Comments on: Turkish Delight?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:56:33 +0000

John, for reasons I won’t go into, even after all of the years I’ve been out of the military, Turkey has been a very reliable ally, especially during the Cold War. They fought with the US in Korea and provided us with bases and transit when those were not popular actions in their country.

There were ways of doing this diplomatically, but no one tried.

By: John A.

John A. — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:38:13 +0000

We should not allow Turkey to blackmail American foreign policy using threats.

Maybe they aren’t as close allies as they pretend to be.

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:20:14 +0000

Jack ,you are absolutely right.
I came to this country 14 years ago from Azerbaijan. Running from Armenian started war (Karabax-that is where I am orijinally from) against my country that has left thousands of azerbaijanies,also armenians dead. The attacks of russian backed armenian forces killed more than 3 thousand people just in one town -Xojali-mostly children,elderly and women. There is a documentary of those events. I will never forget tragedy of those days -something that happened 14 YEARS ago,but not a century. I have witnessed armenian millitants’ barberian crimes. I cannot even describe the pain and dissapointment that this resolution has caused to millions of Azerbaijanies who think of America as their friend.

By: whig

whig — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:11:28 +0000

Words.

I think this is a good resolution. Genocide is genocide, and would that we’d recognize our own crimes and apologize for them.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:29:56 +0000

Our congressclowns listen to us, Hipparchia – surely you jest. I’m surprised they still manage to find the state.

Fallenmonk, the ham-handed way they tried to get Turkey involved in Iraq with a bribe, was beyond stupid. Of course there had to be some financial consideration, but talking openly about a wad of cash for a specific policy makes anyone who advocates for the policy look corrupt, even if they aren’t.

Oh, yes, Jack, this was a gift to the Hedgemony, a custom built excuse. Now, when Turkey invades northern Iraq, it is the fault of Congress.

John, all Orthodox Christian communities hate the Turks, all ethnics groups in the Balkans, Arabs – everyone who lived under the Ottoman Empire. Sephardic Jews are the only group that likes them, based on their acceptance after being expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century. There’s a large Turkish community in western New York, but that’s about it. The suffer from being the object of Lord Byron’s hate.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:00:42 +0000

Michael, you can’t disagree with me, because I’m not taking a position on the question. I lived in California, so I’ve been bombarded by this issue, the same way the Cubans in Miami bombard everyone on Castro.

Based only on numbers killed and displaced, the US should be talking about American genocide in Iraq. The American government is using the same excuse the Turks use – it is a war, and people die in wars.

The US should wait until it has a short period of sanity before it starts making moral judgments about other countries. In the meantime, historians can do their jobs and present a clearer view of what happened without political embellishment.

The Turks won’t come clean; the Japanese won’t come clean; the US won’t come clean; and the list continues.

Frankly a declaration by a Congress that got its knickers in a wad over a MoveOn ad, doesn’t have much credibility.

By: John B.

John B. — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:29:09 +0000

One part of the story you overlook is the cheap, domestic political motive House members have in going on record with resolutions about "the history of another country." Armenians and Kurds and Greeks and a lot of other ethnically sensitive Mediterraneans have descendants and relatives in the U.S. Turks? Not so much -- thanks mostly to our own sordid history of racialist immigration policies.The ONLY reason for Congress to entertain such a resolution is so Members can truckle with voters in their local districts. Another omission is the additional threat this represents to NATO. As it is, the Greeks in Greece hate the Turks in Turkey, and vice versa. Both nations belong to NATO. Neither misses the opportunity to tweak the other's nose when it suits their own domestic political agenda. Every time they do it, though, NATO commanders have to work like bees to calm everybody down and put away those F-16's we sold to both sides. It's all smoke and mirrors, designed to distract the people with hot-button irrelevancies and make us forget why we really elected men and women to Congress and what we expected them to do.

By: Jack K.

Jack K. — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:33:17 +0000

…listening to this story this morning, I was mulling over the oddity of the Foreign Affairs committee’s timing and the clear indication that this was – as you put it – one of Turkey’s “hot buttons”. What struck me most profoundly, though, was the suspicion that this effort in the House to hang the ‘genocide’ tag on Turkey (with pretty good odds of a negative reaction) would give Bush a new pile of chips in the Iraq Texas Hold ‘Em game. If Turkey does start denying basing, operational, and transit rights to the US in response to the resolution, somewhere down the road Bushco and the rest of the war supporters will have the space to claim that this action by a Democratic Congress is what lost the war…

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:29:27 +0000

I’m afraid I can’t agree with your take on this, Bryan. Turkey is overreacting to the acknowledgement of what they and everyone else in the world has long known to be the truth. The Turks seem to feel that as long as nobody uses the “G-word” about the Armenian massacre, it never happened and they don’t have to acknowledge even a tenuous responsibility for it. The trouble is, everyone knows that it did happen, and that the Turks were responsible. Acknowledge that and move on–and demonstrate that the Turkey of today is not the same as the Ottoman Empire of nearly a century ago. (That, I would venture to guess, is the hard part–a lot of the same mechanisms are still operating in Turkey, and that makes them look bad now, as opposed to in the past.)

However, as one of the Democrats on the committee observed during the debate on the resolution yesterday, denial of genocide isn’t just the last stage of genocide: it’s the first stage of the next genocide. He went on to quote Hitler appropriately: when he was trying to convince his followers that they could, indeed, get away with what they were planning, Hitler famously observed “Who now remembers what happened to the Armenians?” This resolution comes at least sixty years too late.

By: Fallenmonk

Fallenmonk — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:22:04 +0000

You just have to wonder how much of the dynamics and history of the Middle East Bush and his sycophants understand. From the outside it sure looks like they are totally clueless.