Thursday, October 11, 2007

Turkey Moves on Alderaan (Alderaaq?)

I've been holding out for an interesting story that wasn't about the Middle East or Russia...preferably something Scandinavian since I just got the new Dethklok album. But nothing's turning up, and events elsewhere force my hand...

Since October 7, 15 Turkish soldiers have been killed by members of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), and this has prompted emergency measures to be taken by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has stated that a request to send the military into northern Iraq could be sent to the parliament as early as tomorrow.

For those of you not familiar with the Kurdish situation, look it up because I don't know too much about it, myself. But I'll tell you what I do know. The densest concentration of Kurds stretches from southern Turkey into northern Iraq, and both countries have had their problems with separatist Kurdish elements, Turkey moreso because a democratic government is a little more hesitant about gassing its own people.

Occupying northern Iraq is, in fact, not an unprecedented move by Turkey. I was a bit surprised to learn that they did the same thing in the post-Gulf-War-I 1990s, just to create a buffer zone against incursions by the Kurds, which didn't make too many waves. So they might do the same thing again.

Only, see, things are a little different in Iraq now. With the political situation there still murky as ever, a military presence by Turkey will really complicate things. First of all, they are 99% likely to oppose any greater autonomy, let alone independence, granted to the Kurds in northern Iraq as this will embolden separatists in their own country and destabilize the areas where they live.

That, and having another regional power throwing its weight around in an already-screwed up country can't make things better. Europe has no clout to tell them to back down, since they've been blackballing Turkey from the E.U. like a black jewish communist golfer in the 50's trying to get a membership at Augusta. And while the U.S. and Turkey are allies, we need the Turks a lot more than they need us right now, so we can't do much more than ask nicely at this point.

But hey, if worse comes to worst and they DO move to occupy northern Iraq, and then worse comes to worst comes to worst and the fragile system we have put in place crumbles, we can always just bail and leave Turkey holding the bag. Nah, we really can't. But it would be pretty funny and spiteful.

2 Comments:

Blogger Chris said...

Turkey's kinda a dick, isn't she? The near coup over the First Lady's headscarf, the Armenian genocide denial, the Kurd thing. And I'll bet they like the Rockies too.

9:44 PM  
Blogger leo said...

Dammit, Danno, how many times do i have to say it????


THAT'S
NOBODY'S
BUSINESS
BUT
THE
TURKS!!!!

And how dare you mock and sully fez hats. Fez hats rule.

10:50 PM  

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