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The lack of precision on this issues is frustrating.

Agreed!!

I will accept you statement about the autonomous area as fact - no time to research myself.

Question though, how autonomous were the Kurds? I would wager it was limited and that they had little power to do much of anything (but I could be wrong).

To your original question - why not bomb the kurds - if the kurdich autonomous government was supporting terrorists, they should have been just as much a target as any other country / group supporting terrorists. The US though, has chosen (wisely or not remains to be seen), to "support" some of these countries (Pakistan comes to mind) is as much as they support the US effort. Maybe the Kurds changed, I don't know - but if you have some info on this, I'd be very interested.

As far as the level of autonomy goes - the Kurds weren't getting their door kicked in the middle of the night and getting dragged away to a mass grave site. They elected their own leaders. The developed a grass-roots economy. And, if anyone thinks that Saddam "let" them do this out of the goodness of his heart, well... Let's just say that if they were doing these things it could only be because Baghdad did not have the power in the area to stop them.

I don't think we should bomb Kurds. At all. My question was directed at the premise of this article - i.e. that because these guys got training in Iraq, Iraq was complicit. That is a false assumption, and if it were not, then the Kurds would be complicit. It happened in their territory.

Now, Pakistan is another story. I understand that the issue has nuance, but if we are going to take the position that those states that support terror are our enemies, then it would be hard not to place Pakistan in the #1 slot, with our other ally, Saudi Arabia, in at #2. So maybe that is not really our policy after all.