Leadership Quote by Les Aspin

Aspin’s sentence is diplomacy with the knives tucked away: it sells a hard geopolitical bargain as a matter of comfort and safety. “Long-term” signals that whatever crisis sparked the remark is being treated as chronic, not episodic. The real wager is that Iraq’s Kurdish question can be managed by engineering a political middle zone - autonomy that’s meaningful enough to prevent persecution, but limited enough not to look like secession.

The phrasing is careful to the point of strategic vagueness. “Must figure out a way” spreads responsibility across an unnamed “we” (Washington, Baghdad, the UN, coalition partners), while also lowering expectations: this isn’t a promise, it’s a process. “Certain amount of autonomy” is a classic politician’s shim, acknowledging Kurdish self-rule aspirations without saying “statehood,” a word that would antagonize Turkey, Iran, and Arab Iraqi nationalists in one stroke. Aspin is effectively proposing a pressure-release valve: decentralize just enough to reduce ethnic violence and refugee flows, stabilize the map, and keep the region from dragging the US into repeated emergency interventions.

The emotional center is “comfortable and safe going back” - a humane frame for what is also a security agenda. It implies displacement has already occurred (or is imminent) and that return is preferable to resettlement elsewhere. Subtext: autonomy isn’t just a moral concession; it’s a mechanism for keeping borders intact while making Kurdish return feasible, thereby preventing a permanent humanitarian problem that becomes a permanent political liability. Aspin’s intent is less about celebrating Kurdish rights than about constructing a durable arrangement that averts the next collapse.