Trouble in Turkey

In my younger years I was relentlessly amused by Turkey and Hungary being nations that exist near one another. Obviously, my seven year old mind thought, one would consume another. Of course, as I have grown older, my understanding of Turkey has grown to be more nuanced. Evidently, Congress has not.

United States legislators have begun what has been called the “genocide vote.” The Turkish government said that a congressional committee vote labeling the mass killings of Armenians as genocide would endanger U.S. relations with the transcontinental nation, according to the Washington Post.

The Foreign Affairs Committee passed the nonbinding resolution on a 27 to 21 bipartisan vote. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has promised she will bring the resolution to the full House for a vote, the Post reports. Turkey had spent millions in a lobbying campaign to quell the vote.

Turkey rose out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The nation is largely thought of as an axis between the East and West, or perhaps the Orient and the Occident. Rightly so, as the area factored into the split of East and West Roman Empire, to the change from Constantinople to Istanbul.

The nation acts a fulcrum between the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds. it joined the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1952. It is slotted to become the first Islamic nation to enter into the European Union. Turkey is one of America's closest Islamic allies, and the relationship is not quite as odorous as with Saudi Arabia, with not nearly the same oil interests.

At the same time, Turkey hopes to send its military into Iraq to pursue the Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist faction in Turkish politics. Both the U.S. and the EU have asked Trukey to hold off on cross-border operations. Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

The Post reports: “A Turkish military attack on northern Iraq could create chaos in that country's only relatively stable region, and a Turkish threat to limit U.S. access to its air bases and roads because of the congressional vote could cripple supply lines to American forces in Iraq.”

Turkey plans to play “diplomatic hardball” with the U.S. if the genocide bill goes through, the Economist reports.

That's all for now, I've got to go sign a lease.