War Drums
Speculation over whether or not the Turks are going to launch a major attack across the border into Iraq are still being bandied about, and I came across a couple of interesting articles in that vein.
When I posted regarding the possibility of a Turkish incursion, I used last year’s Israeli war with Lebanon as a sort of template. I didn’t bother to point out the rather hypocritical positions that the US has been taking over the two scenarios, but Gwynne Dyer has no such problems.
Fifteen months ago, the armed wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah party, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most other Western countries, attacked Israel’s northern border, capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing eight more. Israel replied with a month of massive air attacks all across Lebanon that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, leveled a good deal of south Beirut, and killed around a thousand Lebanese civilians.
Washington, London, Ottawa and some other Western capitals insisted that this was a reasonable and proportionate response, and shielded Israel from intense diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks even when Israel launched a land invasion of southern Lebanon in early August, 2006. The operation only ended when Israeli casualties on the ground mounted rapidly and the Israeli government pulled its troops back.
So what would be a reasonable and proportionate Turkish response to the recent attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most other Western countries, from northern Iraq into southeastern Turkey?
. . .
What’s that? Washington is asking Turkey to show restraint and not attack Iraq at all? Even after the Kurdish terrorists killed or kidnapped all those Turkish people? Could it be that Turkish lives are worth less than Israeli lives?
Of course, the special relationship Israel enjoys with the US is well-known, even if the alliance with Turkey is far more formal, as in Turkey is an official NATO ally who the US, (and Canada), is supposed to support when they are attacked by an outside party.
Still Dyer marks the hypocrisy even further than that:
Never mind. At least the United States officially classes the PKK as a terrorist organization and refuses to let its officials have any contact with it. But what’s this? There is a parallel terrorist organization called the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), essentially a branch office of the PKK, also based in northern Iraq, which carries out attacks into the adjacent Kurdish-populated region of Iran, and the United States does not condemn the PJAK? It even sends its officials to have friendly chats with the PJAK terrorists? How odd!
The PJAK’s leader, Rahman Haj-Ahmadi, paid an unofficial visit to Washington last summer. One of his close associates, Biryar Gabar, claims to have “normal dialogue” with US officials, according to a report last Tuesday in the New York Times — and the American military spokesman in Baghdad, Cmdr. Scott Rye, issued a carefully structured nondenial saying that “The consensus is that US forces are not working with or advising the PJAK.”
Biryar Gabar also said that PJAK fighters have killed at least 150 Iranian soldiers and officials in the past three months. That’s a lot more people than the PKK have killed in Turkey in the same time, and yet neither Washington nor any other Western country has expressed sympathy for Iran. Could it be that Iranian lives are worth even less than Turkish lives?
If you’re even slightly surprised that Iranian lives don’t factor into Washington’s decisions, (at least not maintaining their lives), you really need to read more. The real factor that Dyer doesn’t quite get around to mentioning, is that the Turks have also found a good number of weapons the Americans supplied to the Iraqi Army, some of them unfortunately "lost", that have ended up in the hands of the PKK. It doesn't take too much of a leap to guess that given the US's cozy relations with PJAK and their intentions regarding Iran, that some of those "lost" weapons were headed to Kurdish territory all along, and that the two terror groups have been working together.
Still, it’s the next part that got the neurons firing:
And here’s something even more peculiar. Iran, like Turkey, is already shelling Kurdish villages on the Iraqi side of the frontier that it suspects of sheltering or supplying the PKK/PJAK. How come President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney simply ignore these actions, when they have been working hard for the past year to build a case for attacking Iran?
That, when you think about it, is an excellent question. The Bush administration hardly seems shy about attributing all sorts of nastiness in Iraq to the Iranians, even designating their Revolutionary Guards as a “special terrorist organization”, but the one clear, easily provable Iranian military action on Iraqi soil gets almost no attention whatsoever.
Dyer’s hopeful explanation aside, I think it may speak more to just how much the Turks will be allowed to get away with if they do in fact launch a punitive invasion. When even Christopher Hitchens has trouble defending the PKK, you know the odds of any nation siding with them are practically non-existent.
The second article by Eric Margolis gives a much better picture of just how screwed up the whole situation is, but takes the question of just what the Turks may do quite a bit further.
A new danger looms. The US invasion devastated Iraq and effectively split into three pieces - fulfilling the first step in Israel’s grand strategy of fragmenting Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Iraq’s Mosul oil region, which formerly belonged to the Ottoman Empire, is a mere 119 kms from Turkey’s border. Kirkuk is only a bit further. After World War I, the British Empire grabbed this oil-rich region, cobbling together the unnatural state of Iraq to safeguard the oil.
If Iraq slides further into the abyss, Turkey and Iran may partition Iraq. Today, Turkey has no oil. Its fragile economy is hammered by having to earn US dollars to buy oil. But if Turkey repossessed Iraq’s northern oil fields, this nation of 70 million with 515,000 men at arms would become an important power that would reassert traditional Turkish influence in the Mideast, Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia.
`Pan-Turanism,’ the idea of spreading Turkish influence from its eastern border across the Turkic lands of Central Asia to the Great Wall of China remains dear to the hearts of many Turkish nationalists and far rightists. Iraq’s huge oil reserves are a big temptation Ankara cannot ignore. After all, if the US can invade Iraq for oil, why not neighboring, ex-owner Turkey?
I don’t pretend to be an expert on Turkey or its people’s ambitions, but I can say that any attempt to try and control northern Iraq’s oil fields will prove disastrous for Turkey. The PKK engender no sympathy, and the evidence points to Turkey not suffering too badly on the diplomatic front from a quick, punitive campaign, but if they are foolish enough to turn things into a long-term occupation, the price will far outweigh any possible benefits from their “control” of the oilfields.
For one, the diplomatic blind eye I believe most countries will turn towards a short campaign will turn to an intense glare in short order if it appears the Turks are planning to stay. A not insignificant fraction of the EU is looking for excuses to keep Turkey out, and a Turkish occupation will ensure they succeed. And the oil around Mosul and Kirkuk aren’t worth as much to Turkey as open trade with Europe.
As for the oil itself, even the Sunni Iraqi insurgents have been successful in shutting down the flow from northern Iraq on a repeated basis. One can safely assume the Kurds themselves can do a far better job denying the oil resources to an occupying Turkish army, not to mention giving them even greater incentive to expand their campaign to the BTC pipeline running from the Caspian to Europe, making Turkey an unreliable source for oil transport. It’s not inconceivable that a Turkish occupation could roil oil markets just as much as an American attack on Iran.
And for those who think that the Turks are capable of some special brand of brutality that the US and Israelis just can’t muster anymore, and that that will allow them to somehow crush any opposition where other Western powers have failed, I would remind them that this is the same argument used by some after Ethiopia invaded Somalia, and that certainly hasn’t worked out according to plan.
That’s not to say I don’t find the scenario entirely unlikely. After all, if the last several years have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t trust governments, and particularly governments who have their people whipped up into a jingoistic rage, (even a justified one), to make rational choices when they see an opportunity to enrich themselves.
But I stand behind my contention that if the Turks do anything beyond a short, sharp shock attack into Iraq followed by an immediate withdrawal, they will learn to regret it.
