No nation has been a better friend or more reliable ally. Since the first days of the Cold War, Turkey hosted U.S. bases. And few nations are more crucial than this land bridge between Islam and the West, between the Middle East and Europe. Turkey is a crossroads of the world.
But the relationship has deteriorated.
The Turks opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing, rightly it turns out, that Saddam was no threat to the region. The Turks refused to allow us to use their territory for a northern front in the invasion of Iraq. Yet, today, Turkey is indispensable to Gen. Petraeus. Turkish drivers deliver munitions and supplies overland to Iraq. Turkish bases, like Incirlik, are used by the U.S. Air Force to support American troops in Iraq.
Ankara's reward: to have Congress vote to condemn Turkey's founding fathers as genocidal murderers.
Understandably, Turks are coming to see the alliance as a one-way street and themselves as forgotten friends. For we have failed to convince the Kurds we shelter in northern Iraq to rein in their terrorist cousins, who are using Iraqi territory as a privileged sanctuary from which to attack the Turkish army. Two dozen Turkish soldiers have been murdered in two separate attacks in recent weeks by the PKK.
When Pancho Villa raided Columbus, N.M., in 1916, and killed dozens of Americans, Wilson sent Gen. Pershing and an army of 12,000 into Mexico to run him down. Turks have the same right of hot pursuit, and they feel the same rage. For the Leninists of the PKK were responsible for a 15-year war in which some 37,000 Turks and Kurds died before 1999, when a truce was declared.
By reigniting a war of terror in Turkey and using bases in Iraq from which to attack, the PKK appears to be provoking a Turkish invasion of Iraq, which could deal a mortal blow to the U.S.-Turkish alliance and would be a disaster for U.S. policy in Iraq. Meanwhile, Iranian Kurds of a related terror group, PEJAK, have been conducting attacks inside Iran. Iran, like Turkey, has been responding with artillery fire into Iraq.
The United States needs to sit down with our Kurdish friends and explain that in return for U.S. protection, they are to rein in the PKK and PEJAK before they drag us into a wider war.
As for Ms. Pelosi & Co., they seem determined to prove the point that, no matter the failures of Bush & Co., the Democrats are unfit for command.