Hmmm....though I'm not shy about my political views, I was a bit reluctant to discuss this matter fully, but it seems like the time is appropriate.
This will assuredly not be welcome by some Armenian Americans who seem to want to talk to their real estate brokers in Glendale, Calif., about which part of Turkey they can have (I am refering to the more radical Armenian Americans_certainly not all of them). Nor will it welcome by many Kurdish people in America.
It will also be criticized by radical right-wing warmongers who do not want any country to interfere with the American effort to bring peace and liberty to Iraq (insert laugh track here) and by utopian left-wingers who feel there is always a diplomatic way to keep terrorists from attacking innocent civilians in all circumstances.
But, Turkey has been patient and the terrorist group, the Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK), has launched terrorist attacks in southeast Turkey against many innocent people, both Turkish and Kurdish alike from camps within northern Iraq time and time again.
At a recent bombing in the Turkish city of Diyarbakir, which has a significant Kurdish population, a bomb went off near a major hotel and it killed several school children_ many of whom were Kurdish.
I personally respect the Kurdish people, and I am disappointed that the PKK has come back from inactivity at a time when many Turkish people were trying to liberalize relations with Turkey's largest ethnic minority. The War in Iraq helped reignite this volcano as it gave militant Kurdish operatives in Turkey the view that they could somehow reunite with their brothers in northern Iraq.
It is truly a shame that a paranoid view developed in this country_ that by attacking Iraq, we as Americans could somehow liberate Iraqis in spite of enormous ethnic divisions while somehow preventing a terrorist attack (here?!) from a hostile, yet dormant dictator in Saddam Hussein who had not even attacked a neighboring country since his invasion of Kuwait in 1991.....not even his long-standing enemy Iran.
This painfully shows why we needed a president with foreign policy experience to replace Bill Clinton, who in my view generally handled this delicate part of the world quite well. George W. Bush was clearly not a person who had that background, and all of us as Americans and citizens of the world are paying the cost for that every single day........
I hope the Turkish incursions work, and that relative peace and stability is restored in southeast Turkey. I have had my disagreements with the Turkish government in the past, even though it is my late father's country, particularly the one that is presently in charge. But, they are undertaking an essential operation which even those of us of Turkish heritage who were a bit ambivalent about now fully support.
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