Who's On First?

Can it be true that the United States is engaged in a clandestine effort, using its own special operations troops, to support Turkish incursions into Iraqi territory to combat the PKK and other "Kurdish guerillas"? Sure!

Consider. The United States invaded Iraq and deposed its Sunni Arab Ba'athist government. After months of inept proconsular hijinks that guaranteed Insurgency Now! instead of Insurgency One-ah-dese-days!, hasty elections were mounted under a bloc-lists system of proportional representation, which guarnateed that Iraqis would not actually know whom they were voting for, and which also guaranteed a substantial Shia majority in the parliament. At about this point, the Americans discovered--holy shit!--that Iran is, in fact, a Shia nation, and that these Shia politicians had the backing of Iran. And not only that, but they were, like, trying to consolidate their power with private militias and death squads and various and sundry other subversions of that old shibboleth, Democracy. Of course, America took the only reasonable course of action. It began arming the very Sunni Arab groups that had been fighting both the American occupation and the Iranian-occupied government, in order that the Sunni Insurgents--now referred to, of course, as former Sunni Insurgents--could contain the Iranian influence and combat these death squads and whomever else it was they were supposed to be combatting. Meanwhile, in the North, the Kurds basically created their own country, with their own military, governmental institutions, laws, customs, and flag. Turkey, America's nominal ally, didn't like this one bit. But of course, America was funding and supporting Iraqi Kurdistan--an oasis of relative calm in a bloody desert. Now, it turns out, America is also supporting Turkish efforts to wage a cross-border counterinsurgency against the coethnoreligionist Kurds in Iraq as an outgrowth of their repressive efforts against Turkish Kurds.

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

To which I can only commend the following bit of incisive commentary on our present situation: