Posted 10/11/2007 05:54:00 PM by Douglas

This is baffling to me. Well, kinda. I can see how Turkey would be upset with the "genocide" tag since they want in the EU so desperately, but since when did such things get determined by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and why the hell are the Turks listening to them, anyway? No one else does.

Turkey's government on Thursday warned the U.S. that a congressional bill recognizing the mass killings of Armenians during World War One as genocide could jeopardize relations between the two countries.

In a statement, Turkey's foreign ministry said the country's government "resents and condemns this decision" and called the resolution an "irresponsible act" at an "extremely critical time."

The issue threatened to "not only endanger the relations with a friendly and allied nation but also jeopardize a strategic partnership that has been cultivated for generations," it added.

"We still hope that common sense will prevail and that the House of Representatives will not move this resolution any further."

Common sense? House of Representatives? Good freakin' luck! But even if they did (sorry Turkey, you're not the first group screwed over by Congress, so get in line) get legitimately wronged by the US government, why take it out on Boeing?

Boeing could lose more than a billion dollars worth of defense contracts with Turkey if the House of Representatives adopts a resolution to label as genocide the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago, a State Department official indicated Thursday.

R. Stephen Beecroft, executive assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told reporters traveling to Russia and the Middle East with the secretary that Turkey would consider canceling its Boeing contracts if the House passes the measure, which could be voted upon as early as next week.

You can point all the 90 year old fingers you want and call it what you will, but a Billion dollars is a Billion dollars. Someone's phone better be ringing over that one. This one, too.

Turkey has made clear that it reserves the right to send troops into northern Iraq, despite heavy pressure from the United States and the European Union to keep out.

Turkish officials say that their primary goal is to prevent a humanitarian disaster - an outflow of refugees from Northern Iraq.

That has happened before.

After the last Gulf War almost half a million Iraqis - mostly Kurds - fled to the Turkish border after President Saddam Hussein brutally crushed their uprising.

This time, Turkey says, it will offer humanitarian assistance to displaced Iraqis "inside Iraq on more suitable terrain."

It is also keen to prevent remnants of Turkey's Kurdish separatist group, the PKK, from using a refugee exodus to sneak back into Turkey from bases in Northern Iraq.

What?!? Turkey can't invade a sovereign nation for no reason, can it? Oh right, that's our job.

I'm going to hold off on making a WWIII tag for this story out of historical optimism. Not like the Turks have a history of that in that part of the world or nuthin'.