Evansville Courier & Press , IN
Oct 20 2007

Armenians and Kurds

All of a sudden, two old conflicts put Turkey in the news

Martin Schram, Scripps Howard News Service
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The CNN news alert was about Turkey’s military massing at the border
to attack Kurdish hit-and-run rebels inside Iraq. The info-crawl
across the screen cautioned that a Turkish strike might "destabilize"
Iraq’s government.

"Destabilize" the Iraqi government?

Turkey has suddenly become front-page news. It happened because of
two conflicts that became two crises.

One, the Kurds vs. the Turks, had been simmering for years. The other
one, the Armenians vs. the Turks, had been on an even more remote
burner for almost a century – and the world had been looking the
other way.

Now this. Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki declared: "We
will never accept a military solution to the differences between
Turkey and Iraq." He has, however, been willing to accept a military
solution to the differences between Iraqis and Iraqis. His position
was made awkward because it was the militant Shia cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, commander of his own militia, who’d gotten Maliki his job.

The unstable Iraqi government had promised Turkey it would crack down
on Kurdish rebels who strike inside Turkey. The Bush administration
promised to help control the rebels. Turkey vows to crush the rebels.
No wonder Iraq rushed a diplomatic vanguard to meet with Iraq’s
"Turkish friends."

Meanwhile, another border conflict arose – this one along
Pennsylvania Avenue. On one side sits the House of Representatives,
on the other, the White House. This time, it was the House Democrats
who struck suddenly. With the war in Iraq unsolvable, they moved to
urgently tackle a World War I era horror that the U.S. Congress never
addressed in the past 90 years: the genocide against the Armenian
people committed by an empire that was about to collapse – the empire
of the Ottoman Turks. Some 1.5 million Armenians were killed or died
of starvation.

But it turns out that the new Turkey is the old ostrich, and so the
government has denied that Armenians were victims of genocide.
Quibblers contend that it may not meet the technical definition of
genocide. Whatever. Turks perpetrated a horrible mass murder of
Armenians.

Now the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a nonbinding
resolution calling what the Turks did to the Armenians "genocide."
Turkey warned that it might retaliate against the United States,
perhaps closing off Turkish bases.

President Bush moved to try to persuade House Democrats not to enact
that resolution, and eight former secretaries of state backed him.
The act by Ottoman rulers was contemptible and evil. But Speaker
Nancy Pelosi decided to make her strong stand on that sad 90-year-old
burial ground.

If Turkey retaliates by severing supplies to U.S. troops, the next
guns fired will be political. The White House will blame House
Democrats. America’s military’s woes will become the broken property
of House Democrats. And Pelosi’s quest for a moral high ground will
have made her the general who ousted her own troops from a political
high ground that once seemed invincible.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress