With General Petraeus declaring the surge a success – only 1000 civilians recorded murdered this month – just as the car bombs begin again, the whole Iraq thang may go into a whole new phase thanks to two issues facing Turkey, one a tragedy, the other farce.

The tragedy is the killing of 15 – possibly more – Turkish soldiers by PKK guerrillas last Saturday, by far the largest single casualty the PKK has inflicted on the Turks, and an indication that they may be gearing up for a new stage of conflict having regrouped after scattering after Turkey’s election.

The Turkish PM surprised many by not crossing the border after the July election, but in fact he had little need – much of the point of the gesture would have been domestic politics, to shore up legitimacy. In the end he got such a large majority that not even the army was willing to try anything funny.

Now however, the issue may have become genuinely strategic, with a need to try and nip the PKK in the bud – still operating in northern Iraq, still using US supplied weapons (by rogue soldiers say the US). A full scale invasion would require a parliamentary vote, but a series of large raids has already been authorised.

The US is spitting chips about it – one of the reasons Erdogan has so far avoided such a step. Northern Iraq is the only place that works – works so well that it’s signing its own oil and trade deals as a de facto separate country – and a US-Turkish rift would be serious indeed. Why then is Congress antagonising one of its hitherto staunchest postwar allies by passing one of these junk laws, this one declaring the Armenian massacres of WW1 a “genocide“.

It very likely was a genocide – though some reputable scholars describe the whole thing as more complicated than that, and they are not merely David Irving types – but what is the business of a seat of government officially defining how past events are to be described? It’s part of genocide kitsch, one of its purposes being the use of the “g” word in present conflicts – Darfur for example, where the rush to such definition (and subsequent inaction) turned out to have more to do with Sudan-China oil ties than much else.

The Bush administration will probably disregard Congress’s resolution if it passes – although it’s dumb enough not to.

Interestingly enough, one country with a position on the question is Israel – its official policy being that it wasn’t a genocide. Why? Well not only is Turkey its only Muslim ally, but Teodor Herzl, zionism’s founder, was in Constantinople in 1908 advising the “Young Turks” – who perpetrated the massacres – on how to build a modern nation. You had to have an ethnically united nation he said. Just like we zionists are going to have …