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.

Republicans are awesome

Or, in any case, conservatives are. As this proves. What absolute tripe.

Whatever anyone's beliefs about the Iraq war, making the comparison of Libby to a fallen soldier is repugnant. There are actual soldiers facing actual bullets, losing actual limbs and actually dying, everyday. Scooter Libby, by contrast, is a political hack, working in an office in America. He didn't bravely face down a horde of marauding Janissaries. He lied to a prosecutor to keep his bosses from looking bad. If his life is "ruined," well, he had other choices. In any case, the "hardships" poor Scooter will face in minimum-security prison will still be vastly safer than even the safest parts of Baghdad. And I'm sure that there will be plenty of well-paid opportunities in the private sector upon his release. Conservative plutocrats all over the nation will welcome such a faithful operative with open arms, methinks. Whereas the soldiers Ajami compares him to will have far harder roads to travel when they get home, what with their missing limbs, or PTSD, etc.

I shudder to think what the caterwauling and howling would be like if all of this swirled around a Democratic President. But now that the rule of law conservatives say they love so much is being applied one of their own, conservatives like Ajami are doing cartwheels to portray this two-bit monkeyshines courtier as a ruddy-faced, brawny-chested warrior who was merely doing his duty as a patriot and is being brought down by petty jealous rivals (and incidentally, I just love the little sad-face picture of Scooter, it really makes it for me). I know that for some reason conservatives believe that this "fallen soldier" needs to be pardoned. Just to reiterate what others have stated before, the American public is not following you down that road. The attempt to attach Libby to true casualties of war would be laughable, if it weren't so crude. Conservatives are becoming more and more deranged. I'm sorry that I am simply ranting, but, really crap like this is just flat-out crazy.

Friday Cat Blogging

Diego tries out his new litterbox. We tired of always having to clean it, so we had his anus removed. Now we don't even need to fill it with litter.



Jackson. He has attacked a box and feasted on its bloody entrails, like all good hunting cats.

Fun with Ottomans

I am tired from racing last night, so I have mercifully little to say (for me).

I would think this to be a major developing storyline:

PKK attacks military outpost; 7 soldiers killed

ANKARA - Associated Press


The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party fired rockets and grenades at a Turkish military outpost, killing 7 soldiers in a bold attack that heightened tension at a time when Ankara has threatened military action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

The army sent helicopter gunships and reinforcements to Tunceli province in southeastern Turkey after two PKK members rammed a vehicle into the military post on Monday, throwing hand grenades and opening fire with automatic weapons, the governor's office announced.

Soldiers returned fire, killing one of them - who had explosives strapped to his body, the governor's office said. Local media said the second attacker escaped injured.

Several other PKK members simultaneously opened fire on the outpost from a nearby forest, the governor's office said. The attack left seven soldiers dead and seven others injured. One of the injured was in critical condition, authorities said.

The attack came as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül told European Union officials visiting Ankara that "we have every right to take measures against terrorist activities directed at us from northern Iraq."

Turkey's political and military leaders have been debating whether to stage an incursion into northern Iraq to try to root out the PKK bases there.

...and this too:

Turkey says no army operation in N.Iraq just now

ANKARA, June 6 (Reuters) - Turkey said on Wednesday it had no plans at present to send troops into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there, but it indicated this remained an option in the future.

Media speculation is high of a possible cross-border operation against rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which uses mainly Kurdish northern Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks in Turkey.

Parliament, now in recess ahead of July 22 elections, would have to reconvene to authorise any military operation beyond Turkey's borders.

Asked if the Foreign Ministry was readying documents for such a move, spokesman Levent Bilman told a news conference: "At this time there is no work on such an authorisation, but Turkey is ready for anything at any time."

I especially liked this at the end of the Reuters story:

Turkey is furious with U.S. and Iraqi authorities for failing to crack down on the estimated 4,000 PKK rebels in northern Iraq.

Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people in Turkey since the group launched its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the impoverished southeast region in 1984.

What a great situation. A NATO ally massing troops near the border of Iraq to pursue terrorists associated with the most supportive group in the country we invaded.

This brings up numerous points. The PKK is a terrorist group, based on the most basic definition. If you believe the insurgents in Iraq are terrorists, then the PKK would be as well. Kurds in Iraq may be harboring these terrorists. If Turkey were to follow the Bushian philosophy, they would be within their rights to just go right in and invade. After all, we did just that on far flimsier premises. I have to assume this would be unacceptable to Bush and gang, which means they will have to go out of their way to defuse the situation peacefully. They couldn't just let Turkey go in guns a'blazin' because this would presumably piss off the one real ally we have in the country. They might strike a deal wherein the Kurds give up PKK terrorists. I see this as unlikely, for much the same reason as above. So, here we are. If Turkey invades and we do nothing, this will be bad. If we oppose such an incursion, militarily or otherwise, we basically shelter terrorists, which would also have to be considered bad. Finding some way to weed out PKK members hiding out with Iraqi Kurds and handing them over to Turkish authorities is less bad, but not that great. The Bushies haven't shown themselves to be particularly willing to engage in tender diplomacy, nor do they show any real aptitude for it. Mostly, we have to hope that the Turks will decide not to get aggressive (they have some good reasons not to) and that Kurds will cooperate with us in the meantime to root out terrorist elements in the meantime (I'm not betting on this).

Not to pretend that this growing situation was one of the reasons I didn't support invading Iraq in the first place-Kurds were hardly on my radar at the time-but this is exactly the kind of unintended consequence that you would hope really smart war-planners who want to transform the military and establish a beyond-challenge hegemony super-ultra-massive-power might want to consider before launching a war.

Or, apparently, not.

Innovative Conservative Thinkers

Dick Armey. Great.

This is one of those examples of "thoughtful" conservatism based on supposedly "Jeffersonian" principles that makes all kinds of ludicrous assumptions. Particlarly the assumption that

Government can only expand its scope of power and authority at the expense of the citizen.

This is based on the either-or assumption that if government does anything at all, it is automatically at the expense of the freedoms of the American citizen. Thus, any and all government programs or laws or whatever are automatically tyrannical. Any government program, no matter how high-minded, is thus a violation of the principles of the founding fathers, true conservatism which is the natural state of being, blah blah blah blah blah, and thus needs to be curtailed altogether.

Whatever. That is a way of looking at it, I suppose. Not a good way, but a way. Another way of looking at it is that the American government and the American people fashion an agreement as to whether the government will expand or contract, based on whatever conglomeration of interests can tolerate one another enough to get along and cooperate. The way we decide such things as a nation is based on voting. If we want the governemnt to do more things in various ways, we vote for candidates who say they will. When we decide otherwise, we vote accordingly. It's not a perfect system, but for the most part, it works amazingly well. Unless, of course, you believe in theories of, say, a unitary executive who can do whatever he wants without answering to written laws , and who can then, say, spy on American citizens without warrants even though most Americans don't believe he has this authority. Or unless you desire to clamp down on who can and cannot vote, through, maybe, trumped up charges of voter fraud as seen by politicized agents of government institutions. If something like that were to happen, then certainly the expansion of the government would be at the expense of the people, because they could not effectively react to it excesses. Unfortunately for Mr. Armey, he happens to be a member in very good standing with the American political party who have tried exactly these things.

Armey's simplistic "Governement equals Red Tyranny" version of freedom versus government comes up short when he applies it to health care, his chosen example with this post. Simply put, health care isn't a choice. I need it. And since I need it, I have to pay for it somehow. This is only a "choice" in the Libertarian, anarcho-capitalism, "true-conservative" meaning of the word, wherein I can "choose" to be fired from a job and lose my insurance; or "choose" not to have enough money to pay for insurance on my own; or "choose" to curl up in a ball and die. By any rational measure, these aren't really "choices" at all. Since it's accepted economic practice to raise interest rates as a mean of increasing unemployment to control inflation, which of course might leave me and many others out of work and thus out of insurance, in many ways I am already not free to choose the manner of my health care coverage. Given all of this, I might actually welcome government "interference" of some kind to foot the bill for health care. This doesn't threaten my freedoms at all. At worst, it is freedom-neutral-it doesn't affect my freedoms any more or less negatively or positively than the current system; and it could actually increase my choices in other ways.

If this is one of the leading voices of the conservative "movement," then the Republican party is even more vacuous and listless than I thought.

Not-scared America

I have to agree with almost all of this by Fareed Zakaria.

I especially liked this section:

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood," he recently declared.

But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq's Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war—putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It's stupidity.

...largely because it makes a point (better) that I was trying to make here. (Man, linking to myself is just such a wonderfully pompous experience. I would apologize to my readers, if I had any).

Of course, his worldview validates my own worldview, so of course I like what he wrote and I am less likely to look for counter examples. But the he brings up a primary theme that is difficult to refute-America's open, democratic society is a strength, not a weakness. Given that we live in a time when, say, writers at respected, right-wing magazines can call for military coups to save our nation, this cannot be stressed enough.