Please, enough armies have invaded Iraq already, might have been the wearied thought of Condoleezza Rice, as she proceeded to Ankara yesterday after her most recent frustrations, adding more doodles on the “roadmap to peace” between Israel and the Arabs.
It is not a good job, being the U.S. Secretary of State. There are no satisfying moments, and I can’t see why anyone would want it. You get to travel, but what do you get to see? You get to meet people, but not very nice people. The food is sometimes good, but you’ve got to talk while you’re eating. You will get credit for nothing. You will be blamed for everything. And you will never get points for trying your best shot.
The Turks have not only threatened to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, in hot pursuit of the PKK—the Kurdish revolutionists who have, since the 1970s, been making violent attacks throughout the substantial part of Turkey where ethnic Kurds form a majority, as well as against Turkish government installations in other parts of the country and all over the world. They are also moving troops into place for such an adventure. And the PKK have been attacking those troops, from out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
They used to use Syrian territory, too, until the Turks put such a scare into the Assad regime, that they were actually removed. It was a wonderful thing, back in 1999, to watch not only the capture of the infamous PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, by a joint Turkish and CIA operation, but also, the Turkish response to his connexions with Damascus. It was a pleasure to watch the Syrians do what they were told, when a huge Turkish army massed on their northern border. No pleasure now.
Iran’s ayatollahs also play a duplicitous game with the PKK, but the Turks do not want to have a face-off with them, nor with the Russians still fishing in troubled waters. The threat to invade Iraqi Kurdistan is being made only in the expectation it will get results. And in the knowledge that the government of Iraq, and that of the United States, are diplomatically beleaguered, and make cheap targets in Turkish public opinion.
The PKK are Communists. Good old-fashioned Communists, not Islamists. Their ideology has “evolved” slightly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which gave them need for new sponsors, but the final end, in their view, is a united socialist Kurdistan, assembled from all ethnic Kurdish territories overlapping Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In the last quarter-century, the PKK have been responsible for upwards of 37,000 unnatural deaths, and there is no reason for any decent person to sympathize with them.
The Kurds are arguably the world’s most populous stateless nation, and have ethnic distinctions that e.g. Palestinians lack (for “Palestinian” means simply Arab, from within an arbitrary boundary). And, statelessness has been the Kurdish condition, since time out of mind (except a shadowy kingdom c.2400 BC, and numerous principalities in the Middle Ages). They have occupied vast mountainous territories, for so long, that even the Sumerians had a name for them, and ditto ancient Greeks, Romans, and Persians. A reliable source of political trouble, and linguistic and anthropological fascination.
Iraq’s Kurdistan is the closest any part of this “nation” (in the stateless sense) has come to political autonomy in the modern world, and the present rulers can hardly want to lose it. It follows that despite serious popular sympathy for anything any Kurd does to hurt Turkey, the legitimate Kurdish authorities will cooperate with at least American and Iraqi authorities, to remove the PKK. But this is not an easy task, in remote districts, and there is no great surplus of military means, given the need for soldiers elsewhere in Iraq itself. Still, Turkish pressure is strongly influencing American and Iraqi priorities.
The danger here is that the “mildly Islamist” elected Turkish government is under great pressure from its own domestic constituency to make a bold chauvinist display, and that this may suddenly be made without regard to what the Americans and Iraqis are doing. We have another of those train wrecks, that we can see coming from afar, and do absolutely nothing about. It is almost impossible to predict the fallout, if the Turks in fact send their army across Iraq’s sovereign frontier.
It is a grim measure of the decline of U.S. power, that Miss Rice should find herself on a Turkish carpet, reduced to pleading the way she is today.
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