side of World War One, they thought they would get their freedom at last.  But Perfidious Albion sold them straight down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers – dividing their Kurdish homeland between a reconstituted Turkey and an Arab creation of the British carved out of the dead Ottoman Empire called Iraq.

So as they fought the Osmanlis, now they fought the "Hashemis," the family of Hashem brought by the British from Mecca to rule Iraq.  The Hashemis shot and hung any "Peshmerga" or Kurdish guerrilla fighter they found, bombed Kurdish villages, and did their best to keep the Kurds in abject poverty.

But that was nothing compared to the Hashemis' successor, Saddam Hussein.  He instituted a program of attempted genocide upon the Kurds appropriately called Al-Anfal, the name of the eighth sura or chapter of the Koran, meaning "the spoils of war," and which celebrates the slaughter of 900 infidels by Moslems in the Battle of Badr in 642.

Al-Anfal was a campaign of outright extermination, bombing into rubble almost every Kurdish village in northern Iraq, slaughtering some 200,000 Kurds, stealing or killing countless flocks of sheep and goats, and displacing over one million people.

Any captured Kurdish Peshmerga wasn't just killed as did the Hashimis, but were horribly tortured.  "Saddam's torturers delighted in it," describes one victim who managed to survive.  "Their skill was in taking you just to the point of death and then pausing so you wouldn't die, then doing it over and over again.  They considered it an art form."

The greatest single horror took place on March 17, 1988.  Saddam's war planes dropped bombs containing a combination of mustard gas, nerve gas, and cyanide upon the 70,000 inhabitants of the Kurdish village of Halabja.  5,000 people died immediately, 12,000 within a few days.

Given this unimaginable (to us) evil perpetrated upon them by Saddam, it is little wonder that the Kurds revere the man who liberated them from such a monster.  And it is little wonder they are dumbfounded to learn that many Americans don't revere George Bush as well.  They are simply shocked in disbelief to hear that many Americans actually hate their president.

The president of the Kurdish Parliament, Adnan Mufti, an urbane and well-educated man who speaks eloquent English, expressed the feelings of virtually all Kurds when he told me with a dismissive wave of his hand, "Any American who hates George Bush is crazy."

For Kurds revere our president not just because he slayed the Monster of Saddam.  His greater achievement is enabling the creation of a de facto free and independent Kurdish state.

The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world – by far, for they number well over 30 million – without their own country.  It is a dream they have never given up, and have never stopped fighting and dying for.  The heroism of their struggle is beyond words – especially when you listen to stories of Peshmerga who have fought in literally a hundred battles against the Hashimis and Saddamites.

And now at long last, their flag flies proudly over the Citadel of Erbil, over a city of bright prosperity, over a land that is peaceful and free:

Here is that flag, and what it says – and doesn't say – is profound:

You don't see what is on the flag of most every Moslem country – a crescent moon, the symbol of Islam – do you?

Instead, you see the sun, the symbol of the ancient Kurdish faith of Zoroastrianism.

Yes, many Kurds are Moslem – but almost all of them practice Islam-light.  There are mosques, but there are a variety of Christian churches, as well as a growing number of Zoroastrian (or Zardoshti, as they call their prophet Zardosht) or Yezidi (a uniquely Kurdish variant of Zoroastrianism) shrines.

What you see exhibited by the Kurds is religious tolerance, an almost complete absence of religious fanaticism.  Any mullah or imam who shows up and starts preaching radical Islam is quickly and firmly escorted out of Kurdistan by the Peshmerga.

I have had the opportunity to spend time with hundreds of different peoples and ethnic groups all over the world, and I can tell you there is something very special about the Kurds.

Few peoples have suffered so much for so long – and yet there is no bitterness in their souls, no plea of grievance victimhood on their lips, no chip on their shoulders.  They are among the world's greatest fighters, yet there is such a peacefulness, a gentleness about them, an honesty and integrity that draws you to them.  They are intensely proud of their culture and Kurdish identity, which they have preserved for thousands of years, yet they have no arrogance nor air of insufferable superiority.

What an extraordinary people.  And they love America.  I wish all Americans could love our country as much as do the Kurds. 

It is very hard to have a perspective on history when you are living through it.  We get too emotionally caught up in the day-to-day-iveness of it to be dispassionate.  So it may be quite difficult to accept that the day will come when America will be nostalgic for George Bush – nostalgic for his decency in the face of the unending hatred of the Left.

Obviously that day will come very quickly if Obambi the Magic Narcissist is elected, and possibly just a little less quickly with Quirky John.  But the experience of being here in Kurdistan tells me that right now is a good time to acknowledge what our president, George Bush, has done right, rather than focusing only on what he has done wrong or failed to do.

Liberating this land is a great historical achievement, a great humanitarian achievement, giving peace and freedom to a noble people who are in the process of establishing a religiously tolerant and thriving democracy in the Middle East.

The Kurds live in one of the world's roughest neighborhoods, surrounded on all sides by folks who want to do them in:  the Syrians, the Iranians, the Arabs, and the Turks.  Yet with our help, they are succeeding.  It is an achievement of which we Americans can be justly proud.

In the coming days, I'll be reporting to you what I've seen and who I've met traveling throughout Iraqi Kurdistan.  But for now, this is what I wanted to share with you.

America was founded by people willing to fight for their freedom, fight against overwhelming odds yet never giving up.  This is what we have in common with the Kurds, the source of the bond you feel between us and them when you are here.

It is a bond that needs to be strengthened – for we have lost so much of our freedom, mostly thanks to federal judges and bureaucrats and Democrats in Congress ever eager to take more of our freedom away.  It is about time we started fighting for our freedom again as have the Kurds, started having an unquenchable pride in our culture and history as do the Kurds.

As any Kurd will be happy to tell you, we are crazy if we don't.