Troublesome Turkey

While I could easily write about how shitty the new Saw movie was or my new radio show, or even bitch about how work sucks, I’d much rather write about something that matters. There’s always a million different things going on in the world, but does anyone care about anything that doesn’t concern the 2008 presidential election, Darfur, or global warming? Yes, but then again, no.
Oh, of course, no one likes a child solider, and as I’m told, racism is as prevalent at CSU as ever. But then again, we should pay attention to the issues of countries on the other side of the earth. Human life is just as important in Turkmenistan as it is in China or Myanmar (Did you know that the new Rambo movie is SET in Burma? Talk about being time relevant! My guess is that they filmed it knowing that there was some massive violence going on in Southeast Asia; the jungle-setting could’ve been anything from Indonesia to Cambodia to India/Pakistan border and so on.)
So, time to delve into what’s happening. Hmm, child soldiers in Myanmar, Obama pisses off gay community with anti-gay gospel singer, kids found to have tiny percentage of industrial chemicals in their bodies…
Ah, here we go.
So Turkey is cracking down violently on some insurgents, and want to make an incursion into Iraq to stop one particular group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (better known as the PKK) and their violent ways. Ok, here is something I can half-assedly relate to: If such a crossing of borders were to occur by Turkey, it’d throw the northern half of Iraq into chaos, as the self-governing Kurds of the region don’t want to deal with that kind of shit right now, as they’ve got their own IEDs and stuff to deal with, or so I assume. I suppose assuming is bad, but for now we’ll allow it.
When your general smart person population thinks of Turkey these days, they think of that proposed bill that would allow the US government to recognize the murder/deportation of 1.5 million Armenians from Turkey back in the early 1900s as the Armenian Genocide, the scholarly title. From a glance at the timeline of the massive deportation, such a title seems fitting, but Turkey refuses to call it a genocide, and many of our former leaders have said that we would lose a powerful Middle Eastern ally by recognizing it as such: Daddy Bush, Bill Clinton, etc. It’s an interesting situation, calling into question how much do we as America care about a title if it means losing a lot? You have to acknowledge that a title means a lot, really: what would happen if the country had never recognized the Holocaust as a genocide? But frankly, I’m a little torn on the issue, though I lean towards the idea that we should recognize genocide when we see it. Maybe it’ll happen after we get out of Iraq, but then again, I doubt it.
But I digress: This will shake things up, so I only hope Turkey takes precautions before crossing any borders.