[lbo-talk] Chomsky on ending occupation

[Dennis Perrin]

> In fact there's only ONE place I read anything that mentioned the irony of
> the US bourgeoisie using the Ba'ath's cruelty towards the Kurds as an
> emotional justification for the war juxtaposed with the US's continuing
> support for Turkish slaughter of Kurds - which over the past decade has
> been much, much worse than in Iraq, where the Kurds have been left pretty
> much unmolested in the past decade (which of course, has been when the US
> has gone from arming the Ba'ath party to anatgonism with it).  The part of
> the left that is concerned with the Kurds would not be concerned with
> "Hussein" at all, in fact, you mentioning the ancient problem of Hussein
> for the Kurds, and not mentioning the Turkish bloodbath they've been
> facing for the past decade shows not only your non-concern for the Kurds
> but your ignorance of what problems the Kurds are facing at all.


> -- Lance

Well, since I'm part of this thread, let me say that I've made the above
point here and elsewhere numerous times, including directly to Hitchens in a
series of emails during the bombing of Serbia. He told me that the EU would
in time handle Turkish brutality toward the Kurds, but that, for the moment,
we should support Turkish fighter pilots who were taking a break from ethnic
cleansing in Kurdistan to punish Milosevic for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Then when the Turkish parliament followed the lead of over 90% of the
Turkish public in rejecting US troops earlier this year (aka, The Wrong Kind
of Democracy), Hitchens suddenly found his critical voice regarding the
Kurdish question in Turkey, pretending not to notice the functional element
of his, er, "critique."

DP