I've worried that sympathy for Turkish Kurds, or even Iranian Kurds if they bizarrely decide to fight us, could spark the Iraqi Kurds to become the next main armed threat to success in Iraq.
The Iraqi Kurds seem to have their heads screwed on correctly:
The Iraqi government declared that it did not support PKK violence against Turkey. In fact, the statement specified that the Kurdish regional government does not support PKK violence against Turkey – an even more explicit political message. The statement said that the Iraqi Kurdish government had no influence over the PKK but that solving the problem presented by the PKK required a political solution. All in all, this statement is another in a long string of statements where Iraq's central government and the Kurdish regional government distance themselves from the PKK.
Good. We have long been friends with Iraq's Kurds, and I think we can both benefit from that friendship. But it would be foolish for the Kurds of Iraq to think they can prosper as an isolated independent state with hostile neighbors all around them.
With the Iraqis chasing the al Qaeda types around Mosul and the Sadrists and Iranian puppet masters taking a beating in Baghdad and the south, the armed threats to the success of the Iraqi government appear to be dwindling.
The game is hardly over, mind you, but the trajectory to victory is getting clearer.
