Spengler says nerts to the Turks

It about kills me to disagree, as I rarely do, with Spengler's column, especially this point:

News accounts link Turkey’s threat to invade northern Iraq with outrage over a resolution before the US Congress recognizing that Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population in 1915. American diplomats are in Ankara seeking to persuade the Turks to stay on their side of the border. Why the Turks should take out their rancour at the US on the Kurds might seem anomalous until we consider that the issue of Armenian genocide has become a proxy for Turkey’s future disposition towards the Kurds. “We did not exterminate the Armenians,” Ankara says in effect, “and, by the way, we’re going to not exterminate the Kurds, too.”

Nations have tragic flaws, just as do individuals. The task of the tragedian is to show how catastrophic occurrences arise from hidden faults rather than from random error. Turkish history is tragic: a fatal flaw in the national character set loose the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, as much as Macbeth’s ambition forced him to murder Banquo. Because the same flaw still torments the Turkish nation, and the tragedy has a sequel in the person of the Kurds, Turkey cannot face up to its century-old crime against the Armenians.

Shakespeare included the drunken Porter in Macbeth for comic relief; in the present version, the cognate role is played by US President George W Bush, who has begged Congress not to offend an important ally by stating the truth about what happened 100 years ago. The sorry spectacle of an American president begging Congress not to affirm what the whole civilized world knows to be true underlines the overall stupidity of US policy towards the Middle East. It is particularly despicable for a Western nation to avert its eyes from a Muslim genocide against a Christian population.

That last line stings. As I've said, the Turks behaved despicably toward the Armenians, and they also oppress the Kurds. No question. (Spengler is also right to suggest reading Pamuk's novel "Snow," which shows how Islam is filling the spiritual desolation left by Turkey's secular modernity; I read the novel on the flight back from Turkey this summer, and it was somewhat unnerving.) Zeyno Baran, a secular Turk, told me this week that the fears she expressed to me this summer in Istanbul that a victorious AK Party would seek to Islamize Turkey were more than being realized. None of this is any good. And yet, I still cannot see why the US, which has so much trouble internationally at the present moment, should seek to borrow more of it, just to rub the Turks' noses in their historical crime.