Turkish Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly to Authorize Cross-Border Incursions in Pursuit of Kurdish Terrorists

The Turkish Parliament has voted to authorize the government to launch cross-border incursions into Iraq to pursue PKK terrorists that find safe-haven in the Kurdish areas of Iraq.

The motion passed with 507 votes in favor and 19 opposed, and the passage brings Turkey one step closer to entering the conflagration in Iraq and gives the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan one year in which to launch offensives against Kurdish terrorists who carry out attacks in Turkey from safe havens in Iraq. “After so many incidents, we’re at a point that our patience has run out,” said Cemil Cicek, a government spokesman and a member of a special council on terrorism, speaking in the parliamentary chamber.

Bear in mind that over the last two decades, Kurdish terrorists have inflicted at least ten times the toll America experienced on September 11, 2001 on the Turks. Under US law, the PKK is a terrorist organization, and militias are not – but the U.S. military attacks the militias and not the PKK. (This coddling of the PKK undermines the seriousness of a so-called war-on-terror, to say the very least.)

Terrorist organizations are defined by a willingness to attack civilians in an effort to achieve political objectives via public pressure. The PKK routinely commits acts of terrorism against Turkey in order to promote their separatist agenda.

“We are making it very clear to Turkey that we don’t think it is in their interests to send troops into Iraq,” President Bush said at a news conference at the White House. “There’s a better way to deal with the issue than having the Turks send massive troops into the country.”

But Turkish officials say that recent diplomatic efforts have not succeeded. Turkey signed a security agreement with Iraq in September, but since then, more than two dozen Turks have been killed in rebel attacks, some of them civilians, and the government is under strong public pressure to act.

Turkey is out of patience and not at all interested in negotiating with the terrorists of the PKK. They are only interested in actions that would eliminate the PKK as a threat to the national security of the Turkish state.

This is going to be interesting, and the next few days will set the tone of Turkish-American relations for the remainder of the Bush administration. And keep in mind…The die for preemption was cast with the United States invasion of Iraq, and frankly, George ‘aWol’ Bush and his cast of cultural cretins have so degraded the status of the United States that their warnings and preening are about as effective as the Big Lebowski bellowing at the Dude “Get a job, Sir!”