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Kurds Cultivating Their Own Bonds With U.S.
Qubad Talabani represents the Kurdish Regional Government in Washington. As the son of Iraq's president, he has enormous clout.
(By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
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Talabani said he considers Lavin's trip a "big success" because it involved a Cabinet agency "reassessing the way it views doing business in Iraq."
But for Talabani and other Kurdish officials, a major barrier to U.S. investment remains: the State Department's travel warning for Iraq, which cautions that the country is "very dangerous," without distinguishing one region from another.
Talabani has urged the department to change the warning, which he said "tells the potential businessman that all of Iraq is unsafe, and that's not true." Although foreign investment is pouring into Kurdistan, very little is from large U.S. corporations, he added.
Lavin declined to comment on the matter, but Kurdish officials said he has also pressed the State Department to amend the warning.
In an April 3 letter to Talabani, Maura Harty, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, said the warning "accurately reflects the current situation" in Iraq.
Talabani said he plans to urge members of Congress and business executives to petition the State Department.
"We're going to keep up the pressure," he said.
The Minister and the TV Crew
As the Washington campaign unfolded, the other component of the Kurds' influence-building strategy was taking shape three blocks from the beach in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Bill Garaway, an evangelical Christian minister, realized that the Kurds had a public-relations problem when he told his neighbors in the seaside town that he was performing missionary work in Kurdistan.
"They said, 'Who are the Kurds?' " recalled Garaway. "I said, 'There is nobody like them in the Middle East. They're Muslim, but they hate fundamentalist Islam. They love America.' "
On a trip to Iraq in late 2004, he pitched the idea of airing commercials touting Kurdistan in the United States. The Kurds were intrigued. They told Garaway to produce a few spots.
He began filming in early 2005, with a camera crew that captured children waving flags, shoppers strolling through a new mall and peshmerga soldiers saluting. By the end of the summer, he had created three 30-second commercials.
