Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan isn't just talking the talk on responding hard and fast against guerrillas operating from the US-protected Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; he is also prepared to walk the walk.

US President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice need to realize that when Erdogan flies into Washington for talks next week, it will be their last chance to prevent what could prove to be a very dangerous escalation of the ongoing crisis in Iraq, with consequences they have not foreseen.

So far, the Bush administration has proven to be largely ineffectual - one might even call them naïve liberals - in their refusal to rein in the Kurdish authorities and force them to prevent the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from carrying out cross-border operations inside Turkey from their strongholds in the caves of Mount Cudi.

This myopia on the part of Bush and Rice is especially striking when one remembers that, in the eyes of Turkey - America's oldest and most powerful Middle East ally and a strategically crucial member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization anchoring the alliance's vulnerable southeastern flank - the PKK are terrorists who are responsible for attacks and ensuing counterinsurgency operations that have killed 20 times the total number of Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks. (Around 70,000 people are believed to have died in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict over the past decade-and-a-half compared with the 3,000 Americans who were killed on September 11, 2001.) If there is one thing Bush should understand, it is the determination of a nation that has suffered from rampant terror to root out the groups it holds responsible from the mountain caves in which they are hiding.

The failure of the US government to exert any significant pressure to restrain the Kurds - a group that has negligible independent political clout in Washington - is bound to be noted throughout the region and relevant conclusions drawn. If Bush and Rice are even unwilling to call a halt to the excesses of the PKK when the Kurdish authorities are so utterly dependent on Washington, how can they be expected to take any action to force significant concessions from Israel in the peace process at the upcoming Annapolis summit? Or who can have any faith that the president will show the backbone to prevent any preemptive Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, if he cannot even force the Kurds to control the PKK?

A strong, no-nonsense US message to the Kurds is essential to prevent a massive Turkish military reaction that could shatter Ankara's half-century-long close ties to Washington and plunge Iraq into a new cycle of major crisis. It is also a vital first step to restore the general credibility in the region that Bush has so dangerously squandered.

It may well be that the president and the secretary of state are so obsessed with their ideas to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or on talking tough to Iran, that they have actually not realized the severity of the looming crisis. If so, it is high time they woke up. Time has run out.