More Fun with Ottomans

There was a PKK attack on Monday that left 7 dead. The Turkish army responded by sending some of their army into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists and set up a "security zone" in preparation for a potential major incursion. On Thursday, we get this:

Turkish soldiers killed near Iraq

Three Turkish soldiers were killed in a road side bomb near Iraq's border where Turkey's military started a campaign against Kurdish separatists.

The attack on Thursday evening occurred in one of several temporary security zones that the military had just declared along the Iraq border.

Six other soldiers were injured during the bombing, AP reported.

And this certainly looks promising:

The declaration was followed by reports of hundreds of Turkish soldiers crossing the border in to Iraq to pursue the guerrillas, though Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul denied all such reports.

Turkey, as a strong ally of US in the region, has for some time threatened it would strike Kurdish bases in northern Iraq but US officials have argued against it, fearing that it might drag its Iraqi Kurdish allies into the conflict.

There are two things that come to mind as this begins to grow as a crisis. The first is the surge (escalation). Most coverage of the surge deals with Iraq as if it exists in a vacuum. We'll surge, clear and hold in the country and then the Iraqi parliament can take over. Obviously, this is not so. All of the countries that border Iraq-and all of the countries in the region generally-have some kind of stake, from their perspective, in the outcome of the war. For any kind of stability to foment in Iraq, these other countries would have to cooperate. Iran has already shown how troublesome that can be. But a fight between two sets of American allies in the region could usher in a whole new kind of disaster. The idea that we can stabilize Iraq, and thus stabilize the whole region, is a fiction. It depends too much on factors outside it's borders. The Kurd-Turk situation will at some point have to be worked out for a stable Iraq, or else the surge, or any other operation, will end in failure.

The other thing that comes to mind regards the warbloggers. I have already addressed their desire to portray Muslims as one monolithic group with the desire only to destroy the West. This situation brings reality to a head: we are aligned with two different Muslim groups whose support and cooperation are integral to the war. One is the only group of people truly supportive of the American presence, but they are probably harboring terrorists. The other is a NATO ally and one of the only Muslim-based democracies in the world, but they are being attacked by a terrorist group supported and aided by our only friends in Iraq. If you don't understand the potential dangers this situation poses and it's importance, you have no clue about what is happening there. Complete ignorance of these kinds of subtleties might be ok when you're blathering about indoctrinating our schoolchildren into becoming warmongers or yammering about building 10 Gitmos, but it does nothing to deal with the problems as they are.