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From Robert Spencer:

The American government seems intent on insuring that it will do nothing to harm Islam, nothing to exploit those ready-made aspects of Iraq which lend themselves so obviously (obvious to me) to increasing division, disarray, demoralization, within Islam itself.
The Kurds, of course, will be the immediate losers, but by failing to support their well-justified demands for at the very least, autonomy, and even better, for independence, the American government loses a chance to encourage, within the world of Islam, recognition by non-Arab Muslims that they need not permanently accept Arab domination, or the Arab supremacist ideology of which Islam has always been a vehicle.

This could have consequences for the Iranians, so many of whom have become disgusted, because of the past quarter-century of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with Islam. Yet they still cannot quite see their way to jettisoning Islam, possibly for another "religious identity" (name-tags being so very important in the Middle East, where the idea of the individual, the Leibnizian monad floating in the universe, is too frightening to contemplate), most likely Zoroastrianism. It is not the content that matters in that, but rather the notion that one can choose something that is specifically Persian, and that emphasizes the Trojan-horse gift of those primitive Arabs to the superior civilization of the Persians.

It is not hard to imagine that an independent Kurdistan could worry Syria and Iran: by agreement with the Americans, standing in for the Turks, that no territorial demands would be made on Turkey -- and by agreement with the Turks, who will not be admitted to the E.U. and need the Americans more than ever, that no harm would be done, or hostility demonstrated, to that Kurdish state.

What do we see, however? We see Condoleeza Rice lecturing and hectoring the Kurds. This is the woman who, like her Boss, claimed that those who were doubtful about the Administration's Democracy-Is-On-the-March view of Iraq (with no clear explanation of how, even were such to be true, it would improve the world-wide position of Infidels, or help to weaken Islam) were akin to those who scoffed about post-war Occupied Germany and Occupied Japan. If she failed to see the difference between the complete destruction and defeat of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, as compared to Iraq, where the reigning ideology, Islam, has not been and cannot be defeated through military means alone, she needs a course in history and another in logic.