This from the Swampland blog over at Time.com:
Over the summer, I took an informal poll of Iraq analysts at various US intelligence agencies about how and whether the Iraq war would spill over into neighboring countries....The near unanimous opinion was...that the border to watch was Turkey-Kurdistan. The mega-fear is that the Turks will move in to "protect" the local Turkmen population if the Kurds take over Kirkuk (and the adjacent oil fields). The more likely scenario was that the Turks would cross the border to take action against the PKK guerrillas, who have been causing real trouble in the Kurdish areas of Turkey for years. Now the Turkish parliament has approved cross-border military action against the PKK. I'm not sure that this is anything more than a warning flare--or an acknowledgement of the sort of raids that have already been taking place on both sides. But it's not very good....
Add this to Turkey threatening to prevent the U.S. from shipping supplies to Iraq through Turkey (70% of all air cargo headed to Iraq goes through Turkey) if the House passes a resolution condemning the Ottoman Empire's WWI-era slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians as an act of genocide, and you can see how Turkey is ruffling a few feathers in the Mid-East. (I'm sorry, I had to.)
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