Tension increasing on the border between Turkey and Iraq

Tensions are rising in and around Iraq. Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad, large cities in Iraq, are seeing daily ethnic cleansing. Basra is in virtual anarchy with the Brits packing to leave and hunkered down while the Madhi Army and Badr Corps fight for supremacy. Saudi Arabia is funding and arming the Sunni insurgency with the tacit approval of the Bush Administration, while the US Military engages them.
Turkey, concerned about chaos in Iraq and it's border with it and terrorism in it's Kurdish minority is building troops on the border and announced it's intention to do hot pursuit of PKK fighters across the Iraqi border. An incursion into Iraq by Turkey is just a matter of time.
Al Jazeera

Turkish troops have killed two Kurdish fighters in clashes in the southeast overnight, the regional governor's office said, bringing the number killed this week to at least 16. The separatists, meanwhile, attacked a Turkish military vehicle near the border with Iraq on Friday, injuring eight soldiers, the governor's added. The overnight clash, near the town of Tunceli, was part of a series of large-scale offensives that the military has launched against separatists who cross into Turkey from bases in northern Iraq to stage attacks.


Turkey's military has been deploying troops near its border with Iraq, but says it is a routine precaution against separatist infiltrations. The massing of troops, however, coincides with debate over whether to stage an incursion into Iraq to try to eradicate separatist bases there. Turkey's military chief said on Thursday that his army was prepared to attack Kurdish fighters in a cross-border offensive but such action would need to be order by the government.


Turkey last carried out a major incursion into Iraq to chase fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a decade ago. Separatist Kurdish fighters, taking advantage of a power vacuum in northern Iraq, have escalated attacks on Turkish targets. Turkey complains that the United States and Iraqi Kurds have done little to stop them. The United States opposes a Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq, fearing it could destabilise what is one of the most stable regions of the country.

The Daily Star

Turkey sent more tanks to its border with Iraq on Wednesday in a military build-up that is fueling US concern about a possible incursion into northern Iraq against Kurdish rebels.


The move came on the day that US forces handed over responsibility for security in Iraq's three Northern provinces to the Kurdish regional government.


A group of 20 tanks loaded on trucks emerged Wednesday from army barracks in Mardin near Syria and headed toward the Iraqi border in southeastern Turkey, already the scene of a major army offensive against rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).


"The PKK must be eliminated as a problem between Iraq and Turkey," Turkey's special envoy to Iraq, Oguz Celikkol, told CNN-Turk television on Wednesday after visiting Baghdad this week.


Asked whether Turkey could take unilateral action, Celikkol said: "Our expectation is that this issue is resolved before it comes to that point."

And as TomPaine.com aptly points out, it's all because of "crackpot realism", an ideological world view that has little connection with the real world, more connection with the biases and preferences of those in the Bush Administration who feel the need to act.

I’m talking about his concept of "crackpot realism," a tough-talking, no-nonsense, power-driven line of thought and action that invariably leads to disaster. Mills was particularly concerned with looming nuclear war, but his analysis holds fine in today’s non-nuclear (so far) conflict.


“In crackpot realism,” he wrote, “a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. ... So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.”


You might think he was reporting on the planning of the Iraq invasion when he wrote, “... They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines... In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what.”


[...]On May 23, John Edwards told the Council on Foreign Relations, "By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam."


First we framed the Middle East conflict as a war when it wasn’t, then we initiated a full-scale war to match our language. Then, we lost.


The response to Edwards was either to attack the messenger, as the RNC did, or to dismiss it as fantasy, as the right-wing blog world did. Hard-headed realists like Dick Cheney simply continued to push the war, and the Congress continued to fund it. Apparently, a majority of federal legislators fear being identified as traitors to a war that was crackpot from the get-go. Mills would understand.