December 18, 2007

TURKEY did the wrong thing for the wrong reasons Sunday when it sent more than 50 of its air force jets to bomb sites in northern Iraq. The goal was to kill fighters of the PKK, Kurdish rebels who have been mounting guerrilla attacks in southeastern Turkey. Sunday's bombing and shelling killed at least two civilians and five PKK members, while setting Iraqi Kurdish farms and villages afire. But as a strategic move, Turkey's raid was worse than useless.

PKK forces are ensconced in caves high in the inaccessible Kandil mountain range, so there was little chance Turkey's raid would accomplish more than it did. Indeed, the tactical reason for making such an empty gesture was that, with snow now falling in the mountains, a ground invasion of the sort Turkey had been threatening would have been more costly and even less effective.

But that hardly justifies the bombing. The Turkish military asserted its nationalist bravado at the price of violating the sovereignty of a neighbor, implicating the United States in that transgression, and incurring a condemnation from the European Union.

Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, exercised exemplary restraint when he said Iraq had expected Turkey to consult with it before taking such an action. The fact that Iraqi Kurdish civilians were killed suggested to Zebari that Sunday's strike "was based maybe on misinformation."

This was not only a discreet way of intimating that the Turks were careless about killing Kurdish villagers in Iraq; it was also a diplomatic allusion to the suspected source of that misinformation - the United States.

Last month, after Turkey threatened to send ground troops into Iraq, the Bush administration said it would give Turkey intelligence on the PKK. So it was no surprise that Turkey's military chief, General Yasar Buyukanit, announced yesterday that "America gave intelligence." To make sure nobody misunderstood, he added, "But more importantly, America last night opened the [Iraqi] airspace to us. By opening the airspace, America gave its approval to this operation."

There could hardly be a more incoherent twist to President Bush's Iraq policy. Bush has made preserving Iraq's borders a primary objective. Yet the administration colluded in Turkey's violation of Iraqi sovereignty - even as Washington is warning Iran to stop sending agents and weapons into Iraq, and is pressing Syria and Saudi Arabia to crack down on foreign jihadists crossing into Iraq.

Bush ought to urge Turkey to make the PKK superfluous by granting full cultural and linguistic rights to the Kurds and developing the impoverished Kurdish region of southeast Turkey. Turkey's bombing of northern Iraq harms its chances of admission to the European Union. And it makes the United States look simultaneously incompetent and hypocritical.