A TIME FOR DIPLOMACY

Stockton Record, CA
AID=/20071025/A_OPINION01/710250315/-1/A_OPINION06
Oct 25 2007

As Turkey’s leaders threaten to invade Iraq, dialogue must be a
U.S. priority

Centuries of ethnic strife, distrust and retribution between Iraq
and Turkey are creating dangerous complications for the unpopular
war in Iraq.

Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member since 1952 and
associate member of the European Union, is a vital staging hub for
the U.S. military.

The Turks are angry at Kurdish incursions – 12 soldiers were killed
in an ambush by Kurd guerrillas on Sunday – and what they perceive
as U.S. leaders’ unwillingness to act on their behalf.

An invasion of Iraq by the Turkish army has been authorized by members
of Turkey’s parliament.

It’s doubtful Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will order an
invasion anytime soon, though the tension and danger seem to have
escalated this week.

The conflict centers around the Kurdistan Workers Party – a Marxist
group known as PKK – that’s using violence to establish an autonomous
state for Kurds now living in five Middle East nations.

Raids by these guerrillas have killed 24 Turkish civilians.

If warfare should erupt in northern Iraq, the U.S. military, already
stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be
forced to react.

Turkey, the region’s most moderate, secular society, is a valuable
strategic partner of the U.S. Internal forces guided and provoked by
Islamic extremists are a problem.

The best hope for reason – and development of a diplomatic solution
– might be a Nov. 5 meeting between Erdogan and President Bush in
Washington.

Bush needs to reassure Erdogan of U.S. support and understanding.

He also needs to persuade the Turkish prime minister that conflict
on his country’s southeastern border will jeopardize the hard-fought
gains of Mustafa Kemal Atatýrk (1881-1938), who founded the modern
republic of Turkey and was its first president.

This is an explosive geopolitical situation that demands determined
diplomacy. Not more war.

Choice of words California Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian, R-Stockton,
co-authored a resolution passed by the state Assembly calling on
Congress to recognize as genocide a 90-year-old atrocity that has
injected a troubling dimension into the current dispute between Turkey
and the Kurds in Iraq.

The House Foreign Relations Committee passed an Oct. 10 resolution
declaring the 1915-23 ethnic cleansing of Armenians by the Ottoman
Turks as a "mass genocide."

As accurate as that might be, the timing is all wrong, and the full
House didn’t vote on the measure.

Emotions still run deep over the tragic deaths of 1.5 million men,
women and children during and after World War I.

Though heartfelt, such efforts might better serve U.S. interests at
a later time.

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