Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Turkey, Iraq, the US, and Just Cause

Okay, let me see if I have this straight:

On the one hand, a rebel Kurdish separatist group in Iraq, the PKK, has conducted raids into Turkey.

While the Turks have fought back in the past, their parliament yesterday voted to officially authorize Turkish forces to cross into Iraq in order to strike PKK targets.

Oh, and George Bush does not approve. "We are making it very clear to Turkey that we do not think it is in their interest to send troops into Iraq," he said.

On the other hand, Saddam Hussein neither co-operated with al Qaeda, nor was otherwise involved in the 9/11 terror attacks; and Iraq neither attacked nor imminently threatened the United States. But Congress and George Bush believed it was in our interest to invade Iraq, depose Saddam and rebuild/occupy Iraq.

Now I'm no diplomat, political scientist or expert in international relations, so maybe I'm missing something here. But it sure seems to me that Turkey has more just cause to conduct military operations in Iraq than we ever did ... but for some reason, George Bush doesn't approve of Turkey's actions.

Why dat is?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Crazy, dat.

J. and C. Matthews said...

Well, Turkey isn't blessed with a holy empire. In fact, it just has the name of a stupid American bird. So it never has a moral justification to invade other countries, unlike the World's Lone Superpower. Duh! ;-)