Mass killings, whatever the label, must always be condemned. But when such condemnations carry the potential to cause more loss of life, it is time to give pause.
The effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies to label as genocide the mass killings of Armenians almost a century ago combines the worst of American foreign policy: crass politics, international naiveté, and raw hypocrisy.
Pelosi's district has a significant number of Armenian-American voters. The idea of members of Congress backing legislation simply to win the support of a local constituency isn't exactly new to US politics. But in this case, such vote pandering could cost lives - Turkish, Kurdish, Iraqi, and American.
Neither political party in the US has a monopoly on ignorance of Middle East regional politics. Just before the invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration floated the idea of asking Turkey - the last imperial power to occupy Iraq - to invade from the north. Not only did the idea of a return by their former colonial masters horrify Iraqis, but such a scenario meant a Turkish occupation of Kurdistan, thus guaranteeing a distracting mini-war between America's staunch North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally and the one Iraqi ethnic group the US could count on. The genocide resolution, sponsored by the Democrats, is just as self-defeating. It undermines the United States' own interests and threatens regional stability.
Consider this: Half the food and fuel - and 70 percent of the air supplies - heading for US troops in Iraq transits Turkey. Ankara's threat to interrupt that flow could affect US operations on the ground - and potentially endanger American lives.
Consider also that Turkey, with an Islamist government, is an important and respected voice of moderation in the Muslim world, a neighborhood in which the US has few remaining friends.
And consider the escalating confrontation between Turkish forces and the Kurds. Ankara wants the Iraqi government to intervene. But a regime whose writ does not extend beyond the US-protected Green Zone is not in much position to tell Kurdish irregulars to stand down. Nor is anyone else in the region - except the US, But with the Turks in a snit, the US has lost its leverage. A full-scale Turkish invasion would affect not only Iraq, but have implications for neighboring Syria and Iran, both of which have Kurdish minorities in the border regions.
And then there is the issue of hubris. From the perspective of the Middle East, America ceded the moral high ground long ago. With tens of thousands of civilians dead in Iraq and the word "genocide" used almost daily in the region's media to describe the body count in the Palestinian territories, American indignation over massacres that took place almost a century ago seems hypocritical at best.
What happened in Armenia was a tragedy. But it would also be a tragedy to cause more deaths with an empty and ill-timed gesture that cannot change the past.
Editorial: Don't compound the tragedy
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