Fun with Ottomans Volume III

It seems the Turkish military pressure to invade Iraq and take out the PKK Kurds is mounting:

Turkey flirts with the Iraq quagmire
By Hilmi Toros

ISTANBUL - Turkey is beefing up military preparedness against Iraq-based Kurdish rebels as a prelude to a possible cross-border incursion that is opposed by the United States, the European Union and the Iraqi government.

Three Turkish provinces bordering Iraq have already been declared "special security" zones, limiting civilian access in the wake of an increase in bomb blasts in urban areas, including the capital Ankara and Istanbul, and attacks on the military. Although no one has claimed responsibility, official and public condemnation goes
to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgents slipping in from Iraq.
In addition, troops and military hardware are being amassed in Turkey's rugged and impoverished southeast, in the country's Kurdish-populated areas.

The daily newspaper Milliyet reported on Saturday that Turkish troops were already shelling PKK rebels in frontier areas within Iraq.

So far, despite public outcry for a decisive move against an estimated 3,000 secessionist PKK rebels holed up in Iraq, there has been no major incursion. But it has not been ruled out. And if it happens, it may have serious consequences for Turkey, Iraq and beyond.

Such an incursion is described as a "nightmare" scenario for the U.S. in Iraq:

The risk, analysts said, is that Turkey might become drawn into a wider conflict with Iraqi Kurds even if it initially sought to conduct a small-scale operation, and that other countries, including Iran, might also feel emboldened.

"It could open a Pandora's box for the quagmire -- the fiasco -- in Iraq to turn into a regional quagmire, with regional countries starting to fight wars on Iraqi territory," said Brookings Institution analyst Omer Taspinar.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the CSIS think tank in Washington, said, "A complete mess in the North of Iraq creates problems for everything we are trying to do in Iraq. It creates problems for our deep defense relationship with Turkey and it creates an even more chaotic situation in a part of the world where we are desperate for less chaos."

Not only would it put America at odds either with Turkey or Iraqi Kurds or both, it might spread into a couple of other potential sensitive areas:

While the current focus is on the PKK (listed by Turkey, the US and the EU as a terrorist organization), there exists a larger "Kurdish problem". Turkey, Syria and Iran also have sizable Kurdish minorities and have experienced occasional flare-ups of ethnic tensions.

The Laciner report also says that if any Turkish military action goes beyond flushing out PKK rebels to involve fighting with Iraqi Kurds, it may lead to pan-Kurdish solidarity that could spell trouble for Turkey, Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq. The main Turkish concern is that a strong Kurdish entity in northern Iraq, including an independent one in case of an Iraqi meltdown, could embolden its own Kurds to seek similar status.

So the whole situation could open up, in essence, another front in the Iraq war, one potentially more wide ranging and no less intractable.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, for his part, in no hurry to send in the army. He faces opposition from NATO and America, and Turkey stands to lose economically in the event of an invasion. But the military in Turkey has a very strong hand, seeing itself as the guardian of the secular republic against Islamist or separatist threats. Their military has a long history, dating back to the Ottoman Empire days, of making its own political decisions and walking over (or killing) any political opposition. With an increase in Kurdish terrorist acts and a weak, vacillating, moderate Islamist government at the helm, they are already bolstering their position. Meanwhile, public support for them increases at the expense of the government:

ANKARA: Funerals for three soldiers killed in a roadside bombing set up by Kurdish rebels turned into anti-government protests Monday as thousands of mourners called on Turkey's leaders to resign over their failure to rein in the violence.

Many Turks are becoming increasingly angry over the mounting military death toll from attacks by Kurdish rebels, some of whom are believed to be entering the country from northern Iraq.

The three soldiers were killed Saturday in Sirnak, a southeastern province, and were buried in separate funerals in Istanbul, Ankara and Manisa. Thousands attended the ceremonies, carrying Turkish flags, shouting anti-government slogans and booing ministers and other government officials who were present. Military officials were greeted with applause.

In Ankara, about 10,000 people gathered at the city's largest mosque, shouting "Government resign!" as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and other officials arrived.

In Manisa, protesters booed the speaker of Parliament, Bulent Arinc, and denounced the United States and Kurdish separatists

Obviously, the situation is in and of itself bad. The surge has hardly clamped down on violence in Iraq as it is, and this is with the Kurdish areas relatively calm and violence free. The Turkish military's defiant position in the face of international and UN opposition to an incursion sounds, to my ears, strikingly familiar. The difference between the Turks and the U.S. in this equation is that while we could merely claim (wrongly) that we had evidence of WMD and that Iraq under Saddam was an imminent threat, the Turks can actually claim a real and current threat, right over their border. Bushco. can huff and puff about the wider consequences of a military incursion all they want, but that won't hold a lot of water with average Turks. The specter of terrorist attacks is no less frightening for Turkish citizens than it is for American citizens, and it is far more immediate. With every attack, it is going to be harder and harder for the already flaccid Turkish government to hold back.

In a wider sense, this is the very predictable consequence of attempting to build an empire. As anyone who has had the misfortune of reading through the PNAC website could tell you, the neoncons wanted to take over Iraq and establish a permanent American "footprint" long before 9/11. This is long established fact. When I put on my little tinfoil hat, I see a direct pipeline from PNAC to the "sea of oil" in Iraq. But even if you take their prattlings at face value and believe their quasi-Wilsonian nonsense about spreading democracy (without all of that wussy League-of-Nations stuff, however) it amounts to the same thing-they are going to impose their will on other sovereign nations for what they see as America's (or really, their) interests.

The problem is that other nations in the region, or anywhere, are going to have interests of their own-interests that probably will not coincide with Americas. In fact, they may be at cross purposes. Furthermore, the citizens of an invaded country will almost ALWAYS be at cross purposes with their occupiers, which makes surrounding countries even jumpier, since there will almost surely be some runoff into their borders. The presence of an outside, interloping military force planting itself permanently in the region is almost guaranteed to invoke hostility all of its own accord.

In the face of hostile natives and hostile nations surrounding our forces, we, or any occupying force, would of course have to make deals with anyone who will do so. But this means that as soon as we do, someone else might see this as being against THEIR interests. In this way, we become entangled with competing allies or allies who are aligned with our enemies. And ultimately, it could be no other way-despite all of the right-wing chest beating and shouting, we simply cannot control people through the force of our will or our military. The days of that kind of physical dominance are over, unless we would like to drop fistfulls of atomic weaponry (I know some on the right would gladly do so), which brings up its own set of problems.

This is ultimately an untenable situation, making our security far worse than even I, a terrible pessimist, could ever have foreseen. And yet, in many ways it was pretty damn predictable-in fact, many people did predict it, and were called traitors for the effort. Many of the self-proclaimed Real Americans who brought us to this point are still in charge. I hope they can find a way to pull us back from a further escalating disaster, but I doubt they even really wish to try. It's not an edifying thought that in this case, for a sane resolution, I have to depend on Islamist Tayyip Erdogan and the PKK to find a way to a ceasefire, but there it is.