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i just read all the articles on this.
if turkey strikes, does that make them a member of the axis of evil?
cause, you know, anyone thats against us must accept the label of "terrorist".
Turkey Says Its Troops Can Cross Iraq Border
By SEBNEM ARSU
Published: October 10, 2007
ISTANBUL, Oct. 9 — Turkey took a step toward cross-border military action in Iraq today, as a council of the country’s top political and military leaders issued a statement today allowing troops to cross to eliminate separatist Kurdish rebel camps in the mountainous northern region.
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Burhan Ozbilici/Associated Press
Turkey’s move toward military action comes in the face of strong opposition by the United States, which is anxious to maintain peace in that area, one of the rare regions of stability in conflict-torn Iraq.
All government offices and ins utions have been ordered “to take all economic and political measures, including cross-border operations when necessary, in order to end the existence of the terror organization in a neighboring country,” said the statement, which was released by the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office.
After the meeting, Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul told the semi-official Anatolian News Agency said that the parliamentary approval normally needed for cross-border movement of troops was not needed for special units’ in hot pursuit of Kurdish separatist rebels, who have launched a recent series of hit-and-run attacks from bases in northern Iraqi mountains. A landmine that exploded Sunday in southeastern Sirnak Province, about 15 miles from the Iraq border, killed 13 soldiers, one of the highest death tolls in recent years from attacks by the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.
Some analysts said that give the complicated relations among Turkey, Iraq and the United States, Turkey would continue to consider military action a last resort....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/wo.../10turkey.html
Hopefully that last sentence is true.
i just read all the articles on this.
if turkey strikes, does that make them a member of the axis of evil?
cause, you know, anyone thats against us must accept the label of "terrorist".
"pre-emptive warfare" isn't so great when it's some other country's foreign policy, huh?
I don't think it is pre-emptive. Some Turkish Kurds are in based in Kurdistan, raiding over the border, at least according to the story.
MCFLYYYY
Every bozo knows preemptive strikes are only morally justifiable if USA or Israel uses them.
Pakistan is looking wonderful, too
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250 Dead in 4 Days of Pakistan Clashes
By Imtiaz Ali and Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; 3:48 PM
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 9 -- Up to 250 people, including at least 45 soldiers, have been killed in fierce fighting in northwestern Pakistan over the past four days, with Pakistani military jets bombing suspected insurgent hide-outs amid tough resistance, officials and residents said Tuesday.
The military said that at least 150 insurgents had been killed in the battles in North Waziristan, a remote tribal region that al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters have used as a base for operations.
The most intense clashes have come in the town of Mir Ali, where the military has deployed heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and fighter jets to try to oust insurgents who have been waging an aggressive campaign against the Pakistani army. The use of fighter jets is unusual, but government officials said it was necessary given the strength of the firepower they were facing from the insurgents.
"The resistance from local Taliban is tougher than what the government usually expects," conceded a tribal affairs official in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier province. "Such tough resistance also gives credence to speculation that al-Qaeda-trained foreign fighters might be backing these local Taliban"
The fighting, which began late Saturday with an insurgent strike on a military convoy, has taken a heavy toll on civilians. There were reports Tuesday of large numbers of casualties among residents caught in the crossfire. Civilians in some villagers used mosque loudspeakers to appeal to both sides not to target homes or shopping areas.
Meanwhile, a full-scale exodus was underway for those who were able to leave.
Mohammad Zarin, 33, made it from Mir Ali to the nearby town of Bannu Tuesday with his mother, wife, three children, sister-in-law, three nephews and two nieces.
"It was a hard decision to leave our home in Mir Ali. But life is more precious than material things," Zarin said by phone. "We decided to leave our home for the sake of our children."
Zarin said his older brother had stayed behind to look after the family's home.
"The first priority of every family is to take their women and children to a safer place, and leave one person at home to take care of the household," he said.
For others, it was too late.
"I have seen people digging graves for the dead bodies," said Malik Mumtaz, a tribal elder from North Waziristan. "Others are busy rushing their injured to the nearby hospitals."
He said that many of those wounded had to be taken to hospitals in Bannu or Peshawar because electricity had been cut in North Waziristan and the hospitals were out of medicine.
Military officials conceded the heavy fighting may have resulted in civilian casualties, though they would not give specifics.
Mumtaz said two Pakistani army jets had bombed the village of Aipi at around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, killing about 50 tribesmen.
That account was impossible to verify. Waziristan has become inaccessible even to most Pakistanis from outside the area, and aid groups long ago had to shutter their operations there. The few local journalists who are able to report from the region do so covertly.
Rising militancy in the tribal areas has been a major concern for the United States. Tuesday's fighting came as the White House released a report that again pointed to Pakistan's tribal belt as an operational headquarters for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.
The problem was only exacerbated, the White House has said, by a 2006 peace deal in North Waziristan that required the Pakistani military to pull back to its barracks. The deal fell apart this summer, but many critics contend that Pakistan is now suffering the consequences of a policy that allowed extremist groups to rebuild.
"I have said repeatedly that the peace agreement with the tribals in Pakistan failed Pakistan and it failed us," Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser, said in a conference call with reporters. "And obviously, that's one of the fundamental things that al-Qaeda took advantage of to reestablish a safe haven in the tribal areas."
Townsend refrained from directly criticizing embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Instead, she emphasized the U.S. commitment to working with his government. "We have enjoyed some of our biggest successes with our allies in Pakistan," Townsend said, noting the arrest by Pakistani authorities of several key al-Qaeda operatives in recent years.
Musharraf's cooperation with the United States on counter-terrorism efforts has not been popular in Pakistan.
"The military operations are being conducted for the sole purpose of appeasing the United States at the expense of innocent tribesmen who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and the Taliban," said Mumtaz, the tribal elder.
Pakistan's military has lost more than 250 soldiers in fighting over the past three months. Another 250 remain in Taliban custody after they surrendered to a group of insurgents in late August.
On Tuesday, residents of Waziristan reported seeing scores of bodies -- including beheaded Pakistani soldiers -- on the outskirts of Mir Ali as they fled the area.
Witte reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
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never fear, cowboy commander dubya is mounted up, God wants him to, and ready to defend This Great Country of Ours.
croutons, answer this question. And don't give me any rhetoric or profanity or anything...never fear, cowboy commander dubya is mounted up, God wants him to, and ready to defend This Great Country of Ours.
Q: Why do you have such a problem with Bush having faith in God, but never call out guys like Osama for hijacking their faith for political and militaristic (sending people to die in suicide attacks) use?
bush has faith in God? bush uses phomy expressions of faith FOR YOU.
I have no objection to dubya having faith in God or anything.
But he did say God wanted him to be President, so his abuse of God for political purposes, pandering to dumb radical "Christians", is fair game. I'm sure God wants me to trash dubya forever.
So when I trash your boy dubya, he's truly a POS, I'm a jihadi apologist?
Damn, you simplistic red-neck dubya suckers are dumb bunch of twits.
Have you sent dubya your $7000 check to pay for your part of dubya's oil grab war?
Last edited by boutons_; 10-09-2007 at 08:21 PM.
I am totally pleased that Musharraf is trying to kick ass again in Waziristan since Bush decided to give up on the Taliban and the real Al Qaeda to occupy Iraq for four years and counting. I just hope the Supreme Court there doesn't try to invalidate his latest election.
Apparently, in Pakistan being Army Chief is more important than being president, since he seems loathe to take off the uniform.
I can't give too much of a crap about that. Dude has been in the middle of the storm and really is our most important ally in the war on terra that could actually affect the US.
i guess we'll find out if his bite has any teeth.
or if we'll use his teeth to identify him.
He and by extension Pakistan is in the most precarious position of any of our allies. If there are objections about how he got and kept power, I definitely prefer him as the devil I know.
but...what if the opposite gained control.
wouldn't that enable us to declare "open season"?
or are you just happy with someone else as an aggressor, in other words, not just us?
Yep, precarious is a good word for stability in PK.
Going after the insurgents is fine with me, but not if it leads to a general uproar and overthrow of Musharraf.
At this point we can't do anything else but pound sand. It sucks that we spent all our military might and international goodwill in Iraq. We really had AQ on the ropes and could have finished them off if we had somehow leveraged an entry into Waziristan. It definitely could have ended up as bad as Iraq, but at least it would have been for a good cause. As it is we have half-assed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
CD comes correct FINALLY.
Its funny because I was just about to suggest we resort to sandpounding it hardcore to elicit a CD response, and here he is with a preemptive pro-sandpounding post.
Where are all our special elite forces? The true way to deal with all this is like CD said, when we had AQ on the ropes we should have taken it to where they were. Can you imagine a unilateral decision to bring the most grizzled shock forces into a well researched campaign in that mountainous terrain? Fighting enemies in that terrain at least has the benefit of little or no civilian interaction....we could have shot to kill any mother er we saw and if it took *gasp* years it would have been for a good cause....
If we had ended up winning our generals would be looked at as military geniuses if nothing else. But heroes would have been a good possibility as well.
What's this "finally" crap? I've been saying some variation of this for four years.
It was a joke..
But seriously, even if we had taken it to them, the campaign would have required the world's greatest military minds, and could have resulted in a load more US troop casualties during the initial phases. But its better to fight guerillas that use terrain than guerillas that use civilians IMO.
LOL, if we had gone to war there Halliburton would have a brick.
Yeah, it would have been crazy difficult, but we could have just said it would be a cakewalk to assure popular support.
I think two or three presidents down the road we are going to have to eventually invade that area with troops, but later other groups would just move in once we left....
I don't see militant groups abandoning that area ever.
, over the last several decades we have gradually become the damn babysitter trying to control a bunch of little kids. We should have left them to kill each other, Israel be damned.
By SELCAN HACAOGLU
Associated Press Writer
SIRNAK, Turkey --LinkTurkish warplanes bombed positions of suspected Kurdish rebels Wednesday, and the prime minister said preparations for parliamentary approval of a military mission against separatist fighters in Iraq were under way.
A cross-border operation could hurt Turkey's relationship with the United States, which opposes Turkish intervention in northern Iraq, a region that has escaped the violence afflicting much of the rest of the country.
-----------------------------
Turkey and the United States are NATO allies, but ties have also been tense over a U.S. congressional bill that would label the mass killings of Armenians by Turks around the time of World War I as genocide. President Bush strongly urged Congress to reject the bill, saying it would do "great harm" to U.S.-Turkish relations.
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Turkish troops blocked rebel escape routes into Iraq while F-16 and F-14 warplanes and Cobra helicopters dropped bombs on possible hideouts, Dogan news agency reported. The military had dispatched tanks to the region to support the operation against the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, in response to more than a week of deadly attacks in southeastern Turkey.
It's a good thing we are passing meaningless measures in Congress about the Turks committing genocide during WWI. Their full cooperation in the war on terra is assured!
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