WAR DRUMMING CONTINUES

"The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public."
~ Report by the Commission on Freedom of the Press, quoted by Michael Parenti in Democracy for the Few.

The WaPo continues to beat the war drums and employs the same old mantras while doing so:

At least 30,000 people have been killed since the Kurdish rebels launched a campaign in 1984 for an independent Kurdish homeland in eastern Turkey. Clashes and bombs this week killed 14 Turkish soldiers and rebel fighters. The rebels also kidnapped eight residents of a Kurdish village in the east.

What's lacking here? Context. As always. Who were those 30,000 people? They were Kurds. Who killed them? NATO's second largest army, the TSK. There were 14 Turkish soldiers and HPG gerîlas killed last week? Wouldn't have happened if the Ankara regime had accepted the ceasefire and HPG's offer of a democratic resolution. Gerîlas kidnapping Kurdish villagers? Now it's odd that there are a lot of links in the article to sources, but this claim has no source. Maybe it happened; maybe it didn't. But I'd like to know just what kind of "villagers" these were supposed to be. If they were Village Guards, oh well.

Turkey accuses Iraq's Kurds -- who have built a nearly autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq under protection of the U.S. military since the early 1990s -- of giving the Kurdish rebels a haven and allowing them free passage back and forth across the Iraqi border into Turkey.

Really? You mean there was some kind of US protection for Southern Kurds during the 1990s? Then I wonder how the WaPo's propagandist would explain the Turkish military's bombing of Kurdish villages during the time of the "safe haven." I also wonder if the WaPo's propagandist has ever looked at a map of the region and comprehended what it means to conduct an operation in the Dersim area while enjoying a breezy "free passage back and forth across" the border. I'm going to guess that map-reading is not the WaPo's strong point.

It's fascinating that Zeyno Baran is quoted as such a know-it-all on the matter of a Turkish invasion, but that may have to do with her familiarity with the Turkish general staff. Baran was one of those present with members of the Turkish general staff at the Hudson Institute when the "beheading" of PKK was being planned.

"Both the civilian and military leadership believe we really have to do something about it, that this is getting ridiculous," Baran said.

No, what's ridiculous is the fact that the Ankara regime still has not done anything to come to terms with the population of its internal Kurdish colony. It failed to do anything during the long ceasefire that began in 1998. It failed to take advantage of the ceasefire after Erdoğan's visit to Amed in 2005. It is failing to take advantage of the current ceasefire. In other words, the Ankara regime has finely honed the state of being utterly ridiculous.

We can skip over the info on Leaky Novak's ratting out of Eric Edelman, because that's a game, and jump to this:

U.S. reluctance to hit the PKK has angered many in Turkey and damaged relations between the two NATO allies. A recent Pew public opinion survey showed only 9 percent of Turks viewed the United States favorably.

Gee, that wouldn't have anything to do with the massive propaganda system known as the Turkish media, would it? And who is it that controls what gets said or what gets omitted in Turkish media? That's right, America's good allies, the Paşas.

Oh, by the way, just for the record, the Ankara regime was getting cozy with the mullah regime back in 2003 after the US invasion of Iraq but before PKK ended it's long, unilateral ceasefire.

A Turk, Omer Taşpınar, at the Brookings Institution--another neocon bastion--is trying to link a Southern Kurdish response against PKK with the Kerkuk referendum, but that's going to be hard to do since some 1,000 HPG gerîlas are supposed to be integrated with the KDP's special forces. I don't know; maybe Brookings' financial backers paid Talpınar to suggest the quid pro quo on Kerkuk because those financial backers would benefit financially from more fighting, as they include many of the usual suspects--Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon. Other financial backers would no doubt love to control Kerkuk--ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco-Phillips, and Marathon Oil.

Finally, we have another former ambassador to Turkey--don't these guys ever die?--Morton Abramowitz, calling for the US to go fight the gerîlas. This is the same former ambassador who recently called for the US to use air power to destroy PKK. The thing about "air power" is that it kills a lot of civilians, something that rarely gets discussed in the mainstream media although it does, occasionaly, make it into foreign media. But, if a real discussion of the use of "air power" did make it into the mainstream media, it would become clear that "air power" is the coward's way of war.

Instead of threatening Baghdad or Southern Kurds for failure to "act" against Kurdish gerîlas, the Ankara regime should have taken advantage of the many opportunities the PKK has offered over the years and, especially, the recent opportunities. The West, particularly the EU, should have negotiated a political solution, such as the solution reached between the UK government and the IRA. This is what Öcalan tried to get Europe to do.

But for the warmongers of the MIC, peace just doesn't pay.