I love this “reply” to the Turks by the Iraqi president, Talabani, who just happens to be a Kurd.
“We are looking for peace, not war, and to solve problems peacefully,? said Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president.
…. But Mr. Talabani, who is himself a Kurd, added tartly, “We will not hand any Kurdish man to Turkey, even a Kurdish cat.?
Ah, the language of diplomacy. Well, he’s lucky, he has Condi Rice to teach the niceties of diplomacy to him. After all, she’s the one who tutored our diplomat-in-chief, George Bush. Of great satisfaction to George Bush must be the realization that he can actually point out on a map the string of countries that are either falling apart or lining up against us, from Turkey and Iraq in the west to a re-talabanized Afghanistan and destabilized nuclear Pakistan in the east and our medieval hero Ahmedinajad the Holocaust Denier in the middle. The stars align.
Is there ANYONE out there in bloglandia who can see why we should teach geography in school? Not the “can you recite the state capitals” b.s. that passes for geography in most schools but the kind that tells you which nations are landlocked, what borders are porous, what lakes are drying up, what land is deforested, what cities are expanding in the form of slums, what countries are economically dominated by foreign ethnic minorities, what countries have ties through colonialism to European counties, which, which, which.
Why are Americans SO ignorant of the world around them? They don’t even know anything about Canada or Mexico. One wag had it that the purpose of wars is to teach Americans geography. Sadly, it was more than a joke.