Iraq may not have major-league baseball or daylight-saving time, but it has come to recognize an equally reliable sign of spring. Each year, as the snows melt in the lofty mountain passes along the border of northern Iraq, the sporadic, five-year-old guerrilla rebellion of Iraq's stubborn 1,500,000 Kurdish tribesmen flares up again—fueled by fresh weapons and ammunition lugged in by donkey caravan over the mountains from fellow Kurds in Iran.
This year was supposed to be different. The death last April of President Abdul Salam Aref removed the Kurds' most implacable foe. When his brother, Abdel Rahman Aref, took over,...
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