THE DAILY BLADE: Armenian Genocide Resolution Annihilated By Turkish Threats
They say politics makes strange bedfellows. It also sometimes drives otherwise compatible couples to sleep in separate beds. Case in point: the Armenian Genocide Resolution.
On Monday, The Stiletto was forced to take on fellow conservatives for placing expediency above moral correctness. Now, The Oread Daily* has gone after wobbly Dems, who swallowed the Turkish propaganda regurgitated by Bush Administration officials and Turkey’s apologist shills in the MSM, and have backed away from the resolution they had co-sponsored. The Stiletto couldn’t have done a better job beating up on these spineless cowards herself, so she is publishing a chunk of the OD post here - and urges you to read the rest:
[T]he Democrats, they of the noble speeches, they who talk endlessly about Iraq but do nothing, those folks, you know them, now they are starting to back away from their own resolution and join their friends on the other side of the aisle and in the White House and becoming "pragmatic."
Take tough talking John Murtha. You remember him. Today calling on the House leadership to shy away from a vote said of the resolution to condemn the genocide, ""We don't have the number of allies we used to have. We've lost so much credibility worldwide." So John is telling his buds to just forget about it already.
Joining Mr. Murtha were Alcee Hastings, chairman of the House Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and John Tanner, Chief of the Voting Rights Section, Robert Wexler, chairman of the House NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and Stephan Cohen, chairman of Subcommittee on European Affairs who all appealed to the House Speaker to call off the vote on the resolution. …
Madam Speaker has no more guts then the rest of these gomers. Pelosi backed off her pledge to call a floor vote on a measure declaring the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks an act of genocide after support for the resolution eroded.
"Whether it will come up or not and what the action will be remains to be seen,'' Pelosi told reporters today.
And then there is that profile of courage, the former Congressman from Missouri, who so well exemplifies why Americans of all political stripes so often say "a pox on both your houses." Just keep reading.
In 2003, Richard A. Gephardt cosponsored a resolution that put the "Armenian genocide" in company with the Holocaust and mass deaths in Cambodia and Rwanda.
In 2000, the Missouri lawmaker backed a similar measure, and in a letter to then-Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Gephardt said he was "committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the Armenian genocide."
Now Gephardt, reports Congressional Quarterly is a foreign agent lobbying on behalf of Turkey, and he’s got a different view of the world. He’s working to stymie the latest version of an Armenian genocide resolution.
It all just makes you want to do one of those Howard Dean screams!!!
An op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times by Graham E. Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, clearly explains that American and Turkish self-interest is widely divergent on several key issues:
Turkish-American relations are in crisis. But the House resolution declaring the World War I-era killings of Armenians a genocide is only one cause - and that's just a sideshow. Turkish-American relations have been deteriorating for years, and the root explanation is simple and harsh: Washington's policies are broadly and fundamentally incompatible with Turkish foreign policy interests in multiple arenas. …
† Since the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi Kurds … are now on the brink of de facto independence. Such a Kurdish entity in Iraq stimulates Kurdish separatism inside Turkey. …
† Iran is Turkey's most powerful neighbor and a vital source of oil and gas - second only to Russia … Washington heavy-handedly pressures Turkey to end its extensive and deepening relations with Iran in order to press a U.S. sanctions regime there. …
† Syrians -- as well as many other Arabs -- are impressed with Turkey's ability to simultaneously be a member of NATO, seek entry into the European Union, say no to Washington on using Turkish soil to invade Iraq …
… While the State Department may soothingly speak of "vital shared interests" in democracy, stability and counter-terrorism … We had better get used to the fact that Turkey, strengthened by its popular democracy, is going to pursue its own national interests, regardless of Washington's pressure. …
Our foreign policy strategy must move beyond the old Cold War paradigm and accept the new reality that Turkey cannot be counted on to further our interests – and is actively undermining us. It’s past time that we weaned ourselves off depending on Turkey for any goal or undertaking important to the U.S. Let’s start with Iraq War logistics. Just as the success of the Surge shows that we were undermanned from the start, another miscalculation made by Iraq War planners was to be dependent on Turkey to supply our troops. Turkey’s threat to cut off use of air and land supply routes into Iraq, should prompt us to use alternatives, regardless of whether the Armenian Genocide Resolution is tabled.
And by the way: The resolution is limited only to the Armenian Genocide of 1915- 1917 and omits previous pogroms that killed several hundred thousand Armenians: The Hamidian Massacres from 1894 to 1897 and the Adana Massacre in April 1909, a year after the Young Turks seized power from Sultan Hamid in a military coup. Without a doubt, the Turks meant to keep mass-murdering Armenians as many times as it took to wipe them off the face of the earth. It’s not the members House of Representatives who don’t know the history of the Armenians’ suffering. It’s Turkey’s flacks and genocide denial enablers in the MSM who prefer to repeat Turkish propaganda whole cloth rather than to do their own research.
*Disclosure: OD has posted items from The Stiletto Blog, and we often exchange friendly correspondence on topics of mutual interest.
The Other Shoe Drops: Updates To Previous Posts
† Sicko Healthcare Prescription Causes Adverse Side Effects For Dems (second item): Due to a severe shortage of National Health Service dentists in England, some citizens have taken to extracting their own teeth with pliers or using Super Glue to stick crowns back onto teeth, according to a survey of 5,000 patients. If The Stiletto was forced to choose between DIY dentistry or going to this guy, you’d find her at Home Depot checking out the plethora of pliers.
† Termites Are Nothing, Compared To This: Nichole Marie Blackwell, that Tacoma, WA, woman accused of placing an online ad on Craigslist to "come and take whatever you want," from her aunt's house pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and first-degree malicious mischief, and was sentenced to three months of electronic home monitoring.
You should read this blog:
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/10/note_on_tukey_kurdistan_trigge.php
Reply to this
Thanks for the suggestion. Might The Stiletto also offer two of her own to you: JihadWatch and DhimmiWatch.
Reply to this