Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Ah, there you go again, Carl. You have a real talent for digging up masses of irrelevant material that somehow, in your own mind, proves your point. What the Turks were doing in Northern Iraq a year ago, or five years ago, is quite besides the point. The question is, what have they done lately? I went looking in the Turkish press, and look, they share debka's "fantasy""
The problem is that Debka doesn't put things into perspective. Instead of explaining that the Turks are the same place where they were 4 years ago, Debka puts it that Iraq is being attacked by being cut up like a "salami":
CobaltBlue, August 13, 2002
Debka isn't talking about all-out gung-ho invasion, but, as they put it, like cutting up a salami, slice by slice. At any rate, it appears that the real question isn't "if" but "when," and the answer is "soon." #reply-17872622
But the fact is that the Turks have been continuosly in Bamerni for at least 4 years. Debka made news out of "olds". At this rate it will be 1000 years before the "salami" is finally cut to pieces. The fact is that there is no invasion of Iraq, but Debka pretends that there is.
And why is the Turkish military in Northern Iraq? To help topple Saddam? Hell, no, they're killing Kurds, just like they've been doing for a very long time.
Yes, after the reports of Bamerni airport got loose some in Turkey made a big deal of it, but if you'd looked around just a little you'd have discovered it was no big deal:
Kurdistan Dispatch: Bomb Shelter
Michael Rubin, New Republic, June 17, 2002
...
For the Kurds, the remilitarization of no-man's-land is one more sign that when it comes to confronting Saddam, the United States can't be trusted. And that's a big problem, because without Kurdish help the Bush administration's on again, off-again invasion plans may be off for good. The two primary Iraqi-Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani -- who head the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), respectively - administer a chunk of Iraq twice the size of New Jersey.They control 50,000 lightly armed peshmerga (literally, "those who face death") as well as a number of small airfields, many of which were cleared of debris in March ("to provide better picnic grounds," Kurdish officials told the populace). While the landing strips would need to be lengthened to accommodate jet fighters, basic infrastructure exists for helicopters and smaller planes and can be quickly upgraded for more sophisticated aircraft. (Indeed, the Turkish army occasionally uses the Bamerni Airfield near Sarsang.) In addition, scattered throughout the region are concrete fortresses built by Saddam and now used by refugees, the United Nations, or peshmerga -- fortresses that could be easily secured for use by American rear-guard troops as armor and ammunition depots. While the United States can oust Saddam without Kurdish assistance, a ready made staging area in northern Iraq would lessen our dependence on unreliable Persian Gulf partners like Saudi Arabia -- which would make any military campaign a whole lot easier.
...
washingtoninstitute.org
-- Carl
P.S. "there you go again" does bring back memories. |
