What did Turkey do?

This is a bit of an older link (in blog time, anyway) but it highlights one of the enduring paradoxes to the Iraq mission: we're supposed to "liberate" the Kurds, but do so without creating the conditions for an independent Kurdish state. This - given the fact that the Kurds are well-armed, trained, and willing to fight for lands they see as theirs - may very well be impossible.

So what are the Kurds likely to do once they have a state? Well, probably more of what they're doing already - attack Turkey and try to take even more land. To do so would be foolish, but as I said, it's already happening.

Some Iraq War partisans readily acknowledge that the point of the war was to re-draw the lines of the Middle East, explicitly without the consent of the inhabitants. I suppose it's a bit much to ask Washington to care what, say, Iraqi Sunnis, think about this project. But you'd at least think that Turkey - you know, moderately Islamic, NATO ally, secular free-market state Turkey - would be exempt from this colonial impulse.

But no. It seems the craziest Americans think that, for no good reason whatsoever, Turkey should lose about 20% of its territory to the new Kurdish state. For what? Admittedly, Turkey did engage in a particularly brutal campaign against the Kurds during the 1990s - and was armed by Washington to do so. Whether or not a new Kurdish state is formed from the remains of Iraq is yet to be seen - about the only thing the Sunnis and Shia agree on is that the Kurds can't be accomodated. Destroying an embryonic Kurdish state could be the one thing that Syria, Iran, and Turkey all agree on.

I say this not because I'm hostile to the idea of a Kurdish state in theory, but because I can't think of a way in practice it wouldn't lead to even more regional instability.