Secretary of State Pelosi
Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2007;

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famous for donning a head scarf earlier this year to commune for peace with the Syrians, has now concluded that this is the perfect moment to pass a Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of 1915. Problem is, Turkey in 2007 has it within its power to damage the growing success of the U.S. effort in Iraq. We would like to assume this is not Speaker Pelosi’s goal.

To be clear: We write that we would like to assume, rather than that we do assume, because we are no longer able to discern whether the Speaker’s foreign-policy intrusions are merely misguided or are consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq.

[…]

Where is the upside in October 2007 to this Armenian resolution?

The bill is opposed by eight former U.S. Secretaries of State, including Madeleine Albright. After Tom Lantos’s House Foreign Affairs Committee voted out the resolution last week, Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington. Turkey serves as a primary transit hub for U.S. equipment going into both Iraq and Afghanistan. […]

Somehow, none of this is allowed to penetrate Speaker Pelosi’s world. She is offering various explanations for bringing the genocide resolution to the House floor. “This isn’t about the Erdogan government,” she says. “This is about the Ottoman Empire,” last seen more than 85 years ago. “Genocide still exists,” insists Ms. Pelosi. “We saw it in Rwanda; we see it now in Darfur.”

Yes, but why now, with Turkey crucial to an Iraq policy that now has the prospect of a positive outcome? The answer may be found in the compulsive parochialism of the House’s current edition of politicians, mostly Democrats. California is home to the country’s largest number of politically active Armenians. Speaker Pelosi has many in her own district. Mr. Lantos represents the San Francisco suburbs. The bill’s leading sponsors include Representatives Adam Schiff, George Radanovich and Anna Eshoo, all from California.

[…]

Back when Bill Clinton was President, Mr. Lantos took a different view. “This legislation at this moment in U.S.-Turkish relations is singularly counterproductive to our national interest,” he said in September 2000, when there was much less at stake in the Middle East. According to Reuters, he added that the resolution would “humiliate and insult” Turkey and that the “unintended results would be devastating.”

If Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos want to take down U.S. policy in Iraq to tag George Bush with the failure, they should have the courage to walk through the front door to do it. Bringing the genocide resolution to the House floor this week would put a terrible event of Armenia’s past in the service of America’s bitter partisanship today. It is mischievous at best, catastrophic at worst, and should be tabled.

The work of Taner Akcam and Fatma Gocek mentioned in the Inside Higher Ed article you link to above will hopefully shed light on why it has been so important to the Turks not to acknowledge the Genocide. Unfortunately my experience in debating the issue is that they will be dismissed as sell-outs, etc.

Anyway, I don’t need to label anyone. Readers are quite able to come to their own conclusion on that one. Also, I don’t want to get into the usual quagmire associated with discussing the Genocide. I’d actually like some reasoned debate so want to avoid using emotive terms while also quoting from, and linking to, as many different posts reflecting what is being spoken about, as possible. At any rate, even the vast majority of those posts that oppose the resolution don’t deny the Genocide so I don’t think there’s any call for emotive outbursts on this subject.

Besides, I will decide when and when not to label people. It’s entirely another matter if you or she thinks otherwise. Personally, I hope that through not fueling argument we can instead bring people to discuss the issue instead.

Anyone who says they ‘loathe’ or ‘hate’ an entire race as Turkish Girl does about Armenians on her blog is a racist and should be called such. This also applies to Armenians and others who denigrate Turks as a race or a people.

Your comments here and on her blog should state clearly that she is a racist.

Behind The Armenian Genocide Vote

If you’re like me, you are probably wondering: what on earth are the Democrats doing — or think they are doing — by pressing the House vote on the Armenian genocide? Surely there is something more, perhaps a whole lot more, to this than the simpleton words that Nancy Pelosi recently offered.

[…]

If Pelosi’s concern for old people of Armenia strikes you as a significant reason to escalate hostilities between the US and Turkey, then you might be inclined to buy that. But I’m not. And you probably shouldn’t be either.

[…]

This is all speculation, of course. And it is driven by my own inability to understand just why the House leadership is suddenly pressing this vote. It makes no sense. The Bush administration has managed to keep the Turks at bay so far but this vote and the position of the Democratic Congress has decidedly changed that and this fallout was both obvious and easily predicted. Pelosi’s pursuit of this formalism at this time surely bespeaks of something else.

Either that, or we take Pelosi’s word at face value and note her seeming lack of awareness about the larger implications that the genocide vote is having and will have. In which case, the Democrats really are as useless and craven as we’ve grown to expect.

http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/10/behind-armenian-genocide-vote.html

People Died And The Bush Administration Lied

More than 60 years ago, Polish-Jewish scholar Ralph Lemkin coined the term “genocide” precisely to describe the scale and brutality of the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.

The assertions Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates made arguing against Congress passing HR 106/SR 106, which calls on our government to recognize the historical truth of the Armenian Genocide, are outright lies: That loss of access to Turkish land and air supply routes will imperil coalition forces in Iraq, and that that Turkey is an indispensable ally. Unfortunately, these lies were enough to sway one co-sponsor of the bill, Jane Harman (D-CA), to withdraw her support.

The truth: Turkey is irresolute as an Iraq War ally and irrelevant as a NATO ally.

If Turkey makes good on its threats to deny the U.S. access to Incirlik Air Base – through which 70 percent of military cargo sent to Iraq is flown – and closes the Turkish-Iraq border to trucks that deliver 30 percent of the fuel used by the U.S. military, there is a Plan B. “Turkey has been a tremendous hub for us, and if we didn’t have it that would increase time lines and distances. But it would be a short-term impact,” a senior military officer involved in logistical planning and operations tells The New York Times. Armored vehicles and other equipment flown to Iraq over Turkish airspace can also be rerouted, if necessary.

[…]

Here’s what’s really going on: Turkey is using HR 106 as a pretext to carry out its long-planned excursion into Northern Iraq to kill as many Kurds as possible – along with any ambitions they might have of joining their brethren on the Turkish side of the border to form an independent country. The real prize is the potentially huge untapped oil reserves now under the control of the Kurdish Regional Government.

The “insult” of passing the Armenian Genocide Resolution gives Turkey the cover it needs to further it’s geopolitical interests and to undermine the U.S. mission in Iraq once again – just as a “neutral” Turkey undermined the Allies in WWII by secretly supplying Hitler with chromite. (Another historical truth that Shimon Peres and Abe Foxman must deny along with the Armenian Genocide so that Israel can maintain its “friendship” with Turkey.)

Conservatives who argue that the Armenian Genocide happened, but it’s “inconvenient” to say so right now, should know better than anyone that doing the right thing is never “convenient.” It’s convenient to steal a car, not to save up money to buy one; to rape a woman a man is sexually attracted to, not to woo and marry her; and to abort a baby, not to feed, clothe and raise him. But in each of these cases – as with passing the Armenian Genocide Resolution - the convenient thing is not the right thing.

http://www.bloggernews.net/110960

The Armenian Genocide

Turkey is threatening serious consequences in its relations with the United States to protest a vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee declaring the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians to be an act of genocide.

Armenian-Americans have been lobbying for years to have what happened to their ancestors during World War I officially declared a case of genocide. It has been a perennial issue — noticed mostly by Armenian-Americans and by Turkey — in Congress and even in presidential campaigns.

Turkey denies that a genocide occurs, asserting that not so many Armenians died and that the deaths were an unintended consequence of a program to relocate troublesome Armenian nationalists out of a war zone.

Decide for yourself whether the cost, in damaged U.S.-Turkish relations, is worth the declaration that a genocide occurred. But make no mistake, it occurred.

http://www.minnesotamonitor.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2603

When Democrats and liberals argue that the United States needs to rebuild its image abroad, they are using “image” to refer to America’s reputation as a beacon of democracy and freedom, and as a defender of global human rights. They are not using the word “image” to refer to America’s more recent image as a country that gives hypocritical lip service to human rights while arming and supporting savage dictatorships as long as said dictatorships support U.S. policies. That being the case, the Bush administration’s vehement opposition to a congressional resolution calling the Armenian genocide a genocide is not likely to be successful in rebuilding our image abroad.

[…]

[…] From literally the moment of its birth as an independent modern nation, Turkey has refused to acknowledge what was done to the Armenians living in the land that now bears that name. The denial of the crime of genocide for so many years — and the legitimacy given to that denial by the entire Western world — are crimes in and of themselves. For almost a century, Turkey has pretended that the deliberate extermination of an entire people did not happen. And we — the West, Europe, the United States — went along with that pretense.

That is shameful, and it has created an injustice that the Armenian people have lived with and suffered in addition to the memories of the atrocities themselves. Even this is not the worst of it, however. The worst of it is that the crime of the denial of the Armenian genocide, on top of the original crime of the genocide itself, almost certainly paved the way for the next genocide, which was much worse in sheer scale — in fact, it is probably the worst single example of man’s inhumanity to man in all of human history. That is the one that decimated my family.

http://libertystreetusa.blogspot.com/2007/10/armenian-genocide.html

Source: AFP
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