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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Hey, I said "a teensy part." I don't disagree. That said, do you see this going in a different direction? I'm becoming more pessimistic that the centre simply isn't going to hold in Baghdad, and our forces -- whether 160k, or Bush's "Korea-clone" 50k, withdraws to the periphery in the north or in Kuwait or something.

Maybe they all go to Kirkuk, which might placate the Turks to some degree, but by that time Kurdistan is de facto independent anyway.

Clearly, I don't have a good appreciation for the Turk/Kurdish dynamic. Yes, I know that Kurds are spread across Iraq/Iran/Turkey, and I know that their separatist notions in Turkey are and have been a real problem. But with Kurdistan operating pretty much independently since the early 90s, I don't see the domino effect that I keep reading about, which is supposedly what Turkey fears most about this stuff.

Turkey doesn't want Kurds in Iraq free to support Kurdish separatists in Turkey, and sees this as something like an existensial problem for the Turkish state. But I don't think Turkey is that much better off with a failed Iraq state and a functionally independent Kurdish north. (Somewhat better, because it's not nominally a Kurdish nation.) In our present role, we act as a check on the Kurds, and that may be as good as it's going to get for Turkey.