July 15, 2007 | Andrew Sullivan

The phrase on everyone’s lips now is “postsurge”. The logistics of military tour cycles, the logic of congressional politics and the sheer impossibility of putting Iraq back together again in anything like the foreseeable future have caused something of a Rubicon in Washington.

It has been approaching for a while but last week you could feel the collective decision being made. Some time in the next six months there will be a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Quite when it happens, how it happens and who will take credit or blame have yet to be determined. But it will happen. The question then becomes: what is salvageable? What is the opportunity in this transition?

An honest assessment would have to acknowledge that in many parts of Iraq even worse horrors will probably unfold. In areas of sectarian conflict the violence could be dreadful even by Iraqi standards. This is one reason not to feel uncomplicated relief at some realism entering into US policy so late.

I think intelligent, careful withdrawal is the least worst option. But I’m not going to pretend it’s morally clean. It isn’t. Many innocents will die. The problem is: staying isn’t morally clean either. And many innocents are already dying in a civil war we cannot get a handle on.

But it’s also a stretch to see all of Iraq necessarily going up in smoke. There are smaller regional success stories. Anbar is one, where Sunni tribes in a homogeneous Sunni region have aligned effectively with US forces to fight Al-Qaeda. But the real success story – and the great unsung achievement of the West for the past 15 years – is the emergence of a relatively peaceful, increasingly prosperous, largely democratic Kurdish region in the north. It’s a success story we have no reason to turn into a failure.

The Kurds, of course, were in effect liberated from Saddam’s butchery after the first Gulf war by the US-UK nofly zone. They had their civil war in the 1990s and a stable polity emerged. The Kurdish peshmerga have been the only seriously competent force in Iraq since the fall of the Ba’athists and the disbanding of the army.

More important: they are Sunni Muslims. They have a fledgling democracy. And they love the US. If the US can salvage a democratic, peaceful Kurdistan from the wreckage of the Iraq occupation, the war will not have been entirely in vain. I don’t mean independence. I mean an effective soft-partition that keeps the Kurdish dream alive.

Yes, there are many issues remaining: the status of Kirkuk and Mosul, potential ethnic clashes and rogue Kurdish terrorists. But they are certainly more manageable than keeping the lid on the entire country of Iraq in the absence of a central government.

One obvious postsurge option for US troops is therefore to redeploy to Iraq’s territorial borders to deter an influx of foreign agents, but primarily to defend and police the territorial integrity of Kurdistan. In this, Washington needs to hold Turkey’s hand tightly and patiently. It too is a critical ally, a Muslim democracy and essential to restraining the centrifugal forces of Iraq.

But the Turks are deeply and understandably suspicious of Kurdish aspirations. The Turkish-Kurdish border therefore badly needs Nato troops to keep it stable and prevent incursions from either side.

The benefits of rescuing Kurdistan include a positive and constructive narrative for the next stage of the war. Americans do not like losing and they need to be reminded that the sacrifice of thousands of young soldiers has not been for nothing. But protecting Kurdistan has profound strategic advantages as well.

It would create a democratic buffer against Arab extremism from Israel through Turkey to Kurdistan. That arc points directly at Iran, a country in the grip of spiralling inflation, public unrest and a brutal crackdown on dissent. Iran too has a Kurdish population, and a free Kurdistan under US protection could act as a focus for Kurdish unrest in Iran’s north. Persians are not Arabs. Many of them love the West and are potentially a great ally against Wahhabist insanity. If the next few years are about rattling Tehran’s cage, a free, stable Kurdistan would help.

It’s also worth remembering that some things are true even if George W Bush believes them. One of those truths is that the Middle East should not be consigned to Islamist fundamentalism or secular dictatorship for eternity. If we are going to win the long war against Islamo-fascism, some models of democracy in the region are essential.

There are encouraging global precedents. In Asia, for example, Taiwan followed Japan’s capitalist, democratic path, and the domino effect eventually brought China and Vietnam into the global economy. Even in the Gulf, Dubai is showing that freedom and capitalism are not impossible for Arab states. But they cannot be imposed by force. They can rather be defended by force, protected, nurtured and then held up as role models. If part of Iraq succeeds in this way, what better example for the other parts? Or for the region as a whole?

It’s also, it seems to me, far too soon to give up on Afghanistan. It is not a hopelessly divided sectarian mess like Mesopotamia. It is rather a hard-to-govern wasteland that has nonetheless come a long way since liberation from the Taliban.

The problem in Iraq is that there is no real government, no central entity that can unite the country’s sects and control its warring militias. Afghanistan is nowhere near as hopeless.

Am I being naively optimistic? I hope not. I still believe that removing Saddam was a morally and strategically defensible act. For the Kurds it ended a hideous chapter in a long history of oppression and violence. They remain grateful. They want to be a solid ally in the region and an oasis from Islamist terror.

Like the Jews, they have endured centuries of persecution in other people’s lands with no home of their own. They have one now and the West helped give it to them. We should do all we can to ensure nobody takes it away.

There are many things left to fight for in Iraq. Kurdistan is one of them.