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Thankyou for the links. I'm going through them.

I am sympathetic to the Kurdish situation in Iraq, as you may have gathered, but in no way am I sympathetic to the PKK. Their tactics are reminiscent of the tactics of the Viet Cong. Anyone that purposely targets innocents has already lost their souls. And whatever you have to do to get the guys that do these things is also just fine with me.

A handful of misfits attacked us, and killed 3000 innocents, maybe a tenth of what Turkey has suffered, and we are going to chase them down to the ends of the earth. I expect no less of Turkey. We have to distinguish between the ones that did this, and the ones that didn't. And one of the things we have to do is drain the swamp, so to speak, which is part of what drives us in Afghanistan, and part of what drives us in Iraq.

It gets complicated. We are trying to separate the Pashtuns from the Taliban, and we are trying to separate the Kurds from the PKK. It gets tricky, because if you kill the wrong people you just create more recruits. But while you try to find common cause where you can, and try to avoid doing more harm than good, you still have to identify and find the killers and kill them.

I am sympathetic to the Kurdish situation in Iraq, as you may have gathered, but in no way am I sympathetic to the PKK. Their tactics are reminiscent of the tactics of the Viet Cong. Anyone that purposely targets innocents has already lost their souls. And whatever you have to do to get the guys that do these things is also just fine with me.

Turkey already kicked their asses and captured their leader. As a result the Kurds in Turkey made nice, and I believe (correct me here, a_Turk) that some concessions were extended after the ass-kicking to Turkish Kurds along the lines of limited local rule, or being able to use their own language in schools or somesuch. The Turks just don't want to have to do it all again, and are nervous about the Kurdish pot being stirred by the Iraq situation. They are also worried about mistreatment or displacement (from lucrative oil regions) of ethnic Turks in predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq. (I don't think the Kurdistan enthusiasts understand how much these ethnic groups are intermixed in the region.)

BTW, I think I am correct in saying that, until America defeated the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Turks, in their war against the PKK and other Kurdish separatists, were the only regular army in modern history to defeat a native, insurgent force in mountainous terrain.