There was just one problem. Oil was discovered in the Mosul Province. And a refinery got built. And what with ongoing resistance from the Kurds, Saddam couldn't trust them around oil.
So he purged a lot of the Kurds (and Assyrian Christians and such) out of Mosul and Irbil and settled "safe" Sunni Arabs in the area.
(See above about the history of the Kurds.)
When the U.S. came in, the Kurds got a partial beny on resettlement. A lot of the Sunnis hadn't wanted to be up there, anyway. As they left the Kurds moved back in.
But a lot of the Sunnis, who made up the most hardcore faction of the Resistance, fought back. So Mosul and Irbil remained war zones until the Sunni were more or less wiped or driven out. (The reason the Iraq campaign really started winding down.)
Even before then, the Kurds had established a "no travel" zone in their core areas including Kirkuk and Sulamaniyah. That is, they'd take in anybody but an Islamic Arab. Turkic? Come on in. Assyrian Christian? Love you guys. Fucking Sunni or Shia Arab from down on the south plains? Fuck off.
Which is why when U.S. units crossed the borders into what everybody called Kurdistan, you could take off your body armor and relax. You could walk around in a market with no more bother than kids pestering you for treats. People fucking handed you stuff like fruit. They loved American troops.
But the battles around Mosul and Irbil never really stopped. The Sunnis always got weapons, money and people funneled into Iraq right up to the time of the Plague. See, Saddam had been a Sunni. Most of the surrounding countries, especially Syria, Jordan and Saudi, were either controlled by or predominately Sunni countries. They did not want the Shia in control in Iraq. That would create the possibility of a Shia Union with Iran.
(Which is more or less what the Persian Union is, except it's secular. Well, as much as the U.S. is.)
And the Sunni didn't just try to take back their "core" areas around Baghdad (what used to be called the Sunni Triangle and through which we were about to pass) they wanted the fucking oil around Mosul and Irbil.
So we get to the good and the bad.
We'd kept in contact with the Kurds. They'd gotten hit, hard, by the Plague. Not as hard as some areas, though. One; we'd made sure they had vaccine through the military. Two: they distributed it pretty effectively. (More in their core areas than around Mosul and such, obviously.) Three: They had, as a culture, high-trust and a huge degree of cohesion.
So they'd lost a lot of people. And they had then reacted, adapted and overcome. Bury the dead, sow and reap.
Oh, things weren't great. But they were hanging in there.
Which, when I found the right guy at the Pentagon to tell me that and give me some phone numbers, was great news. I was going to need a fill-up and some friendly faces would be nice to see. They had fuel and friendly faces, just like Sunoco or whatever.
Which brings us to the bad.
Unlike Iran, which was not yet up to the level of "pacified" whatever policy maker thought was good enough, Iraq was not considered a "threat country." They were an "associated country" with "good relations" with the U.S. Not quite an ally, but on the way.
(I would have begged to differ, but we're talking about policy makers. State was involved.)
So they could be left with all the gear we were leaving behind under the assumption it would be put to good works.
Now, having just described what great fucking people the Kurds are, where do you think we parked all that fucking equipment?
The Shia were marginal allies of the U.S. They hated the Sunni and Saddam and we'd kicked Saddam out and given them a chance to get out from under five hundred fucking years of domination by a Sunni minority. They were, of course, like any fucking Arab or Persian in that you couldn't trust them as far as you could throw the Great Pyramid. And they had lots of guys who wanted to team up with the Mad Mullahs and kick our ass. But, overall, they were nominally on our side.
The Kurds were just our fucking right damned arm. They thought we rocked, most of the guys who worked with them thought they rocked. They could be trusted like the armor on an Abrams.
The main problem, beginning, middle and right up to the end in Iraq, were the fucking Sunnis. Whether the RIFs that trickled in from other Sunni countries around the world with the intent of blowing up an American for Allah or the Ba'athist party thugs who wanted back into power so they could go back to dominating the Shia like a good Sunni should. They were the motherfuckers we were constantly fighting.
And they were concentrated, to the very end, around Baghdad, up to Tikrit and over to the Syrian border.
So where did we park our equipment?
That's right, right in the middle of the fucking Sunni Triangle.
What. The. Fuck?
We get back to the tofu-eaters. Sort of. Actually we get back to State.
State had a long-term suck affair with the Sunni.
Part of that was just numbers. There were way more Sunni countries than Shia. The only major Shia country, Iran, we didn't have diplomatic relations with until we invaded. (If you can call that diplomatic. Most did not.) So there were just more slots for State pussies to suck Sunni dictator dick than Shia dictator dick. So they learned to suck Sunni dick. They "spoke the language" in diplo-speak. "Would you like it slow or hard?" in Arabic appropriate to the local grammar and norms.
The other part was, frankly, money. Filthy lucre. Graft.
The Sunni countries, many of them, had shitloads of oil money. And they tended to throw it around. The UAE, a tropical desert country, built a giant fucking tube of steel to use as a snow skiing slope. I shit you not. Huge motherfucker.
They gifted "chairs" at prestigious universities. They funded think tanks.
Eventually, every government service worker, including soldiers, wants to get out and do something else. For some of us it's buying or returning to the farm. For others it's getting a good academic position or a think-tank position or a spokesperson's position or a lobbyist's or . . . You get the picture.
Pre-Plague the average salary for an ambassador to a "top-flight" nation was $175,000, most of it untaxable, and quite a few perks. Nothing to sneeze at.
A retiring ambassador to Saudi Arabia left government service and was hired into a "think-tank" that "considered Middle Eastern relations with the Western World" for two million and change.
Guess where the money came from? Bunch of small scale middle-class American contributors?
Don't think so. Whole think-tank, all American citizens and mostly former State employees, was funded by the Saudi Arabian government. The former ambassador had been handed his watch by the U.S. government and a Rolex factory by the Saudis.
So where do you think his real interests lay? Including while he was ambassador.
Oh, of course it was never money! Heaven forbid. The Sunni were our closest allies in the region. Sure, just ask the Sunni guys flying the planes into the World Trade Center. Most of them Saudi citizens because a Saudi citizen could get a visa, from State, without any review whatsoever.
State considered Shia to be unwashed monkeys. What they thought of the Kurds, those violent inbred rednecks of the Zagros and Tauric mountains, you don't want to know.