Say Hello to Friday Lunch Club

Friday Lunch Club has an ambitious plan.

Striking a balance, maintaining a wealthy blog, keeping one's sources anonymous while prodding the readers' interest is a blogger necessary baptism. Posting here will be episodic at first, hoping to graduate to a regular blurb soon after. Don't give up on me too early in the game, and remember, dead blogs don't deserve an epitaph!

Unlike Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, I don't do 'Say Hello' posts each time I add to my blog roll. I think Friday Lunch club deserves one though, it's the most underrated new blog I've seen so far. As far as I can tell they haven't developed any ananymous sources yet. They do a great job in posting from and linking to English language media from elsewhere in the world that most American bloggers may not be regularly monitoring, including the Lebanese Daily Star and AsiaTimes. When they link to American sources, these are often academic sources such as Syriacomment and the American Prospect, or whistleblower.org and the Small Wars Journal, rather then the few large media sources that almost everyone quotes from and blogs about.

I was a little put off by yet another poll about the Isreal lobby - until I saw the post about the Saudi lobby.

Turkish rhetoric with Iraqi Kurds heats up

Via Friday Lunch Club, the Belgravia Dispatch is monitoring the chance of Turkey sending troops into the Kurdish area of Iraq.

They quote several sources, including the London Financial Times:

Turkey's top general called yesterday for military intervention in northern Iraq in comments that will increase regional tensions - already high after a series of verbal exchanges between Turkish and Kurdish leaders.

Turkey is accusing the Iraqi Kurds of sheltering Turkish (Kurdish) rebels - and building up troops on the border.

An anonymous commenter pointed out

An anonymous commenter pointed out that my post before last about this wasn't complete.

From Foreign Policy magazine, an interview with Nibras Kazimi:

My mother’s family is Kurdish, and they’re Talibanis. My mother’s village was targeted during the Anfal. They dug up the cemeteries, and my grandfather’s grave was dug up. They were stamping out traces of people. It was vindictive, and it wasn’t unique to my mother’s village. It happened across many of the villages that were affected by the Anfal campaign. And through marriage, we had relatives who were directly affected by the chemical bombings at Halabja. On my father’s side, the ones that had registered as Persian nationals rather than as Ottoman nationals were deported to Iran. Some of the young men were seized, and they spent years in prison, some of them executed. You know, the usual Iraq story. My father’s people were Shiite Arabs from Kazimiya, a formerly independent town that has become a northern suburb of Baghdad. It’s actually where Saddam was executed, in the military intelligence complex.

So both sides of his family experienced terrible atrocities from Saddam and his allies. His father's family was indeed Sunni - but Sunni Kurds. Few of us have ever demonstrated the sort of forgiveness that would enable us to criticize him. At the same time, the people who have been put in charge of American forces after hard experience both say we cannot win this war by force alone. If they are wrong, someone should come up with a better plan than that of Petraeus and Gates. If they are right, we need to remember that Nibras Kazimi isn't an ally of those with a realistic plan for victory. This civil war will not lead to an extinction of all violent Sunni's, but of a generation brought up to believe that suicide bombing is heroic. At best the infighting gives us a little time. I don't know if Al Qaeda can change course again or not, but even if not history has many examples of civil wars breeding more and more violence and hatred, rather than leading to the death of the violent and peace.

Instapundit seems to think this is good news.

Commander of the Islamic Revolution's Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Rahim Safavi, on Wednesday warned the Iraqi Kurd authorities to expel the armed bandits and counterrevolutionaries, linked to the foreigners, from their territories, Fars news agency reported.

"Otherwise, the IRGC forces are ready to sacrifice their lives and defend their country in pursuit of the counterrevolutionary bandits across the border and wipe them out," the IRGC Commander has been quoted as saying.

He made the remarks in a commemoration service held in Orumiyeh, West Azarbaijan Province, for a number of IRGC forces who were martyred in a helicopter crash last week in the area.

He said that members of counterrevolutionary terrorist groups in northwestern Iran are now being surrounded by the Iranian armed forces.

Three commanders of PEJAK terrorist group were killed in Sero region in Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province, by the Islamic Republic armed forces Tuesday, he said.

according to the report, the IRGC Commander said that the US is funding the terrorists groups to act against Iran and the Zionists are training the Iranian counterrevolutionary bandits in northern Iraq.

Before this I was hoping our new General and Defense Secretary might be up to the job. Iraq couldn't let people attacking across their border alone even if they wanted to - and after our words about regime change, they won't trust us enough to work with us either.

Many Democrats are wildly overoptimistic about what will happen when we leave Iraq - to America's reputaion among other things, blue states and red alike. But if the middle east is going up in flames, the people who say there is nothing we can do may be right.