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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Cold, Turkey

You're harshing the President's war buzz.

Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who operate from bases there, Turkish security officials told The Associated Press.

Two senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the raid was limited in scope and that it did not constitute the kind of large incursion that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks.

"It is not a major offensive and the number of troops is not in the tens of thousands," one of the officials told the AP by telephone. The official is based in southeast Turkey, where the military has been battling separatist Kurdish rebels since they took up arms in 1984.


What's several thousands of troops crossing an international border amongst friends? I'm sure that the peshmerga will have no problem with it!

The news from Iraq lately may not have the 'zazz of mass casualties (though that's happening too), but it's been just as terrible. The Parliament is moving to assert themselves and take the lead on whether or not to kick out US troops. Graduates in Iraqi universities are fleeing in droves, robbing the country of its intellectual class. The idea that the military will spend 50 years in Iraq has not gone over well, to the extent that an ABC story laying the groundwork for a longer stay was abruptly removed from their site. In fact, the idea of staying in Iraq long-term flatly contradicts signed US law mandating that there will be no permanent bases in the country. A Sunni group signed a peace treaty with Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the common enemy, us. And the Maliki government may be just about done.

Iraq's government is teetering on the edge. Maliki's Cabinet is filled with officials who are deeply estranged from one another and more loyal to their parties than to the government as a whole. Some are jostling to unseat the prime minister. Few, if any, have accepted the basic premise of a government whose power is shared among each of Iraq's warring sects and ethnic groups.

Maliki is the man U.S. officials are counting on to bring Iraq's civil war under control, yet he seems unable to break the government's deadlock.

Even Maliki's top political advisor, Sadiq Rikabi, says he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs.

"We hope to achieve some of them, but solving the Iraqi problems and resolving the different challenges in the [next] three months would need a miracle," Rikabi said.


You can throw those benchmarks out the window. And add yet another foreign incursion into the mix in the North, and you can see that Iraq is simply combustible right now.

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