No Fair, WE Get To Start The Next War

Not Turkey, I mean, who are they?

Turkey's ruling party decided Tuesday to seek parliamentary approval for an offensive against Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, a move that could open a new front in the Iraq war and disrupt one of that nation's few relatively peaceful areas.

The government did not say it had decided to launch such an attack, which could jeopardize Turkey's ties with the United States. The U.S. warned against sending troops across the border and urged Turkey to work with Iraq's government to quell the Turkish Kurd guerrillas.

Considering that the Iraqi government has little leverage in Kurdistan, and is also non-functional in general, I don't see how they can help any nation with anything.

This has been the great fear coming out of Iraq for some time. Allowing the Kurds to go basically autonomous invited this kind of cross-border terrorism, and Turkey honestly has a right to defend themselves. The problem is that this has the potential to spill out far beyond Turkey and provoke a wider war, with the involvement of all kinds of ethnic regions. And the US will be stuck right in the middle.

I don't really trust the diplomatic power of the White House to massage this into a good place, do you?

As a side note, maybe we can get Gordon Brown to work on this one, he seems to have figured out that Middle Easterners are tired of colonialism:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain told the House of Commons on Monday that the number of British troops in Iraq will be cut in half to 2,500 by next spring, and he left open the strong possibility that all British soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of 2008.

Brown said the reductions -- down from about 5,000 British soldiers now -- are possible because of the progress made in training Iraqi security forces. He described the situation in Basrah in southern Iraq, where the British troops are based, as "calmer."

See, foreign troops occupying your country has a tendency to inflame the local populace.

As for the next war in Turkey, a NATO ally by the way... well, that's a whole other kettle of fish.