With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago?

Make no mistake about it, that massacre of hundreds of thousands -- perhaps a million or more -- Armenians was one of the worst atrocities in all of history.

As with the later Holocaust against the Jews, it was not considered sufficient to kill innocent victims. They were first put through soul-scarring dehumanization in whatever sadistic ways occurred to those who carried out these atrocities.

Historians need to make us aware of such things. But why are politicians suddenly trying to pass Congressional resolutions about these events, long after all those involved are dead and after the Ottoman Empire in which all these things happened no longer exists?

The short answer is irresponsible politics.

People of Armenian ancestry in the United States and around the world are justifiably outraged at what happened in the Ottoman Empire -- and at subsequent governments in Turkey which have refused to acknowledge or accept historical responsibility for the mass atrocities that took place on their soil.

But the sudden interest of Congressional Democrats in this issue goes beyond trying to pick up some votes.

They want a resolution to condemn what happened as "genocide" -- a word that provokes instant anger among today's Turks, since genocide means a deliberate government policy aimed at exterminating a whole people, as distinguished from horrors growing out of a widespread breakdown of law and order in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

These are issues of historical facts and semantics best left to scholars rather than politicians.

If Congress has gone nearly a century without passing a resolution accusing the Turks of genocide, why now, in the midst of the Iraq war?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this resolution is just the latest in a series of Congressional efforts to sabotage the conduct of that war.

Large numbers of American troops and vast amounts of military equipment go to Iraq through Turkey, one of the few nations in the Islamic Middle East that has long been an American ally. Continued...