WorldNetDaily, OR
Oct 19 2007

Bush betrays the Kurds

Posted: October 19, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Turkish "lawmakers voted 507 to 19 to give Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan permission to order strategic strikes or large-scale
invasions of Iraq for a one-year period," the Washington Post
reported.

The Turkish government’s ruse for war-making is the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party. The PKK are separatist rebels who’ve waged a
decades-old campaign of terror against Turkey. Essentially, Turkey is
threatening to visit on Iraqi Kurdistan what Israel had no right to
inflict on Lebanon: Level the country and kill hundreds of innocent
civilians for the actions of a few militants acting in defiance of
the central government.

But why now? Why would Turkey disturb the détente, and threaten to
destabilize the only stable region in Iraq?

The Turks are cross with Congress, which had planned on scheduling a
vote to recognize as genocide the mass murder of 1.5 million
Armenians by the Ottoman Turks a century ago. Contemporary Turkey is
to Armenians as the Institute for Historical Review is to Jews:
Holocaust deniers. Even though support for the symbolic vote has
waned in Washington, Ankara has recalled its ambassador and seized
the opportunity to do what it’s clearly been itching to do since the
Iraqi Kurds gained autonomy: cut them down to size. For some time
now, Turkey has also been shelling Southern Kurdistan.

Iraqi Kurds have cause for concern. The Armenians are not the only
ethnic group to have suffered at the hands of the Turks. Turkey has
waged systematic ethnocide against its Kurdish population as well.
Although it has lifted bans on speaking Kurdish and wearing the
traditional garb, Turkey still prohibits other forms of cultural
expression by Turkish Kurds.

The Turks are not the only power to use and abuse the Kurds. Many a
creative post hoc argument has been concocted to justify the
unnecessary war the United States waged on a sovereign nation that
had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match
for us.

One such argument for the invasion of Iraq utilized the Kurds.
Flaunting sham sympathies, unapologetic war apologists resurrected,
in 2003, the Halabja massacre of 1988, during which "Chemical Ali,"
then governor of Northern Iraq, released lethal gases on a Kurdish
town. Over 5,000 men, women and children perished.

The hell Hussein unleashed on Halabja formed part of the genocidal
Anfal campaign he initiated against the Kurds. Aside from convicting
the Kurds for supporting Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Hussein
coveted the oil-rich land around Kirkuk occupied by the Kurds. The
area is crucial to the Iraqi economy. The Kurds, moreover, are a
non-Arabic, if Muslim, people. To an Arab, that’s almost as
incriminating as being an infidel. Ask the decidedly non-Halal
victims of the Janjaweed in Darfur about Arab chauvinism! Over a
100,000 Kurds lost their lives during the Anfal onslaught, as Saddam
razed hamlets, slaughtered their inhabitants and scattered the
survivors throughout Iraq.

Bush boosters now habitually use the fate of the Kurds, in 1988, as
an excuse for their illegitimate 2003 invasion of Iraq. But back when
images of Kurdish corpses on the streets of Halabja reached the West,
the U.S. opted to sit on the sidelines. Worse still: The U.S.
succored Saddam at his most monstrous, providing him with chemical
and biological precursors, pesticides and poisonous compounds to
carry out his deeds.

Before Halabja, the U.S. had abandoned the Kurds to Iraq’s mercies in
a 1975 covert operation involving Iran. After Halabja, the U.S.
forsook the Kurds in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Kurdish militia,
the brave Peshmergas, rose up against the Baath government, only to
be jilted by George the First.

The Kurds are the only sect in Iraq that has been consistently loyal
to America – the Peshmergas assisted American forces in the north
during the invasion. Not one American soldier has been killed in that
region. Kurds are also the only group to have made good on their
newly found freedom. Monocultural Iraqi Kurdistan is an oasis in the
democratic desert that is Iraq, "where business is booming and
Americans are beloved."

"When visiting Kurdistan," enthused CBS’s "60 Minutes," "one can see
nation-building wherever one looks – Kurds are building their country
day by day. There are more cranes here than minarets, and there’s a
run on cement." No wonder the constructive Kurds want nothing to do
with the destructive Iraqi Arabs, who’ve persecuted them in years
past and have now turned on one another.

The Prince of Darkness, aka Robert Novak, has divulged that Bush
authorized "a covert operation of U.S. Special Forces to help the
Turks neutralize the PKK." The King of Darkness may be planning to
sell the Kurds down the Tigress to pacify the Turks.

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