Steve Forbes' great idea: Let Turkey make a meal of Saddam

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Isn't it amazing to see how Turkey suddenly became a democratic country? Am
I proud or what?

Sabri

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http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/1210/013.html

This is an excerpt from the above article:

LET TURKEY MAKE A MEAL OF SADDAM

While we fight to bring down the Taliban in Afghanistan, we should open a
second, infinitely more important front: Iraq. We need not re-create a 1991
Gulf war-like coalition. Instead, after imposing a no-fly zone over all of
Iraq, we should award northern Iraq to Turkey, under the condition that the
Turks give the area home rule. The north holds most of Iraq's oil. The vast
majority of people there are Kurds, an ethnic group distinct from the Arabs,
who, though they have no love for the Turks, would much prefer them to the
sadistic Saddam, who slaughtered and gassed them by the thousands. After WWI
this territory was taken from Turkey and given to Baghdad by the British,
with the understanding the Kurds would be granted substantial autonomy, a
promise not kept, with murderous results.

The Turks, aided by our air power, would make short shrift of any Iraqi
armed resistance to their marching into northern Iraq. The advantages of
such a move would be momentous. The Turks would use the oil for benign
domestic purposes, rather than for acquiring weapons of mass destruction and
oppressing the local population. This would be an object lesson to states
harboring terrorists: Cross the civilized world, and you will be punished.

And bin Laden-like fanatics could hardly accuse the heirs of the
Constantinople-conquering Ottoman Empire of being anti-Islamic latter-day
Crusaders. Saddam's long-cowed officer corps and intelligence apparatchiks
would rise up and destroy him. What enabled Saddam to suppress rebels after
his 1991 Kuwait fiasco was our letting him use his helicopters to put down
local uprisings.

Would the dismemberment of Iraq create a vacuum that would be filled by
mullah-oppressed Iran? The Turkish presence in the north would take care of
that. In fact, the overthrow of Saddam would encourage anti-ayatollah forces
in Iran who have recently staged impressive pro-America demonstrations in
various cities and whose liberalizing goals are largely shared by the
popularly elected but clerically hogtied President Mohammad Khatami.

Democratic, secular Turkey would become an even more potent model for the
Arab world.