Denny wrote:What it boils down is that Kurdish terrorists (the KTT, I think they are called) have been attacking Turkish tropps and then moving over the Iraq boundary to escape reprisal.
That's all true.
The US invasion of Iraq has "upset all the [ethnic] applecarts" in the neighborhood over there, as phrased by Spengler in the Asia Times the other day.
We can only wish that there were better on-the-spot journalistic coverage of these current events. It would have to accomplished by a journalist who could articulate the long, deep and simmering politics between the Turks and the Kurds. I think it's pretty interesting history myself.
Spengler, who writes for the Asia Times, surprisingly came out the other day for a Kurdish state which would include territory taken from both Turkey, Iran and Northern Iraq. Wow! That would seem like a recipe for war to me. But he insists that his views are well-considered over a period of many years of studying the situation.
It seemed to me from looking at it, that the US could USE the Kurds!
If the US were to strike a deal with the Kurds where the US gets a large military base in a new, Democratic, independent, Islamic Kurdistan, then the US would muscle Turkey and Iran to go along with it.
This would require some extensive deal-making that would probably include oil-flows and whatnot. But the military strength of the US to enforce such a long-shot deal would be greatly increased because America could train, equip and arm the Kurds who have quested for their own country for hundreds of years. It wouldn't be like our attempts to train the half-hearted Iraqi Army (whose allegiances also are ethnic-religious based).
It might be even be possible to include the Iraqi Sunnis in a new Kurdistan since the Kurds are Sunni also. I don't know.
America would sit there on it's big base, policing the whole situation, controlling the local economics (and the oil as well).
Why not?!!
The Shia get the south and its oil and their ties to Iran. They would have to deal with the behemoth to their north.