By the way

It seems kind of pointless to even bring this up for a readership steeped in the conventional rhetoric of Cole and that ilk, but there is an Iraqi-nationalist view of the Turkey-Kurdistan crisis.

It goes like this: First of all, the PKK guerrilla activities are embarassing to the Kurdistan regional government, because it has been taking advantage of the US occupation and the weakness of the Baghdad government to nourish separatist aspirations, so this Turkish threat puts it on the horns of a dilemma. If it declares war on the PKK, it will seem to have abandoned its claim to Kurdish nationalism, but if it doesn't, and Turkey invades the north, then it loses prestige as an effective power. And the US is on the same page. For the US, Kurdistan is a model of stable separatism, and it does not want to see this model destroyed via a Turkish invasion. Hence its recent warnings to the Turkish government to put away the tanks and deal with the PKK issue via the usual back-channels.

When all is said and done, says Al-Quds al-Arabi in its editorial yesterday (Thursday Oct 11), the Turkish government will listen to the Americans and refrain from an invasion.

First of all [the editorialist writes], they aren't really interested in angering Washington. And secondly, Turkey has no real desire to mix it up in northern Iraq, because it understands quite well that such an involvement could lead to the exact opposite to the desired result, in the sense of failing to put an end to the Kurdish Workers Party in any definitive way, and instead leading to the worst possible result, namely turning Kurdistan into a platform for real and broader attacks in the future. [Turkey remembers that] the military attacks it launched in 1995 and 1997, using 120,000 Turkish troops, didn't succeed in putting an complete end to the PKK or its bases.

This is an analysis that points the way to a likely result, with important implications for the political development of the region. The editorialist puts it this way:

Most likely, the Turkish government has used these threats of an invasion to press the United States to get a move on, and pressure its allies in northern Iraq to prevent the PKK from operating from bases in its territory, in the same way that [the United States] did with some of the Iraqi tribes that it pressed to form so-called "awakening" forces to declare war on the AlQaeda organization and expel them by force from Sunni regions in Anbar and elsewhere.

The editorial is called "The cleverness of Erdogan and the American-Kurdish entanglement". Its starting-point is that this is another manifestation of America having turned Iraq into a failed state in which every interested party has its hand in the stew, militarily or politically or both, so whatever you think you saw in the "tribal awakening" movement, you could well end up seeing in a Kurdish version of it.