Turkey preparing to invade Kurdistan?

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Turkey has been mak­ing noises that the Iraqi Kurds should not get too hope­ful about estab­lish­ing a quasi-independent entity in the three gov­er­nates they con­trol in north­ern Iraq. Now, it looks like Turkey is ready to back up their words with force. (At least they’re con­sis­tent.) How­ever, there is an elec­tion com­ing up in Turkey, so the pos­si­bil­ity that this is all fod­der for domes­tic con­stituen­cies can­not be ruled out.
On the they-really-mean-it side of the equa­tion, Ara​bic​News​.com is report­ing that Turk­ish deputy prime min­is­ter Doulat Bah­jali said that his coun­try must recon­sider its stance regard­ing north­ern Iraq. Since 1991 when it got dragged into Oper­a­tion Pro­vide Com­fort (the allied estab­lish­ment of the north­ern no-fly zone to pro­tect Kur­dish refugees from the 1990 – 91 Gulf War,) Turky has gone back and forth in its rela­tions with the PUK and KDP. At times the rela­tion­ship was warm enough that Barzani and Tal­a­bani, the lead­ers of the respec­tive par­ties, trav­eled under Turk­ish diplo­matic pass­ports.
That has appar­ently ended with final­ity after the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment con­vened its par­lia­ment in Octo­ber and intro­duced a pro­posal for a fed­eral repub­lic of Iraq with a Kur­dish entity in the north and with Kirkuk as its cap­i­tal. Kirkuk, rich in oil and his­tory is home to Kurds, Arabs, Assyr­i­ans and Turkomen, to whose defense Bah­jali is leap­ing.
“The pres­sures which are imposed on the Turkomen under Sad­dam Hus­sein were great and that they are at the mean­time exposed to a new threat by the two Kur­dish lead­ers Masoud al-Barazani and Jalal al-Talabani tar­get­ing their cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Arbil,” Ara​bic​News​.com says. (Ed. I changed some spellings of towns in this quote.)
This backs up the it’s-all-politics argu­ment, since the Turkomen are a nat­ural ally of Bahjali’s National Move­ment Party, and bash­ing the Kurds is always a sure­fire way to rally the nation­al­ist faith­ful. How­ever, Turk­ish defense min­is­ter Sbah Eddin Oglo said Oct. 14 that Turkey intends to estab­lish ‘a secu­rity belt’ in north­ern Iraq and that intel­li­gence agen­cies have reported that Turkey has increased its troop strength in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan from 4,000 to 10,000 troops.
All of this must be dri­ving the United States crazy. The last thing it needs is a Kurdish-Turkish dis­pute in north­ern Iraq just when it’s try­ing to get its ducks in a row should shoot­ing start. And this is exactly the kind of chaos var­i­ous pun­dits have pre­dicted would hap­pen if Sad­dam is removed and regional rival­ries are allowed to flare. But wasn’t that sup­posed to hap­pen after a war?
Keep watch­ing the Turks. They hold the key to all of this.

Saddam recalls children of diplomats

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In a trou­bling piece in the Wash­ing­ton Times, Sad­dam has allegedly demanded that the chil­dren of Iraqi diplo­mats return to Iraq. U.S. intel­li­gence believes this is an attempt to pre­vent defec­tions of high-ranking envoys.
If this is true, and the Times piece says that some diplo­mats haven’t got­ten the mes­sage so it might not be, this is another sign that Sad­dam is increas­ingly ner­vous over the sur­vival of his regime in the face of pres­sure from the United States. Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing the sit­u­a­tion, today at the United Nations, the U.S. pushed its own res­o­lu­tion on Iraq for­ward, with France indi­cat­ing a will­ing­ness to nego­ti­ate. This leaves Rus­sia as the main hold­out on tough new lan­guage against Iraq, and I’ve been told Amer­ica is work­ing out a deal to set­tle Iraq’s $8 bil­lion debt to Rus­sia in exchange for the Bear’s sup­port. Rus­sia is drag­ging its feet not because of loy­alty to an old cus­tomer, but because it’s hold­ing out for bet­ter terms from the United States. That wiley Putin!
So Sad­dam is feel­ing the heat, but what the out­come of this mul­ti­level chess game is, as yet, hard to predict.

Saddam’s rule showing signs of cracking?

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John Burns has another dyna­mite story from Iraq, detail­ing how Saddam’s free­ing of thou­sands of pris­on­ers from his net­work of gulags may have back­fired.
A street protests erupted and didn’t imme­di­ately dis­perse. Moth­ers demanded an account­ing of their sons from gov­ern­ment offi­cials. While calm was restored, often roughly, the ques­tion I’ve asked my peo­ple over there is whether this is the crack that might bring the whole regime down, but I’ve not yet heard from them.
The protests are unprece­dented and Wamid Nadhmi, a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity called them “very, very impor­tant and unusual” in the Wash­ing­ton Post (How did the Post get sources at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity, I won­der?) Other diplo­mats cau­tion that this might be an iso­lated event, how­ever.
I won­der. Nadhmi prof­fered a tan­ta­liz­ing idea that the protests weren’t spon­ta­neous. “To have a demon­stra­tion means there must be some sort of orga­ni­za­tions behind it,” he is quoted as say­ing.
We know there is an Iraqi resis­tance oper­at­ing out­side of the coun­try, but inside it? It’s pos­si­ble, and most likely prob­a­ble, that the United States is help­ing out local under­ground resis­tance move­ments. Could this have been their work?

Regime change equals “a regime that has changed.” Huh?

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In a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day Pres­i­dent Bush made a cryp­tic com­ment that if Sad­dam Hus­sein com­plies with the UNSC res­o­lu­tions, then that means “the regime has changed.” He also sig­naled a new­found respect for diplo­macy.

“We’ve tried diplo­macy,” Mr. Bush said when asked about the issue today. “We’re try­ing it one more time. I believe the free world, if we make up our mind to, can dis­arm this man peace­fully.“
At the same time he said, “The stated pol­icy of our gov­ern­ment, the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion and this admin­is­tra­tion, is regime change — because we don’t believe he is going to change.“
…
“How­ever, if he were to meet all the con­di­tions of the United Nations, the con­di­tions that I’ve described very clearly in terms that every­body can under­stand, that in itself will sig­nal the regime has changed.“
Those were the last words of the brief Oval Office appear­ance, and aides shooed reporters out before they could ask follow-up questions.

At the same time that the U.S. is try­ing diplo­macy “one more time,” it is grow­ing increas­ingly impa­tient with the Secu­rity Coun­cil on res­o­lu­tions autho­riz­ing force against Iraq if — when? — it fails to meet demands.
I don’t know about you, but I’m thor­oughly con­fused by all of this.
Which may be the point. A lit­tle ambi­gu­ity, some might call it mad­ness, in for­eign affairs can some­times be a good thing. Nixon was said to be very good at this, con­vinc­ing the Rus­sians and the Chi­nese that he was so damn crazy he might just blow the hell out of them. But this is a dif­fer­ent time and shouldn’t the Amer­i­can peo­ple be kinda, you know, informed every once in a while? See­ing as we’re a democ­racy ‘n’ stuff.
Or it may be that Bush keeps rais­ing the hur­dles for Sad­dam so that the dic­ta­tor is bound to fail. Open up the coun­try to weapon inspec­tors? Got it. Release some pris­on­ers? Yup. Now, I don’t want to feel sym­pa­thetic for Sad­dam Husein. I don’t want to think, “Poor guy, he can’t win for los­ing,” but Bush’s drum­beat of war booms steadily, and the pol­icy toward Iraq shows the same inflex­i­bil­ity and dou­bletalk that char­ac­ter­ized Bush’s eco­nomic pol­icy (which, accord­ing to The Onion, involves over­throw­ing Sad­dam.)

HADEP Deputy Chairman: “This is democracy in Turkey”

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While in Ankara, Aykut and I spent a day try­ing to find the local offices of var­i­ous Iraqi and Kur­dish oppo­si­tion groups includ­ing the KDP and PUK. We were look­ing for var­i­ous offi­cials who might be able to help me when I went to Diyarbakir in the south­east and on to Iraq, but we weren’t hav­ing much luck, and kept dri­ving through twisty neigh­bor­hoods hop­ing the cops weren’t fol­low­ing us.

At one point, the com­edy descended into farce, as we drove into a mil­i­tary res­i­dence area look­ing for the embassies. We found the embassies, but the PUK still eluded us. We drove past the Jor­dan­ian, Syr­ian and Saudi Embassies, but finally stopped out­side the the United Arab Emi­rates while Aykut jumped out of the car and asked a bored-looking secu­rity guard for directions.

“Excuse me, where are the offices for the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan?” Akyut asked while I shrunk into my seat and tried to look invisible.

The guard, a Turk and appar­ently no friend of Iraqi Kurds, looked him up and down, looked me up and down, and then motioned off down the road.

Aykut dropped his bulk into the dri­vers’ seat and smiled at me.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

He apol­o­gized, but at least the guard’s direc­tions were good. We finally found the rather sad look­ing house that was the office for the PUK. No one was around except for a plain­clothes guy who watched us closely and smoked a cig­a­rette like a fugi­tive. He made me ner­vous, so we left to go meet A. Turan Demir, the deputy chair­man of HADEP, the Kur­dish party in Turkey. The tran­script — from Aykut’s translation — follows:

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