Invading Kurdistan

More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, it beggars belief that anyone still has to be persuaded that invading Iraq is a bad idea. Yet Turkey's army is now massed on its south-eastern border, poised to deal what it presumably supposes would be a killer blow to guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) based in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, on Sunday warned Ankara against invading. But Turkey's chief of staff formally sought his government's permission to launch a cross-border offensive last week. There are reasons to believe he will get it - none of them convincing.
Turkey is aggrieved that units of the PKK, all but defeated after the vicious 1984-99 insurgency, have regrouped inside the self-governing Kurdish region of northern Iraq, from where, Ankara says, they are carrying out cross-border raids and bomb attacks.
The extent of this activity is disputed. But the Kurdish regional government, America's closest ally in Iraq, does appear to welcome the violent and cultish PKK as a secular foil to the growth of radical Islamism in its territory. This has further soured relations between Ankara and Washington, damaged when Turkey denied the US the use ofits territory to open a northern front in 2003.
But more than this lies behind Turkey's bellicosity. The Turkish establishment, especially its influential military, has always resented European Union pressure to grant minority rights to Turkey's Kurds - a condition of accession negotiations - and US sponsorship of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. It is also livid at the looming referendum on incorporating the ethnically mixed area of Kirkuk into Kurdistan, fearing its oil wealth will float a Kurdish state that will eventually bite off chunks of south-east Turkey. The army is also reasserting its power ahead of elections precipitated by its clash with the neo-Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Crushing the PKK, moreover, is popular with resurgent Turkish nationalists.
Turkey's friends, alas, have little leverage. The long alliance with the US is in shreds, the prospect of EU entry is evaporating. Yet Ankara should think again. Think, for example, of Israel's futile attempt last summer to crush Hizbollah in Lebanon. Turkey would risk mayhem on a far greater scale by a massed assault on the last relatively stable area of Iraq.
Turkey's Kurdish conflict has not returned to anything like levels that would justify all-out attack. A sure way of resurrecting the insurgency - as well as visiting more misery on Iraq - is to invade Kurdistan.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 5 2007 03:00 Last updated: June 5 2007 03:00