Another landmark: this week a House committee approved a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of nearly a century ago – a grisly chapter in Turkish history when perhaps 
1.5 million Armenians were put to death. To speak of it in Turkey now is enough to get you in trouble with the law, much as it is problematic for Turkish Kurds to converse in their native tongue or make culturally significant apparel choices. (Irony alert: back in 1915, the Turks employed Kurds to do some of the killing of Armenians.) The Bush administration and many G.O.P. congressmen have raised the alarm that such a declaration at this time will threaten the safety of our troops in Iraq… not that safety appears to be anything like a central concern, since they were the ones who sent them over there in the first place. Still, they suggest (with uncharacteristic accuracy) that the Turks will be pissed off about this resolution and that it may result in interrupted supply lines via Iraq’s all-important northern frontier. Representatives of the Turkish government have pointed out that, because their country is a democracy, they will have to respond to the will of the people if there is a broad public outcry.
What is worth remembering, even if many of us choose not to, is that the Turkish people are already well and truly pissed off at us over the Iraq war, and that they were against it so overwhelmingly in 2003 that Bush could not use Turkey as an invasion route. (I recall that great defender of democracy Paul Wolfowitz suggesting that the Turkish military should override the public sentiment at that point.) It’s hard to imagine that outrage over the Armenian genocide resolution would make the Turks dislike us all that much more. I suspect an even more serious sticking point for them is the close U.S. alliance with Iraqi Kurds, who remain their current obsession. The Turkish government prosecuted a murderous campaign against its own Kurdish population during the 1990s, and the conflict is still smoldering today. Cross border incursions by the Turkish military into northern Iraq have taken place since the U.S. occupation began and will likely continue, particularly if Iraqi Kurds move toward greater autonomy (as Joe Biden and Sam Brownback seem to agree they should). Sure, the past is important to the Turks, but the present is positively urgent.
My own guess (for what it’s worth) is that if there were a serious dust-up between Turkey and Iraq’s Kurds, Washington would throw the Kurds over the side as great powers have for many decades. In any case, it does strike me as painfully ironic that Congress is calling the Turks out for the Armenian genocide of 1915 when they cannot bring themselves to stop the killing spree that our own country is engaged in right now in Iraq. It’s not as if the numbers of people killed are all that different – if the Johns Hopkins study is as close to the truth as many think it is, the total may be around a million by now. So our cry of anguish for murdered Armenian families rings a little hollow, frankly. For fuck’s sake, we can’t even own up to the millions killed during our savage attack on Indochina back in the 60s and 70s, when perhaps seven times as much explosives were dropped on that sorry region as on every nation combined during World War II. Have we a moral leg to stand on here?
Read the news. Just this week, our military announced that, along with 15 “al Qaeda” operatives, they killed 15 civilians in a single incident, 9 of them children. If we can’t stop that, hang the resolutions.
luv u,
jp
As ever, it is only funny because it tells the truth.