A DANGEROUS dynamic was set in motion Wednesday with the vote of Turkey's Parliament to authorize a military operation in the Kurdish region of Iraq against the guerrilla band of Turkish Kurds known as the PKK.
If Turkish leaders do not heed pleas for restraint from NATO, President Bush, the Iraqi Kurds, and Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki - if they send troops into northern Iraq as they did several times in the 1980s and '90s - they could ignite a conflagration that would burn Turkey as well, scuttling its bid for entry into the European Union.
Since the early 1980s, PKK violence has waxed and waned. After a few years of relative quiet, there has been a recent upsurge of attacks in the Kurdish area of southeastern Turkey. This month 31 people were killed, among them 13 Turkish military commandos and several civilians on a bus.
Whether or not these attacks were actually perpetrated by PKK forces coming from Iraqi Kurdistan, they have provoked public fury in Turkey and a demand for forceful action from the Turkish military. Fearful of losing ever more of their power and prerogatives to the neo-Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's military and intelligence chiefs - whom Turks commonly refer to as the "deep state" - are using anger over PKK terrorism to shift the domestic balance of power back toward themselves.
A Turkish invasion of Iraq, however, would establish a perilous precedent. Iraq's other neighbors would be all too likely to regard such an overt violation of Iraq's sovereignty as a convenient excuse to follow suit whenever it suited their own national interests.
Iran is already lobbing shells into Iraq, to punish Iranian Kurds who mount attacks inside Iran and retreat into northern Iraq. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, who was visiting Turkey when the Parliament voted, was all too eager to back Turkey's right to invade Iraq. Both Iran and Syria have restive Kurdish minorities, and both share Turkey's paranoia about Kurdish aspirations for independence.
Turkey cannot solve its problem with the PKK by military means. Turkish incursions in 1995 and 1997 - with 35,000 troops the first time and 50,000 the second - failed to eliminate the PKK fighters from their mountain redoubts. A small-scale operation could do little more than send a symbolic message and cause PKK guerrillas to melt into the local population. Another large-scale invasion would risk a confrontation with the potent Iraqi Kurdish military known as pesh mergas, destabilizing the one region of Iraq that is relatively peaceful and prosperous.
Turkey would do better to offer an amnesty to PKK fighters, giving them an incentive to return home and pursue Kurdish interests by entering the peaceful political arena. That is the one option that will not do more harm than good to Turkey's true national interests.