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IN all honesty, I don't believe it is a land grab, I think that they want to see the Kurds are not allowed their own country, they are still scared to death that that is going to happen, a Kurdish nation next door would be their Palestine. They do not look forward to that possibility.

Fact is though, they need to chill out, we gave them guarantees that the Kurds would not become a separate entity, and we will keep that promise. The problem is that they screwed us and now they are running scared and doing what they feel is necassary to protect their interests.

Turkey needs to sit on their side of the border and let it happen, they did this to themselves, and they are just going to make a BAD situation WORSE.

I appreciate your reasoning, but disagree completely. What Turkey wants is oil. They were accustomed before the war to endless convoys of oil tankers streaming into Turkey out of Iraq carrying illegal Iraqi crude. That was shut off by the war and the Turkish economy is in a real pinch -- even moreso than before. The fact that they are centering their destabilization efforts at Kirkuk is very telling.

Your reasoning follows the conventional wisdom -- like the fiction that Turkey's pre-war actions were in part to protect itself from the flood of refugees that would begin after the war started. The fact is that the Kurds have a very nice democracy going now (comparatively speaking) and the flow will be the other way if anything, thereby negating your "Palestine" theory (also worn out, conventional wisdom).

Sorry, but you have to think out of the box on this one.