IRAQ - Why Turkey Fears The Kurds; The Viability Of Iraq, Iran & Syria.

Turkey's Kemalists, including the powerful military, have never forgiven the US for calling Erdogan's neo-Islamist government as a model for good democracy in the Muslim world. And, in an article published on Oct. 16 by Asia Times Online, Spengler wrote: "Whether Turkey will fling away its new-found prosperity in a fit of national pique is hard to forecast, but that has been the way... Europe plunged into World War I in 1914 at the peak of its prosperity for similar reasons.

"News accounts link Turkey's threat to invade northern Iraq with outrage over a resolution before the US Congress recognizing that Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population in 1915... Why the Turks should take out their rancor at the US on the Kurds might seem anomalous until we consider that the issue of Armenian genocide has become a proxy for Turkey's future disposition toward the Kurds.

"...Turkey's tragedy is that the 11th Seljuk conquerors of the Anatolian peninsula became masters of a majority Christian population, a cradle of Greek culture for two millennia, in which the oldest and hardiest ethnicity, the Armenians, held fast to the Christian religion they adopted in 301 AD. Even after the forced conversion of Anatolia to Islam, the Ottoman Turks comprised a minority. Turkey...was ill-born to begin with, and the Armenian genocide touches upon a profound and well-justified insecurity in the Turkish national character.

"After the loss of the European part of its empire...(Balkans) in the midst of World War I, the Ottoman Empire feared for its hold on Anatolia itself, and decided to settle the long-unfinished business of conquest with a conscious act of genocide. But the Turks lacked the resources to do so in the midst of war, and Turkey's military leaders enlisted Kurdish tribes to do most of the actual killing in return for Armenian land. That is why Kurds dominate eastern Turkey, which used to be called 'Western Armenia'. The Armenian genocide, in short, gave rise to what today is Turkey's Kurdish problem...

"Far more threatening to Turkey than the resolution on Armenian genocide was the September 75-23 vote in the US Senate in favor of dividing Iraq into Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish zones. Republicans as well as Democrats supported this resolution, and with good reason.

"I have advocated the breakup of the Mesopotamian monster named 'Iraq' for years, and do not think this step can long be withheld. Kurdish nationhood will be the likely outcome of Iraq's breakup. Ethnic Kurds comprise a full fifth of Turkey's population, and the existence of a Kurdish nation will exercise a gravitational pull upon Kurds in Turkey. Turkey fears with good reason for its national integrity.

"If the American Congress accuses Turkey of genocide against the Armenians (as 22 countries already have), the Kurds will have a stronger argument for autonomy - despite the fact that the Kurds dominate eastern Turkey precisely because they slaughtered the Armenians...

"...Iraq never has been viable as a national entity, not when the British Colonial Office cobbled it together out of former Ottoman provinces in 1921, nor when Saddam Hussein ruled it by terror, and surely not under the present American occupation. As the US Senate has had the belated wisdom to recognize, it will break up.

"The Ottoman Empire never was viable - at its peak, half of its population was Christian - and its Anatolian rump, namely modern Turkey, may break up as well. Iran, the mini-empire of the Persians who comprise only half the population, may not hold together, nor may Syria, a witches' cauldron of ethnicities ruled by the brutal hand of the 'Alawite minority.

"America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning. But America's obsession with the surgical implant of democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with a welter of armed ethnicities. How should American strategy respond to violent expressions of existential despair by failing ethnicities?

"One approach was suggested by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Oct. 14: 'A starting point is [Carter national security adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski's new book, Second Chance, which argues that America's best hope is to align itself with...a 'global political awakening'. The former national security adviser explains: 'In today's restless world, America needs to identify with the quest for universal human dignity, a dignity that embodies both freedom and democracy but also implies respect for cultural diversity'.

"...What makes the appeal to 'cultural diversity' preposterous is that the self-expression of Seljuk Turk culture is the suppression of the Kurds, the self-expression of Sunni identity is to suppress the Shi'ites, and so on and so forth. Ethnic tantrums in response to perceived indignities are amplified by a sense of failure in the modern world which cannot be assuaged by American 'respect'. Live and let die, I propose instead.

"For the past seven years I have argued that the West cannot avoid perpetual conflict in the Middle East, and, rather than seeking stability, should steer the instability toward its own ends. Washington should forget about Turkish support in Iraq, allow the Mesopotamian entity to disintegrate into its constituent parts, while helping the Kurds maintain autonomy against Iraq. That would teach the Turks to bite the hand that feeds them.

"A pro-Western Kurdish state would strengthen Washington's hand throughout the region, with adumbrations in Syria and Iran as well as Turkey. One should, of course, take Turkish interests into account. To restore its national dignity, Turkey should be encouraged to incorporate the Turkish-speaking (Azeri) minority of Iran, and so forth.

"Turkey ultimately may concede territory to an independent Kurdistan, but more than replace it by annexing portions of Western Iran. One cannot accord respect to failing nationalities; one can only let them fight it out.

"Breaking up Iraq will not foster stability. On the contrary, it will make the old instabilities a permanent feature of the regional landscape. In the case of Iraq, the danger associated with partition stems from Iran's influence among Iraqi Shi'ites. But Iran, as noted, is just as vulnerable to ethnic disintegration as Iraq, and Washington should do its best to encourage this.

"If...the West employs force against Iran's nuclear weapons development capacity, the ensuing humiliation of the Tehran regime would provide an opportunity to undo some of the dirty work of World War I-era cartographers. All this is hypothetical, of course; the little men behind the desks in Washington do not have the stomach for it".