WASHINGTON —

It’s clear for lots of reasons — political, economic, strategic, electoral, opportunistic, moral and simply sensible, to name a few — that President Barack Obama has no desire to get drawn back into the Iraq war. So why is he bombing Islamist insurgents in the Kurdish region of Iraq and saying he might keep doing so for months? Because what he’s doing has nothing to do with getting drawn back into the Iraq war.

This seems a paradox, to say the least, but stick with me for a minute. We can all agree that “the Iraq war” refers to the period from 2003 to 2011, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, ousted the central Baghdad government and dismantled all bodies of authority, thus hurling most of the country into sectarian warfare, which American commanders tried to suppress, first through crude, brutal occupation, then (in 2007) through clever counterinsurgency techniques, which played the sectarian factions off one another, vastly reducing the violence and forging a provisional truce.

However, even the advocates of this new strategy, such as Gen. David Petraeus, said all along that the benefits would be temporary at best, that all U.S. forces could do was provide “breathing space” for Iraq’s political factions to get their act together.

After American troops came home (under the terms of a 2008 treaty signed by George W. Bush at the insistence of Iraq’s parliament), it soon became clear that Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, had no desire to get his act together and sustain the truce with his Sunni rivals; in fact, he stepped up his persecution against them — and sectarian war re-erupted.

This is the Iraq war that neither President Obama nor any sentient American should want to re-enter. Obama’s airstrikes against the Islamists’ holdings in Kurdistan are something different.

Note that three paragraphs ago, in my minisummary of the Iraq war, I noted that the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the dismantlement of all his ministries hurled “most of the country into sectarian warfare.” The one area of Iraq that remained nearly immune from the chaos — the one area that U.S. authorities deemed “stable” through most of the occupation — was the northern area known as Kurdistan, home to roughly 6 million Kurds.

This is true, despite Kurdistan’s multiethnic population (mainly Muslims but also Yazidis, the Yarsan, Christians and Jews) and its various conflicts over the decades with Baghdad. The main reason for Kurdistan’s stability is that in 1970 the U.S. and Iraqi governments decreed it an autonomous area. More relevant still, after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council, in Resolution 688, declared the area a “safe haven” to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. (He had killed thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.)

And the United States agreed to enforce the resolution with a “no-fly zone.” (In other words, all Iraqi planes trying to fly over Kurdish territory would be shot down by U.S. air or naval power.)

Under this protection, Kurdistan has thrived. Its per capita income exceeds the rest of Iraq’s by 50 percent, it has free-trade zones with Turkey and Iran (both of which were rivals or enemies), and it has solid relations with many Western companies.

The Kurds’ growing wealth has sired tensions, too. As Sunni-Shiite violence has turned Iraq into a borderline “failed state,” the Kurds have started making their own deals with oil companies and made moves toward their century-long aspirations of complete independence (which the French and British colonialists thwarted after World War I by divvying Kurdish territory among the peripheries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran). This would deny Baghdad’s and Iraq’s Sunni Arabs of much oil revenue. Still, it’s become very clear that if Iraq — whether as a centralized state or a loose federation — has any hopes of ever becoming stable, much less democratic, a thriving Kurdistan must be part of it, even a model for it.

— Fred Kaplan is the author of “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War” and “1959: The Year Everything Changed.”