The American Spectator

Is this something that can really be practically adapted by American soldiers?

MT: We are in a guerrilla war and we are playing reconstruction games, fighting terrorists with Pentagon lawyers and Foggy Bottom diplomats. Send the lawyers and the diplomats and the reconstruction aid specialists home. Listen to the Kurds and bring them onboard, and use their incredibly deep, broad and effective human intelligence network in all Iraq. And quit trying to hand Jeffersonian democracy to three separate and incredibly diverse cultures glued together by British mapmakers that never spoke Arab, Farsi or Kurdish. U.S. Army Delta Force commandos and U.S. Army Special Forces have adapted some of the highly-effective Kurdish counter-terrorist strategies, and likewise, been incredibly effective at taking down terrorists and insurgents, in doing so. But it would take a sea change to get the [regular] American military and the American intelligence community to listen in the first place.

With regard to the Kurds, has the U.S. sold out allies in Iraq in pursuit of a unity government?

MT: You can’t fit the music on the street to the music on a sheet. Likewise, you can’t force the music on the sheet — the sheet music written in Washington — to frame the music on the street when the music on the street is written in an entirely different key. The Kurds have far more right to independence than we did in 1775. We didn’t lose 180,000 American colonists to chemical weapons and massacres, and we denied fellow Americans — blacks, women and Native American Indians — basic human rights for many years after we won our freedom from the British.

The Kurds earned their right to independence in fighting Baathist fascism for many, many years. They fought with their hearts and souls, with everything they had, against one of the most brutal dictatorships in the history of mankind. They did not fight for a unity government of Iraq, they did not fight for Iraq at all. They are Kurds. They have a culture, already, and it is 6,000 years old. Who the hell are we to tell them what to do? We owe the Kurds, they do not owe us a damn thing at all. The American record, over the last 36 years, in dealing with the Kurds of Iraq is largely encompassed by three words: shame and disgrace. If we have any common sense as a nation and a people, and any sense of honor whatsoever, we will recognize just how much suffering realpolitik has caused both in Kurdistan and around the world, banish realpolitik to the ash heaps of history, and embrace Kurdish independence.

In our initial contact you wrote to me, “We will not go down as the generation that allowed America to be defeated and destroyed by radical Islamic terrorism.” Why are you so optimistic?

MT: We will win because we have no choice and the American people, at some point, will demand that we kill the enemy. We are a bold, defiant and creative people, historically, and we are still the people who fought to the last man at Brooklyn Heights, who crossed the Delaware with Washington, who wrapped our feet in rags at Valley Forge and who prevailed at Yorktown, against seemingly impossible odds. We will win because among our people, in our towns and hamlets and streets and deserts and on both coasts, we have suffered in this war and we have bled in this war. The nation that stands together, fights together, and bleeds together is the nation that wins together. We need a President and a national leadership on both sides of the aisle that says, “Bleed with me.” There is no way out but together. We will not win with only one percent of military age males carrying the load for the entire nation. al Qaeda has an estimated 54,000 terrorist operatives, all covert, in the world; we have roughly 1,000 CIA covert field agents, in the counter-terrorist fight against al Qaeda, globally.

At some point, the American people are going to wake up and smell the coffee and ask why the java smells like buffalo s[—-] instead of Sumatran fresh ground. And we must hang tough, we must summon all our resources, our courage, our daring, and our intellect to win the war against radical Islamic terrorism.