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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am most grateful to Dr. Scott Merriman for his considerable help in all matters relating to the word processing of this book. I was all the more fortunate that Scott’s office is just across the hall from mine, and he always interrupted his own work in order to help me with world processing problems that popped up all together too frequently. Scott formatted, merged, and de-merged parts of the manuscript whenever it was necessary. This book never would have been finished on the schedule that I had set if it were not for Scott. Every author whose computer skills are limited should be so fortunate as to have someone like Scott Merriman around. I was blessed. Scott also did yeoman service in proofreading the first draft of all of the chapters and sometimes the second as well. The manuscript benefited significantly from his close reading.
My colleague Mike Gunter went beyond the call of duty when he accepted my plea to proofread the manuscript. His acute eye and sharp pencil is evident throughout the book. Moreover, he read and returned each chapter to me in a timely fashion. Mike also recommended the subtitle of book. As usual, I want to thank my friend Dick Gilbreath, who happily happens to be Head of Cartography at the University of Kentucky, for designing the six maps that appear at the front of the book. Thanks for a great job, Dick.
I am most grateful to Kay Woods. This book never would have been finished by the deadline established by the publisher, if it had not been for Kay. Every author should have an editor who applies her/himself so unstintingly in ferreting out every spelling mistake, wrong punctuation or inelegant phrase. Kay is one of those editors of whom an author says, “Why didn’t I think of that? It sounds so much better.” I must have said, “Why didn’t I think of that,” several hundred times in the course of incorporating Kay’s corrections and suggestions into the revised manuscript. I would give a Kay a chapter, and she would sometimes have it back to me in two days, frequently in one day. Kay may actually inspire me to write another book.
Introduction
This book deals with a relatively shorter period of time than most books, but it deals with the complex issues of nationalism, capitalism, and state formation which are topics that have extensive bibliographies. In this study, I do not define what nationalism or capitalism are but assume them as constants that played a strong role in the state formation of Kurdistan-Iraq as it occurred in the first years of the 21st century. The evolution of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab nationalism have been addressed many times, and even though there are still strong differences and opinions as to their origins and development, most scholars agree that all three were developed, albeit in different degrees, by the first quarter of the 20th century. What I try to do in this study is to follow the process of these nationalisms and their interactions with one another, two ensconced in states—Turkey and Iraq—and one, Kurdish, engaged in state formation. I am especially interested in the reasons why Turkey was impelled to accept aspects of Kurdish nationalism as expressed in Kurdistan-Iraq during the first years of the 21st century and, especially during the crucial years from the U.S. invasion of Iraq on 19 March 2003 to the first part of 2005.
First, a word about the title: The Goat and the Butcher. It comes from the Turkish proverb (atasoz): Keci özgürlük ister, kasabı eti: The goat desires its freedom, the butcher its meat.1 The goat is a metaphor for the lower intelligentsia and bureaucratic classes supported by popular nationalism while the butcher is a metaphor for the emergent bourgeois class that is always looking for a market, preferably a national market. In this study, the metaphor of the goat and the butcher will be employed as an apt description of Kurdish nationalism in northern Iraq, or what I prefer to call in this study—Kurdistan-Iraq. The hyphen represents what I consider to be the degree of ...
1 I want to thank Dr. Ali Kemal Özcan for allowing me to use this term as a metaphor for the larger intent of this study. Dr. Özcan first used this term in his The Case of Turkey’s Kurds: A Nationalismles, Nationalsim: which is forthcoming (2005) from Mazda Publishers.
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