Follow-up on Turkey

Thanks to Sara from Groveland who left a comment in response to David Brunet’s recent post: Turkey: An Endangered Bridge Between East and West.

Sara mentioned Rick Steves’ travel blog, which lists on its homepage three posts on Turkey in reverse order: Thorny Turkish Issue #3: If You Mix Turkey into Europe, Will It Curdle? Thorny Turkish Issue #2: Turks and Kurds; Thorny Turkish Issue #1: Armenia

In reply, Brunet, a former Fulbright scholar in Turkey, said he has always liked Steves’ travel notes. And he appreciated that in the above essays Steves identifies Turkey as a constitutionally secular government.

Commenting further, Brunet says “Steves talks about the Kurds being scattered throughout Turkey and notes that most of them are not PKK and don't favor a separatist state.” Brunet recalls, “When we lived in Izmir one of my favorite shopkeepers was Kurdish. I would stop and talk with him almost daily, and when I left Izmir to come home to the US, I went to his shop to say goodbye. I considered him a friend, and it had nothing to do with whether or not he was Kurdish.”

I checked out Steves' essays on Turkey, and I agree with Sara from Groveland and Brunet that they provide background information helpful in understanding the issues the Turks are now facing.

Wrapping the Earth in an Explosive Vest

In his column in Monday’s Boston Globe, James Carroll develops an ominous metaphor tied to Bush’s recent statement to world leaders that if they were interested in avoiding World War III, they ought to be interested in preventing the Iranians from obtaining the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.

Carroll calls attention to the deaths of two young suicide bombers whose plans went awry. The first changed his mind on the way to his target, but died when he accidentally detonated himself while reporting at a police station.

The second young man revealed his plans to family members. When his mother tried to remove the explosive vest from his body, the bomb went off and killed him, his mother, and three siblings.

The suicide bomber has been America’s nemesis in both Afghanistan and Iraq; Carroll says, “A seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers is what makes the American war the horror that it is.”

Carroll focuses on the extreme difficulty of removing the suicide bomber’s explosive vest without detonating it. And he compares the situation America has created in Iraq to wrapping that nation’s body in wires and plastic explosives, suggesting grim implications for a precipitous withdrawal.

Carroll concludes that Bush’s reference to World War III globalizes the explosive vest:

Iraqi civil war, conflict with Iran, Turkish-Kurdish violence, chaos throughout the Middle East - and now President Bush tells us that, if we don't defuse the regional body vest carefully, World War III will start. There it is. Bush himself acknowledging at last what, under his leadership, the United States has done. We have put an explosive vest on Earth itself.

And now our job is to get it off. The revelation here is that, in the new age, every bomber is a suicide bomber.

In my opinion, Carroll’s column is profoundly disturbing: a wake up call to the world.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.