Instanbul Not Constantinople
From the Great and Powerful Kos, a good run-down of the current kerfuffle with Turkey. Unsurprisingly, Dubya is talking out of both sides of his mouth on this, though I do agree on principle that now was probably not the best time to deliberately tweak the Turks with this. As bad as things are currently in Iraq, they will become infinitely worse if Turkey invades Iraqi Kurdistan, which up until now has been a sea of peace and tranquility compared to the rest of the country.
Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq, Turkey
posted by The Local Crank | 6:23 PM
5 Comments:
Wow, that's a great analysis, even if it does come via the Great Orange Satan. Think I'll hit that up on my own little blog.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty good, too; insightful and concise. I hate having to care about the Turk's feelings on this issue--it WAS freakin' genocide, after all, but there are larger geopolitical issues at stake.
The Armenians have been steadily working on this all over the place for some time now. During the 79th session of the lege, we got a request (I can't remember from which senator) to do a resolution denouncing the genocide. Now, I'm not sure how it got all the way down to me, because on the totem pole of legislative consequence, I'm completely underground, but there you have it. I mean, I usually do the resos that declare the chuck wagon to be the state vehicle and such.
Anyway, I knew this was a political hot potato way above my pay grade, but I thought I'd give it a shot. The way I dealt with the most obvious problem was to lay the entire thing at the feet of the Ottoman Empire. This has two obvious benefits. First of all, it's historically accurate, and second, it doesn't say Turkey anywhere. To sum up, I kind of liked the one I did, but by the time it got kicked through the editing process, I'm not even sure that anyone was so much as rude to the Armenians.
We are talking about the Texas Legislature, you know.
"We are talking about the Texas Legislature, you know"
Good Lord, if the Lege got ahold of this issue we'd end up at war...with Turkey AND the Armenians.
Interestingly, I asked a related question of Senator Hagel when he came to speak at my school regarding the political situation in the middle east about a month ago: "Senator, you talked about the need for political reconciliation, or at least political accommodation. Would that include partition of Iraq, and if so, where would that leave our relationship to Turkey with regard to Kurdistan?"
His response was interesting, and I'll paraphrase here. Basically, he said that he was pissed off that the Bush administration was talking out of both sides of its mouth in blathering on about "Democracy" and yet at the same time imposing political requirements upon the Iraqi government. His basic comment was that he didn't much care what the hell happened in Iraq, so long as Iraqi's decided it. Then, if Turkey was pissed off about it, they could be pissed at Iraq (not us) and we could mediate the dispute through the normal channels of international diplomacy, rather than playing these stupid third level who said what games. As much as anything, he sounded tired of this being our problem, and wanted desperately to make it someone else’s. Oh, for a Republican party that made a lick of sense…
And in the more narrow sense, my feeling is that if we deny that there was an Armenian genocide, we lose all credibility to pressuring Serbia to turning over Ratko Mladic. Hell, given about 30 days, a case full of cash, a translator, and an open cell phone connection to Blackwater, *I* could find freaking Mladic. For that matter, I think I got chased out of restaurant in very rural Montenegro because his entourage was about to arrive… If it wasn’t him, it was surely someone that knew him.
Post a Comment
<< Home