Spoils of war

by John Tirman

This tale of modern warfare is told in three interwoven stories: the world of Washington policymaking; the hot spots of the Middle East, particularly Turkey; and a key venue of American arms manufacturing, Connecticut. These three disparate places have combined to produce one of the world's great human-rights catastrophes - the village-by-village destruction of "Kurdistan," the unsovereign homeland to 20 million people. To grasp the evolution of the Middle East and its relations with the West, we reach back more than a thousand years; to understand the politics of American intentions, we reach back to Richard Nixon's presidency; to see how Connecticut's prosperity became so dependent on the military, we reach back to the American Revolution. By the 1970s, the three eras are brought together forcefully: Washington is exporting weapons - often made in Connecticut - to Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere in the region, with uncommonly stark consequences. The different eras and locales demonstrate