MORAL POSTURING, IMMORAL RESULT
Wilmington Morning Star, NC
Oct 16 2007
Democrats in the U.S. House apparently want to prove they can make as
big a disaster in the Middle East as President Bush has. They have
chosen this moment to pass a purely rhetorical resolution declaring
that the mass murder of Armenians between 1915 and 1923 amounted to
genocide by the Turks.
It did, if you accept the judgment of many historians. For example,
the head of a Genocide Studies Program at Yale calls it " the clearest
case of genocide apart from the Holocaust."
But whatever anyone calls it, it’s too late to help the victims. And
it’s absurd to believe that if the U.S. House officially calls
massacre in the past century "genocide," future tyrants and lunatics
will desist from wiping out their enemies.
The way to stop genocide is to stop it, not to denounce it decades
later.
The resolution would do nothing except to please voters who care –
passionately and understandably – about the murder of their family
and friends in the chaotic violence that followed World War I.
But it also would further enrage the Turks, who are plenty angry
enough already.
These are the same allies who are allowing us to use a base in their
country to supply our forces in Iraq. These are the same allies we’re
begging not to attack Kurds in Iraq, some of whom have been helping
Kurds in Iraq attack the Turks.
No wonder the White House is urging Pelosi and her colleagues to cool
their rhetoric. If they are responsible, they will.
016/EDITORIAL/710160315