Turks Vs. Kurds

Juan Cole has been following the tensions in northern Iraq between Kurds and Turks for sometime. Today write a very nice piece covering the situation and he notes (based on personal observation) that citizens of Turkey are "livid" because of terrorists acts inside Turkey by Kurdish rebels who use Iraq as a refuge. He then writes:

I brought up with several observers my nightmare, that the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq will certainly annex Kirkuk later this year, and that there may be as a result clashes between the Kurds and the Turkmen minority. Iraqi Turkmen, some 800,000 strong, have been adopted by the Turks of Turkey as sort of little brothers. I can't imagine the Turkish public standing for a massacre of Turkmen, and hundreds of thousands of people in the street could force Buyukanit [Turkish leader] to act decisively.

My colleagues universally agreed that the potential was there for an escalation of the crisis under such conditions. No one said I was exaggerating the risks. One former official who is an expatriate said that before he arrived in Ankara last week, he did not know just how angry people there were over this issue. He is now convinced that the situation is serious.

Juan Cole has been warning about this for some time. The Bush administration does seem to overly concerned about it, devoting little or no attention to diplomacy over the issue. I get a sense that Bush thinks that Turkey will continue to behave according to U.S./Nato dictum. But Cole makes a very good case for the situation in northern Iraq continuing on it's trajectory of escalation into a full-blown invasion by Turkey. It's happened before.