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Was Rice’s trip to Iraqi Kurdistan
Deliberately Sabotaged?
20.12.2007
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December
20, 2007
US Secretary of State Condi Rice had just made a
surprise visit to the northern oil city of Kirkuk,
apparently to congratulate the provincial council
for a move toward Kurdish-Arab reconciliation. But
while Condi was doing that, the Turkish army invaded
Iraqi Kurdistan! And then the president of the Iraqi
Kurdistan Regional Authority, Massoud Barzani
angrily refused to meet Secretary Rice, saying that
the US had given Turkey the ’green light’ to attack
Kurdistan and that the incursion was a ’crime.’
I guess that means Barzani is calling Rice a
criminal Look, it is absolutely impossible that
Condi plans out a trip to Kirkuk and a meeting with
Barzani with full knowledge that while she is there,
Turkey will send 500 Turkish soldiers into northern
Iraq to occupy the villages of Kaya Retch Binwak,
Janarok and Gelly Resh. Or even that when she set
out on her trip, she knew that Turkey was planning
to bomb Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday, killing 3,
wounding 8, and displacing 300 Kurdish villagers.www.ekurd.net
(Turkey maintained that
these villages were havens for the Kurdish Workers
Party guerrilla (PKK) guerrilla group, which Ankara
accuses of making cross-border raids to kill dozens
of Turkish troops in the past few months.)
So there are only two possibilities. The first is
that this whole affair is a SNAFU. Let us imagine
that the US military is concerned about Barzani
helping PKK guerrillas kill NATO troops (yes, Turkey
is in NATO and a close US ally for decades).
They complain to Erbil and Barzani blows them off.
And the US military takes a little revenge on
Barzani by giving the Turks real time intelligence
on PKK movements. The Turks interpret this gesture
as a green light for them to attack Iraq. In the
meantime, the State Department has set up a secret
trip to Kirkuk and Erbil for Condi.
That could explain Sunday’s bombing raid, which was
not a good omen for Rice’s trip. But it can’t
explain Tuesday’s ground invasion, which is an
obvious provocation and done after it became known
that Rice was in Kirkuk.
So in my view Turkey is trying to drive a wedge
between the US and Barzani, and Turkish chief of
staff Yasar Buyukanit deliberately embarrassed
Secretary Rice and ruined her trip to celebrate
Kurdish-Arab reconciliation (a reconciliation that
is not actually good news for Ankara, which does not
want to see the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government
annex Kirkuk).
If the bombing raid was also not a SNAFU but was a
deliberate attempt to thwart Rice’s good feeling
tour in Iraqi Kurdistan, then that would point to
the Turkish military having received advance warning
from someone in the US government about Rice’s
secret trip. That is,www.ekurd.net
it would point to
spying.
That in turn would raise the question of whether
there are relatively high USG officials who had
knowledge of her secret itinerary, and who have an
interest in bolstering the ties of the US with the
Turkish military at the expense of Washington’s de
facto alliance with Barzani in Iraqi Kurdistan. I’ll
bet you State is looking into this fiasco as we
speak and if you hear fairly soon that someone high
in the department (or another department who has
similar clearances) suddenly resigns to spend more
time with his family, you can reasonably speculate
that he was the source of a leak to Buyukanit—if
indeed there was one.
agoravox com
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