the date of that report is critical
It was announced yesterday.
the level of attrocities/threat associated with Al Qaida dwarfs that of the PPK (that I am aware of).
Not really. Sun Tzu mentioned a 20,000 deaths figure, which is not so different from the numbers I have seen.
Such a Turkish attack could give Sadam the pretext for yet another dirty war
The imminent US invasion could also give Saddam the pretext for launching all those chemical and biological weapons that US says he has on the neighbouring countries. I don't see that stopping the US, though.
This is what probably deterred Turkey
Not at all. What deterred Turkey was the certainty that the international community would not allow such an invasion based on "But they have a PKK camp!". That might change after the current US rhetoric for attacking Iraq, of course.
The US would probably receive a formal condemnation for its tactics. But the benefits from cementing an Al Qaida-Iraq connection would be well worth the criticism.
I beg to differ. Nothing is worth bringing down decades of understanding between sovereign countries re inacceptability of attacks without clear and present provocation (read: self-defense). The world will NOT be a safer place thereby.
Of course this is all based on the assumption that our intel is as good as was just claimed.
That's a BIG assumption. We heard two guys talk in Arabic who may have been talking into mikes in Pentagon, for all we know. We saw some trucks Powell said had weapons in them, which could have been transporting flour for all I know. Do you remember the "incubator babies" crap?
In 1990, the Iraqis invited Kuwait. A government-in-exile was established; it created an organization called "Citizens for a Free Kuwait." This organization hired Hill and Knowlton (the largest public relations firm in the US) to tell their story. At that time, few people -- including many in Congress, which much of the story would be told -- knew that Citizens for a Free Kuwait was using a professional public relations company to help them.
The challenge in this case was this: How to get the United States to feel sympathetic to the Kuwaiti government in exile. Kuwait was a monarchy, giving only limited rights to women (women could not vote, for instance). Some Americans were very critical of the Iraqi invasion but many were dubious that we should go to great lengths to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy to the throne.
Testimony before Congress. Hill and Knowlton arranged for a 15 year old girl to testify to a shocked Congressional Human Rights caucus that she had seen Iraqi-caused atrocities. She said that she had seen the Iraqis pull babies from incubators in hospitals and then left to die on the cold floor (when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait). It later turned out that she was a big fake: she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and had been in the United States at the time of the invasion. Further, there was no evidence at all of the incubator incident. But that story came out months later, long after the U.S. bombing of Iraq.
faculty.washington.edu |
