What great news. Turkey is now fighting the terrorists in Iraq! Well it would be great news except that unfortunately the terrorists Turkey is fighting in Iraq are not the ones (i.e., Al Qaeda in Iraq) which President Bush and General Petraeus told Congress are the main cause of the violence “over there.” Instead, as many predicted, Turkey’s military has now launched cross border attacks against PKK stongholds in Northern Iraq in response to recent violent attacks by PKK fighters based in Northern Iraq which killed and/or wounded a number of Turkish soldiers and civilians.
The PKK is the Kurdish militant group which is officially labeled a terrorist organization by our State department, and which has carried out attacks against both military and civilian targets inside Turkey for decades seeking autonomy for the Kurds who reside there. I guess those threats diplomatic overtures by Condoleezza Rice were all for naught, unfortunately. Here’s the details of the raid as reported by Boomberg:
Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) — Turkey bombed units of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq and sent troops over the border in pursuit of the militants, a lawmaker of Turkey’s governing party said today.
Turkish F-16 jets and artillery pounded at least 63 suspected rebel positions inside the Kurdish-controlled region from Oct. 21 until yesterday, said the lawmaker, who attended a briefing by government spokesman Cemil Cicek to a group of government deputies late yesterday in Ankara.
The army sent 300 commandos into Iraq by helicopter on Oct. 21 to hunt down PKK militants after 12 soldiers were killed by the group the same day, the official said. The attack on PKK bases up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) into Iraq lasted about 28 hours before troops returned to the Turkish side, he added.
This is bad news on many levels. Clearly, respect for the US in the region is dramatically weakened over the past 6 years if Turkey, one of our most important allies, can so blithely disregard a “request” by our Secretary of State for it to hold off on its planned military response against the PKK inside Iraq. In addition, it will put further pressure on the fragile coalition between the Shi’ite and Kurdish political parties which constitute the principal partners in Maliki’s government in Baghdad. It also puts the United States in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between the Kurds, the one ethnic group in Iraq whose political leadership has consistently supported the US occupation and Turkey, a long term US ally and the site of major US military bases in the region.
Nonetheless, I’m sure Cheney and his friends on the Vice President’s Energy Task Force are thrilled about this latest development. The price of oil, after all, is now over $85 a barrel, and though it had been slipping of late on reports that the Saudis planned to increase production, it’s likely to rise again after this news. Just in time for winter.
Who says uncontrolled chaos in the Middle East is all bad? Somehow, I wonder of this was the plan all along. A forever war does need the occasional “unintended consequence” to keep it rolling along, and keep defense industry profits soaring, and what better way than to add a new combatant to the fray.
But no, it would be too cynical of me to harbor such thoughts. Wouldn’t it?
I recall an interview with Christopher Hitchens shortly after the invasion of Iraq where he confessed that he was a fan of Paul Wolfowitz, if not so much a fan of George Bush. According to Hitchens, the neo-con strategy as envisioned by Wolfowitz was a political riff on “Disaster Capitalism”–blow it up, destroy what exists and then build your “democracy” on top of it. He approved, of course. So, under this theory, chaos was the immediate goal. Maybe they just liked it so much they decided to keep it rolling?
Oil Price — 90% Windfall Profits Tax, retroactive to 9/10/01 and the price of a barrel of oil at the beginning of trading in NYC. All WPT revenues go to 100% funding solar energy for private housing, R&D of solar.
Scrap ethanol, put the land back to food production.
Reinstitute Eisenhower Era tax rates.
Re-Regulate telecom and energy industries.
Well. Thats a start, its early. No coffee yet.
Oh, one more thing. Hang Cheney from a lampost.
This was predictable. In fact, I predicted this after reading a half dozen other people predicting it. Considering Turkey’s long-time war against the Kurds in Turkey, they weren’t likely to sit back and allow border raids out of Kurdistan.
To the greater point, yes, fractured, tribalized mini-states are more pliable for the purposes of corporate exploitation. This was the strategy of the destabilization of the former Yugoslavia, breaking down that state which was potentially large enough to be a threat to capital to the West.
Perhaps someday, when corporate headquarters are safely ensconced elsewhere in the world, the same strategy will be applied to the ol’ USA.
the same strategy will be applied to the ol’ USA.
It IS being applied in the USA.
New Orleans 2005
southern California 2007 (this one is unfolding right now)
.
“One of the goals, in my opinion, was to establish control over the country’s crude reserves.” He also said that the U.S. should fix a date for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.
… “The U.S. contingent should only be withdrawn when the Iraqi leadership is capable of maintaining security and stability in the region,” Putin said. He called Iraq “a small country, which holds enormous oil reserves, but is hardly capable of protecting itself.”
Putin also said that, “Some hotheads have come up with the idea of getting access to Russian oil reserves, particularly in east Siberia.” He did not specify further.
Siberian Oil Reserves
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."while it will boost oil prices (good for oil companies) it will take northern Iraq off line (bad for US oil companies).
While shock-and-awe economics has produced great criminal profits, it is also a matter of riding a tiger.
I don’t expect Turkey to return to the US fold.
This is truly becoming the “War of Terror” as spoken by Borat.
Just another in a long line of failures on the part of our Sect. of State, Condi. We’re averaging one failure a week, these days.
Our crack media strikes again! Did that byline read Oct. 24 and was the story reporting on bombings that occurred on Oct. 21? Didn’t any news sources have reporters in Northern Iraq to report on this? This is pretty big news and one would expect our media to at least send reporters to confirm fighting.
Iraq is a mess and getting worse. The Turks have had a long struggle with the Kurds, who seem to be doing the same thing to the Iranians. The Turks do not want to see an independent Kurdish Northern Iraq nor a Kurdish homeland. The US likes the fact the PKK is harassing Iran.
Here we go through the looking glass again. The Kurds were the original poster children for the Iraq attack, remember? How they had to be liberated from Saddam’s oppression, even though UN airspace protection had already pretty much made their territory functionally independent.
So now, from being the poor victims they’ve graduated to being official terrorists, invaded by America’s most vital ally in the region. I have no argument against their aspirations to independence, but any school kid could have foreseen that those long-standing aspirations would only ratchet up as Iraq dissolved, and take the region another step further from the “peace and democracy” that Bush pretended to want for the region. Bush’s lie-eggs are hatching fast and furious now, and the consequences will probably be out of anyone’s control.
I wonder if there had been more of us right from the beginning of this debacle pressing the point that the Bush regime’s agenda was organized around the idea of ‘perpetual war’, if we could have changed the debate in such a way as to maybe be further along now toward derailingthe neocon’s insane juggernaut.
I’ve been saying this about perpetual war since Sept 12, 2001, yet only now, 5 years later, are many of my friends finally coming around to embracing this view.
Tragically, the major corporate media, across the board, is almost always in favor of war, so even more voices on this theme probably wouldn’t have changed the direction of things much.