Turkey Threatens to Invade Iraq, Again

Following the recent re-election of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan , (dubbed by the Jerusalem Post as being "Turkey's Boring Elections"), it was thought that perhaps all of his saber-rattling and military buildup of a reported 140,000 troops along Iraq's northern border (which the US military denied, of course) lining up to go after the PKK in that country might subside - that Erdogan had just used the macho military stance as an election ploy. That assumption, however, may have proven to be a huge misjudgment (and who knows? It may have already started).

(Sidebar: Let's just take note of what WH press sockpuppet Tony Snow had to say about that in early July:

In Washington, White House spokesman Tony Snow said the US shared Turkey's concerns but that it was "important, we think, to recognise the territorial sovereignty of Iraq".

Laugh. I'll wait.)

Alrighty then...on we go...

According to the Washington Post:

CAIRO -- Turkish leaders this week will give visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki what Turkish military commanders and analysts said could be a final warning to act against anti-Turkey Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq -- or to stand by while Turkish forces go after the rebels themselves, risking a new front in Iraq's war.

Leaders of Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party appear to be in agreement with Turkey's generals that the time has come to move against the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by its Kurdish initials, PKK, in its bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, former generals and a military expert close to the Turkish military's general staff said.
[...]
Turkey accuses Iraq's Kurds -- who have built a nearly autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq under protection of the U.S. military since the early 1990s -- of giving the Kurdish rebels a haven and allowing them free passage back and forth across the Iraqi border into Turkey.

And if that sounds exactly like the rhetoric the US is using about going after al Qaeda in northern Pakistan, whether Pakistan agrees or not, it's because it is.

As the WaPo article notes:

Robert D. Novak wrote in a syndicated column that appeared July 30 in The Washington Post that Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and now an undersecretary of defense policy, had secretly briefed U.S. lawmakers that the United States was planning a covert action with the Turkish army against the PKK in northern Iraq. Edelman added that "the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied," according to Novak.

The leak of the alleged plans for a U.S.-Turkish operation makes a fully covert mission now impossible, noted Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence-analysis agency based in Austin.

But it was one of those "handy" leaks for the US government as well:

With the alleged planning made public, "the United States is betting that the Iraqi Kurdish leadership will succumb to pressure to act against the PKK itself, and thus preclude the need for a major Turkish incursion -- which would be an extremely messy situation considering the bloody result of having two NATO allies, PKK rebels and battle-hardened pesh merga forces fighting it out in mountainous terrain," the group wrote, using the Kurdish term for fighters.

And to complicate matters:

Iran, also combating Kurdish rebels on its soil, has used the situation to court an alliance with Turkey. Last month, the two countries signed a major gas line proposal, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited Maliki to the Turkish capital, after Erdogan's party triumphed in the elections. The prime minister accompanied his invitation with a new public warning that Turkey's military would strike the PKK in northern Iraq if the United States and their Iraqi allies failed to do so. Maliki is due in Ankara on Tuesday.

So, if US forces joined in the fight against the PKK, they'd ironically be on the same side as the Iranians. Maybe there was a bit more to the meeting on Monday between the US ambassador and his Iranian counterpart than we know about.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Kurdish party passed its own oil law on Monday (which invites foreign-based oil companies in to pillage for profit) as a signal to al Maliki's government that it will proceed regardless of his parliamentary problems. Nothing like creating even more tension in Iraq:

While the Kurds view their petroleum law as a mark of their self-governing powers, other Iraqi observers say the Kurdish parliament's actions today could further inflame tensions with Iraq's Shiite and Sunni populations.

"Oil is politics in Iraq and I think this will fuel to the fire and upset more people in Baghdad," said former Iraqi oil minister Issam Al-Chalabi, who is now an independent energy consultant. "I think the Kurds should have waited to get a federal deal first before passing their own oil law."

The Guardian notes:

The operations at Taq Taq and Tawke are based on controversial production-sharing agreements signed with the Kurdistan regional government, under which the private companies get between 10%-20% of the profit. The rest goes into government hands.

Such production-sharing agreements are anathema to much of Iraq's oil establishment, as well as to the country's oil unions. The unions, which are strongest in the southern oilfields around Basra, have also rounded on the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein Shahristani, threatening to disrupt production and exports if foreign oil companies are granted too much access to Iraqi oil. In response, Mr Shahristani has ordered his ministry's agencies and departments not to deal with the unions.

And those union members have been very busy protesting and striking , despite the violence on the streets all around them.

Let's face it: war for oil is a messy business.

Oh...and let's throw Karzai saying nice things about Iran in the mix just to show how absolutely screwed the clueless, incompetent neocons really are.

This war won't be over for a very long time.