The Common Ills: Hejira

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Hejira

Call it the official denial:

Even more disturbing:

Brett McGurk ‏@brett_mcgurk Jul 25

We have strongly condemned the #PKK’s terrorist attacks in #Turkey and we fully respect our ally Turkey’s right to self-defense. 2/5

431 retweets 161 favorites

So the attacks do come with the approval of the White House?

Great.

Barack is King F**k Up.

This is not the time for Turkey to be attacking the PKK.

For those who paid attention, not Brett McGurk who spent all of his time in Iraq looking for somewhere to shove his dirty dick, when Turkey pulled these attacks before, they enraged Iraq.

Not just the Kurds, the entire country.

It was so bad that Nouri al-Maliki, who had approved the bombings, had to then decry them publicly.

There was so much outrage over Turkey bombing Iraq -- any part of Iraq -- that Nouri had to disown the Turkish war planes bombing northern Iraq.

Turkish war planes continued bombing northern Iraq today.

Tian Shaohui (Xinhua) observes, "Critics, including opposition politicians, have accused President Tayyip Erdogan of trying to use the campaign against the Islamic State as an excuse to crack down on Kurds."

‏@BenjaminNorton

The US invasion of Iraq, like its support for Turkey's bombing of the PKK, wasn't an "error"; it's typical US policy. http://ind.pn/1HT3eLf

9 retweets 5 favorites

Patrick Cockburn is the author of the Independent report noted above which includes:

But it came as the US was accused by Kurds of tolerating a renewed Turkish government assault on its Kurdish minority as the price for permission for US aircraft to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base against Isis jihadists for the first time.
“The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” said Kamran Karadaghi, an Iraqi Kurdish commentator and former chief of staff to the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey involved on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”
The US denies giving the go-ahead for Turkish attacks on the PKK in return for American use of Turkish air bases, or of any link with Turkish action against Isis fighters and volunteers, who were previously able to move fairly freely across Turkey’s 550-mile border with Syria.
But whatever America was hoping for, initial signs are that the Turkish government may be more interested in moving against the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq than it is in attacking Isis. Ankara has previously said that it considers both the PKK and Isis to be “terrorists”.

He goes on to note the suppression this weekend in Turkey of protesters which I guess also pleases the White House?

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4497.

The following community sites -- plus Jody Watley -- updated: