“HEZBOLLAH, PKK AND AMERICAN HYPOCRACY”
Gwynne Dyer
Fifteen months ago, the armed wing of
Lebanon’s Hezbollah party, listed as a terrorist
organization by the United States and most other Western
countries, attacked Israel’s northern border, capturing two
Israeli soldiers and killing eight more. Israel replied with
a month of massive air attacks all across Lebanon that
destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, leveled a
good deal of south Beirut, and killed around a thousand
Lebanese civilians.
Washington, London, Ottawa and some other
Western capitals insisted that this was a reasonable and
proportionate response, and shielded Israel from intense
diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks even when Israel
launched a land invasion of Southern Lebanon in early
August, 2006. The operation only ended when Israeli
casualties on the ground mounted rapidly and the Israeli
government pulled its troops back.
So what would be a reasonable and
proportionate Turkish response to the recent attacks by the
PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States
and most other Western countries, from Northern Iraq into
Southeastern Turkey? More than forty Turkish civilians and
soldiers have been killed in these attacks over the past two
weeks, and a further eight Turkish soldiers were captured.
Well, it would be unreasonable for Turkey
to bomb Iraq, where the PKK’s bases are, for any more than
one month. It would be quite disproportionate for the
Turkish Air Force to level more than a small part of Baghdad
— say, 15,000 homes. Ideally, it should leave Baghdad alone
and restrict itself to destroying some Kurdish-populated
city in northern Iraq near Turkey’s own border.
Moreover, when the Turks do invade Iraq
on the ground, they should restrict themselves to the
northern border strip where the PKK’s bases are. What’s
this: Washington is asking Turkey to show restraint and not
attack Iraq at all: even after the Kurdish terrorists killed
or kidnapped all those Turkish people. Could this mean that
Turkish lives are worth less than Israeli lives? Never mind!
At least the United States officially classes the PKK as a
terrorist organization and refuses to let its officials have
any contact with it. But what’s this? There is a parallel
terrorist organization called the Party for Free Life in
Kurdistan (PJAK), essentially a branch office of the PKK,
also based in northern Iraq, which carries out attacks into
the adjacent Kurdish-populated region of Iran, and the
United States does not condemn the PJAK? It even sends its
officials to have friendly chats with the PJAK terrorists?
How odd!
The PJAK’s leader, Rahman Haj Ahmadi,
paid an unofficial visit to Washington last summer. One of
his close associates, Biryar Gabar, claims to have “normal
dialogue” with US officials, according to a report last
Tuesday in the New York Times — and the American military
spokesman in Baghdad, Cmdr. Scott Rye, issued a carefully
structured non-denial saying that “The consensus is that US
forces are not working with or advising the PJAK.”
Biryar Gabar also said that PJAK fighters
have killed at least 150 Iranian soldiers and officials in
the past three months. That’s a lot more people than the PKK
have killed in Turkey in the same time, and yet neither
Washington nor any other Western country has expressed
sympathy for Iran. Could it be that Iranian lives are worth
even less than Turkish lives?
And here’s something even more peculiar.
Iran, like Turkey, is already shelling Kurdish villages on
the Iraqi side of the frontier that it suspects of
sheltering or supplying the PKK/PJAK. How come President
George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney simply
ignore these actions, when they have been working hard for
the past year to build a case for attacking Iran? As Pat
Buchanan noted on MSNBC’s “Hardball” last week:“Cheney and
Bush are laying down markers for themselves which they’re
going to have to meet. I don’t see how.” The US military
“assets” for an attack on Iran are all in place, so it can’t
be that. Maybe the delay means that Bush and Cheney are
having difficulty in persuading the military professionals
to go along with this hare-brained scheme. Most senior
American military officers see an attack on Iran as leading
to inevitable failure and humiliation for the United States,
and the last thing the White House wants is a rash of US
generals resigning in protest when it orders the attack.
On the other hand, Bush is still the
commander-in-chief, and how many American generals resigned
when he committed the somewhat lesser folly of invading
Iraq? Only one. And he did it very quietly." (Arab News
Newspaper-30/10/2007)
