ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how in the early 1970s there was a desire to overthrow the Ba'ath government and why the United States failed to back this initiative and continued to ignore Kurdish pleas for US backing, as a superpower that the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani considered to be trustworthy. It then looks at the strengthening of USSR–Iraq relations from the early 1970s, resulting in the Soviet–Iraqi Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of 1972, and the Soviet’s desire to make a strong client of Iraq by having the Ba'ath form a government with the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The implications of these on Iran’s relations with Iraq, and how Iran and other actors managed to pursue Nixon and Kissinger to offer a symbolic covert backing for the Iraqi Kurds, are then studied. This will be followed by a coverage of the renewal of war in Kurdistan in 1974, and ultimately how the Shah of Iran, followed by the United States and Israel, betrayed the Iraqi Kurdish movement after Iraq offered to compromise on Iran’s Shatt al-Arab border demands. These will be followed by a demonstration of how Kissinger turned a blind eye on this betrayal and lastly what was the position of the Iraqi Kurds in the global US policy under Nixon and Ford.
