Will Turkey Attack?
source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-turkey16oct16,1,1069584.story?ctrack=2&c...
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- lauraling
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"The Turkish government Monday said it would seek parliamentary approval this week to launch a major military operation into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish separatists based there, after days of cross-border shelling of suspected rebel positions. The threatened action comes despite pleas from Washington and Baghdad that Turkey refrain from an incursion into Iraq that could destabilize an already volatile part of the world." --LA TIMES
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- groups:
- News and Politics, The Current Conflict
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- tags:
- News and Politics, Iraq War, War on Terror, Turkey, 3 more
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MitchKoss
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An interesting sidelight to the PKK problem in northern Iraq is that no-one is asking the question: Why doesn't the US military just take these guys out in some lightening-like strikes? The absence of that questions points to an apparent change of thinking that has taken place in the US government over the past half-dozen years. Back in the 1980s, the main problem facing the US military was how to defend Western Europe from a Warsaw Pact invasion at a time when anti-nuclear sentiment in West Germany made it difficult to rely primarily on a nuclear deterrent. So the US came up with a Follow-On Forces Attack doctrine, meaning that in event of Soviet attack, the US and NATO would respond not with nuclear weapons, but with incredibly sophisticated--and expensive--high tech, non-nuclear weapons that would destroy the rear ranks, the follow-on forces, of the invading Warsaw Pact armies before they got to the Fulda Gap. Fortunately for Europe, the US was never obliged to use this weaponry. Then, less than a year and a half after the Berlin Wall fell, there came a need: The first Gulf War. Here, America's high-tech weaponry seemed to work great--and give great confidence in what it could do elsewhere, ultimately in the Iraq War... But it's been a long time since March, 2003, and now the US military talks about how force alone can't bring peace to Iraq and Defense Secretary Robert Gates just said that the strategic threat of Islamic extremism can only be finally eliminated by non-military means... Against that light, the PKK problem is kind of interesting in that what seemed like the first option a few years ago, now no longer seems to be an option at all.
- 4 years ago
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MitchKoss
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lauraling
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were in southern Turkey recently, looking into this situation, which seems to be getting tenser by the day. The U.S considers the PKK a terrorist organization, so many Turks are wondering why they U.S. isn't doing more to root out the PKK in their war on terror. It's obvious why the U.S. can't do more--they don't want to disrupt the situation in Northern Iraq, which is one of the most stable regions in Iraq. But, this doesn't stop people in Turkey from thinking the U.S. is acting hypocritally in its war on terror. As a result, public sentiment in Turkey (a U.S. ally and a model for democracy in the Muslim world) toward the U.S. has reached record lows.
Here's our pod that's airing on Current: http://current.com/items/84872211_us_in_the_crossfire
The story has as much to do with the longstanding conflict between Turkey and the PKK as it does with the U.S. standing in the region and its decrease in power since the Iraq war.
- 4 years ago
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lauraling
