Turkish Tinderbox

One of the stories to watch this week is the confrontation building on the border between Turkey and the northern Iraqi region known as Kurdistan. The Turks have moved an invasion force into position for a possible attack into northern Iraq to bring a halt to attacks into Turkey by terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers Party known as the PKK. Reuters quoted Prime Minister Erdogan on Friday as saying Ankara was prepared to face any international criticism if his country launched an attack on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. It quoted Washington as fearing that such an offensive against Turkish Kurds – who want an independent homeland in southeastern Turkey – could destabilize what Reuters characterized as Iraq's most stable area.

No kidding. This is the context into which the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is sashaying with the resolution in respect of the Turkish massacre of Armenians. No doubt obtains about the killings of the Armenians perpetrated by the Young Turks in the heat of World War I. The killings were, and are, one of the worst crimes in the history of the world, a point that was marked at the time by American's envoy in Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Generations later the speaker seems bound and determined to push a resolution labeling the crime a genocide, a resolution that she told ABC News "This Week" in an interview Sunday has been made by 23 other countries. "Genocide still exists, and we saw it in Rwanda; we see it now in Darfur," she told ABC's "This Week" in an interview broadcast today.

Ankara has already recalled its ambassador to Washington in the wake of the decision of the House Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Congressman Thomas Lantos, himself a Holocaust survivor, to report out the resolution in respect of Armenia. The Bush administration and a bipartisan list of our former state secretaries are warning against the measure, precisely because they do not want to complicate an extraordinarily dangerous situation. This has left questions hanging, such as one our contributing editor, Hillel Halkin, asked two years ago, when he wrote: "How can we possibly expect the world powers to budget large sums and risk the lives of their soldiers in order to prevent or end genocidal barbarities when the most powerful of them will not even do something so paltry as acknowledge a genocide that took place at the start of the last century?"

We would not suggest that the facts of history be denied – or ducked. The crimes against the Armenians were not committed by the current Turkish republic, which came into being after the crime against the Armenians took place, but the Ottoman empire. This point was made in a column last week by Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations. The party in the debate that is really on the spot is Mrs. Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in the House. They are all too prepared to issue fine words in respect of a crime committed nearly a century ago by an empire that no longer exists. They proceed with indifference to the fact that we are bound by the North Atlantic Treaty to regard any attack on Turkey as an attack on the United States. But they shrink from the lists in the current war against Islamic extremism – a war in which new genocides are being planned by a merciless enemy.