Having failed miserably to force a US retreat in Iraq, House Democrats and their skittish Republican counterparts have now resorted to asymmetrical political warfare against President Bush, his administration and US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

About 70% of all supplies supporting current US combat operations flow through Turkey. Its strategic location has made the air base at Incirlik a vital lifeline to the US military. It doesn’t take a legal scholar to articulate the implications to Iraq or Afghanistan if Turkey denied access to Incirlik. On October 10, 2007, over the objections of the Bush Administration, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a non-binding resolution that Chairman Tom Lantos and Speaker Nancy Pelosi insist merely acknowledges that the forced expulsions and murders of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900’s were genocide. This resolution has surfaced regularly for years. Even Bill Clinton believed so strongly in the present-day foreign policy damage it would cause, that he urged Congress to withdraw the measure. Yet many in both parties still support it.

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) recalled that Turkey denied use of its soil for attacking Iraq in 2003, which he said cost the lives of US servicemen and women. My question to Republican Kirk then is: Knowing what you now know about what happened in 2003, what will happen to US soldiers already in harm’s way in 2 theaters if Turkey does it again? To Kirk, 2 wrongs apparently will make this right.

The resolution originally had over 200 co-sponsors, but in October, dozens withdrew. This year’s version calls on President Bush to “accurately characterize” the killings, yet in April 2007 he already said that “1.5 million Armenians were annihilated through forced exile and murder.”

Last month, eight former Secretaries of State, including Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright and Warren Christopher wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi warning her that the resolution would endanger US national security interests. Tom Lantos himself warned against the resolution in 2000, citing a “long list of reasons…” But now he says that if we adopt it, it will magically restore morality to our foreign policy. Nancy Pelosi was quoted as telling her critics: “There’s never a good time…” Maybe, maybe not; but there most certainly is a bad time, and this is it.

We have nearly a quarter of a million soldiers in 2 wars in the Middle East.

Attacks on US soldiers and Iraqi civilians, vehicle-borne IEDs and other indicators of violence in and around Baghdad show declines of up to 70 percent due to the recent of efforts coalition soldiers. By every objective measure the surge has been a success, but Democrats simply can’t afford to allow success in Iraq. They ran in opposition to it in the 2006 midterm. Any Democratic presidential candidate with a snowball’s chance in hell has already branded the effort a failure. They must lose at all costs to maintain even a shred of their credibility.

Democrats would have you believe that those against this measure are trying to bury the truth; trying to deny genocide. The truth is, this resolution is not just about Armenian genocide. It is a backdoor attempt at ending the war in Iraq by driving a wedge between the United States and one of our most important allies in the region. They have been loudly criticizing the president for his lack of diplomacy and they now directly sabotage those efforts by slapping Turkey in the face for something that occurred nearly a century ago. What’s not reported in the mainstream media is that the current US Congress has even lower approval ratings than President Bush. They’re abysmal, precisely because of antics like this. The question of genocide should be left up to long-dead presidents, historians or tribunals in The Hague, not the 110th congress.

Turkey has already made several incursions into Iraq in US-made F-16s striking Kurdish terrorists hiding in the north and promises more. US soldiers may need to divert from Baghdad for security, and could get caught in the middle of that mess. We could also be denied the use of Turkish airspace to render air or logistical support to our own military. That could leave them short on food, armor or bullets. Northern Iraq, which had been the most secure region could become destabilized. But that’s the risk Democrats are willing to take in order to vote on which technical term they should apply to mass killings committed in a foreign country nearly a century ago.

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