More on Turkey and the Kurds, from Newsweek:

Could another front be opening in the Iraq war? Over recent weeks, some 200,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, have massed along the mountainous border with Iraq.... last week, according to angry Foreign Ministry officials in Baghdad, Turkish commandos briefly crossed 15 kilometers into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK rebels -- a move that could signal dangerous new frictions to come....

By rights, of course, dealing with the PKK "should be the responsibility of the Iraqi government," as a senior Iraqi official puts it, not wishing to speak publicly on security matters.... But the limits on the central government are obvious.

"The limitations on the central government are obvious" -- that's a subtle way of putting it. Translation: Despite all the b.s. you get from the Bush administration, the Iraqis are not even remotely ready to "stand up" so Americans can "stand down." They certainly don't have the means or the motivation to do so up north, which is barely part of Iraq at all.

More:

... Washington has been trying to pressure Iraq's Kurds to crack down on the PKK themselves, before Ankara steps up its campaign. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has several points of leverage. One is that the Kurds are desperate to have a more or less permanent American military base on their territory as insurance against a future anti-Kurdish regime in Baghdad. Another is that the Kurds will need U.S. help to contain any Shia designs on oil-rich Kirkuk. Also, they need Washington's support in any deal on the parceling out of the country's future oil revenues.

So American troops are supposed to risk their lives defending Kurds against a future Baghdad regime after American troops have spent the last three years risking their lives to put a new regime into power in Baghdad? Is that what this means? Lovely. Oh, and what do you know? It's all about oil.

Or maybe the U.S. has no leverage at all. Maybe the Kurds now assume we're so desperate for friends in the region that we'll do whatever they want, and they can respond with a quid pro nothing:

So, the big question is why the Iraqi Kurds aren't cracking down on the PKK insurgents, with whom, after all, they once used to clash.... today, Iraqi Kurds are much more confident. For the first time, they have their own nation in all but name --and are thus more willing to support the nationalistic aspirations of their 14 million countrymen living in Turkey.

In other words, they think we won't abandon them even if they do nothing about the PKK. Which is probably true. After all, they'll have oil.

And, in fact, Iraqi Kurds seem to be doing more than just leaving the PKK alone:

In words widely interpreted in Ankara as a veiled threat to support a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey if the cross-border raids continue, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government, warned last week that if Turkey tries "to stop our people from profiting or progressing," then Turkey's own "stability and security" would suffer....

Worse and worse....