Bloodless Coup

Yeah, because of course Turkey is surrounded by actively hostile, heavily militarized countries calling for its extinction, and is presently fighting an enemy that consistently uses civilians as shields. It's an exact parallel. Yup.

What would YOU do in Israel's situation? Withdraw from Haifa?

Uh - Kurdish guerillas have been killing people in Turkey for decades, and, from Turkey's perspective actively organizing and undermining the power and stability of the state - so why exactly is that NOT a similar situation?

Oh, please. Nobody's actively threatening Turkey's existence, or even questioning their right to exist. Turkey's not surrounded, not marginalized by the world, and not in a position where any sort of effective response necessitates civilian deaths because of the enemy's tactics.

And I note you didn't answer my question. What would YOU have Israel do?

Not a parallel, but I'm hightly dubious of claims that Israel is "surrounded by actively hostile states calling for its extinction." There hasn't been a war to remove Israel since 1973, and all the wars were won by Israel. Arguably, Israel is far better equipped to fight and win a conventional (armies on a battlefield) war today then they have been in years (especially since the state of said Arab armies is fairly poor these days - Syria has no sponsor, like they did in the USSR in 1973, and Egypt is more concerned with internal security than external).

Israel's existence is threatened far more by the anti-Israeli and anti-western propaganda that has convinced millions and millions of Arabs that they (we) are the enemy, and by the guerilla wars and terrorism this engenders then by any active military force in the region.

I didn't answer it b/c I'm much more interested in what the US does than what Israel does. I'm an American, not an Israeli, and feel rather more qualified to evaluate my own countries actions. I also lack the kind of intelligence I would need to give a full answer to that. But most importantly - I trust the Americans to be able to do some things that might actually settle this. I have much less faith that the Israelis can accomplish that. So, since my priority is getting this settled, I am more interested in their behavior.

I will note though that Israel has regularly carried attacks out on militants that kill civilian bystanders - and I will go on the record as saying that I find that to be an unacceptable regular practice, presuming that opposition to killing innocent civilians is one of the basic reasons one fights terrorists in the first place.

And Turkey has long seen itself surrounded by states that have little in common with it, ancient enemies, and neighbors that bitterly resent its former rule, and diplomatically it's lacked close friends for ages - one of the reasons why the US and Turkey have had (at least until recently) such good relations.

furthermore, if existence-threatening is the rubric, than our rationale for preemptive action also is pretty shaky.

What I've been thinking about through all of this, and especially after reading the comments at the end of this article about Fidel, is how the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination are ignored or deployed at will. Most people here in the US would throw down immediately if anyone challenged the idea that we the people did not have the sovereign right to self-determine the form and execution of our government. It's very clear that those ideas go out the window as soon as discussions begin about Other Countries That Piss Us Off. I guess what is getting to me in all of these chats we're having about India, Pakistan, Israel and Turkey, is the way that we have an implicit and unrecognized assumption that some of these countries (Turkey, India, Israel maybe) have a right to self-determination (and I'm thinking here, today, the self-determination to do things we're not really in agreement with) where others do not. I mean, it's not a novel observation, but it just keeps lurking under the surface. And I think it bleeds through in the way motivations to engage in conflict are valued (or dismissed) as being legitimate or not.

moon: I wasn't proposing it as a rubric, just saying that Armand's comparison was off-base.

Armand's comparison is off-base in the sense that Turkey's existence isn't threatened in the same way that Israel is (I don't believe that Israel is really threatened in that way, but I'll freely admit that the threat to their existence is more significant than any threat to Turkey's existence).

However, from a "consistency" perspective, how is Turkey's actions (using force against a non-state actor in another state's sovereign territory) any different than Israel's (using force against a non-state actor in aother state's sovereign territory)? If one is right, and one is wrong, why?

That's exactly what I was getting at - thank you Baltar. Yeah Hezbollah is a bigger threat to Israel (though surely not "existential") than the PKK is to Turkey - but if we were in Turkey's shoes and had gone through what they've gone through with the Kurds I'd think Bush would be sending troops across the Iraqi the border with guns blazing.

Me too, although I was thinking about it as "if it's self-determination for one, why not for the other.

Then, of course, my cynic-o-meter tells me to stop expecting consistent standards from foreign policy. Or at least consistent standards in anything other than self-interest.