Wednesday, June 02, 2004
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Slate's Kurdish Sell-out WatchA couple of weeks after Fred Kaplan's Kurdistan-Turkish invasion remark (see May 5th below), Slate finally began to realize that Turkey wasn't as deluded as pundits have claimed (see the Torque for alternative commentary). The problem is this has been apparent since the Irbil bombings at the beginning of the year. At that point it was also reported that the terror brought the two parties closer together. The Iraqi Kurds had previously mantained that Turkey has only been interested in them in light of the fight against the PKK separatists. Otherwise, Ankara ignored them. This was a valid complaint. The Turkish Daily News also reported that a "senior Kurdish official" admitted that they appreciated Turkey's consistent frankness, saying that Ankara had always told them what they liked or didn't like in a direct manner. This seemed like a slight directed at the US at the time. As good as the cooling down of Iraqi Kurd and Turkish relations look, the unpleasant truth is that these relations are dependent on increasing terror attacks against Iraqi Kurds. Such a basis for an improvement in relations is not to be cheered.
What's also clear is that more and more news organisations are losing the ability to take the pulse of the countries and populations that are involved in the war on you-know-what. It's almost as if they're taking what droplets of information they have and extrapolating it into luscious waterfalls.
