The Kurds get it right

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UPDATE: Happy New Year

The BBC's Jim Muir, in northern Iraq, says Iraqi Kurds have spoken of how, during the rule of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, they were banned from celebrating Nowruz.

Now, he says, the community enjoys a stability and relative security that is very rare in the rest of the country.

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The mass psychosis that apparently compels so many Iraqis to rain death and destruction on their countrymen, is eerily absent in the Kurdish part of the country.

Nation-building is a hard and violent slog in the center and south of Iraq, and it might not ever work out. But in Kurdistan, in the north, it already is a reality.

The Kurds are building a civil society while their fellow Sunni and Shia countrymen to the south slaughter each other indiscriminately.

The Hilton hotel chain is building a massive full-service tourist resort that will take five years to construct.

It may seem dumb to build a tourist resort in Iraq of all places, but this is Erbil Province, not Anbar Province – there is no war, no insurgency, and no terrorism here whatsoever.

It's the untold story of Iraq.

h/t -- SDA --

UPDATE: Meanwhile, back at the ranch

The internecine slaughter continues...

Nearly 50 people have been killed in two days of fighting between the al-Qaeda-linked militants and Pakistani tribesmen, Pakistani government officials said today.

A battle between foreign militants, most of them Uzbeks, and ethnic Pashtun tribesmen erupted in the remote area near the Afghan border on March 6th.

The latest fighting broke out yesterday in Shin Warsak village, seven kilometres (four miles) west of Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan region. Thirty-five Uzbek militants and 12 tribal combatants were killed, a government official said.

I sure don't get this "Will of Allah" thing.

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