KRG Independence Referendum Continuation of Caliphate's Political Project: Dismemberment of Iraq

You can usually infer what is troubling the Deep State by what is omitted from Foreign Policy's daily Situation Report. This morning there is zero mention of the ongoing story of Monday's independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan (there was a brief mention of it yesterday). The results of the referendum supposedly will be announced today. Already officials of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have leaked to the press that the vote is overwhelmingly "Yes" to independence.

The response from KRG's neighbors has been predictable. Turkey and Iraq are conducting military drills on KRG's northern border. Erdogan threatens war. Iran has banned flights to Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi has demanded the return of the international airports by Friday. Iraq's parliament has asked Abadi to send troops to secure the oil-rich multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk. KRG seized Kirkuk, basically in coordination with ISIS when the jihadis captured Mosul, back in 2014.

Mention of this by David Zucchino, in his story "Iraq Orders Kurdistan to Surrender Its Airports," fails to emphasize the simultaneity of the ISIS-Kurdish blitz:

As the Islamic State rose in northern Iraq in 2014, Kurdish fighters took advantage of the chaos, and in some cases of fleeing Iraqi troops, to expand the Kurdish territory by 40 percent.

We need to interpret the independence referendum as a continuation of the political program of the caliphate. The caliphate was always a GCC project designed to dismember sovereign nations aligned with Iran; an independent Kurdistan, or several independent Kurdish states, accomplishes this.

The U.S. position on the referendum is clearly duplicitous. While the U.S. is officially opposed, one can divine its tacit approval from The New York Times' serially sympathetic coverage of the referendum, captured in a previous Zucchino story, "As Kurds Celebrate Independence Vote, Neighbors Threaten Military Action." The Kurds are presented as victims of Iraqi genocide.

Often the most reliable way to ascertain U.S. policy is look at its organs of propaganda.