View From The Middle
Congress Has No Idea What Turkey-Armenian Decision Means To Us
By Charles Rogers

Our members of Congress are a bunch of idiots. Self-serving and by-all-means driven by their urge to keep their elected place in the American government at all costs - all costs, no matter that human lives are at stake; lives of our American soldiers.

The subject this time, reaches back centuries to when the Ottoman Turks, mostly Muslim, were warring over religion with the Armenians, who were mostly Christians and who felt they were being treated as second-class citizens.

It was the turn of the 20th century and Armenians were defending themselves against the Turks as World War I fomented and spread throughout Europe. America entered the war and it came to an end in 1918, just after the Turks allegedly massacred every Armenian they could find, pillaging and burning villages, raping women and killing mothers and their children haphazardly, and then hieing themselves to the nearby mountains until nomad Armenians came again, at which time more were slaughtered.

Finally, Russia claimed Armenia as one of its states and the status generally remained the same - except - the native Armenians and their predecessors have never forgotten the massacre of their people, said to be approximating over a million and a half, although the present-day Turks claim it was no more than 300,000.

While Armenians, along with their allies, still want to call it genocide, present Turkish leaders look upon the shooting, maiming and killing of these civilians as "part of war," and, therefore, accepted as part of the cost, while others want now to call the killings acts of genocide "as an attempt to deliberately and systematically destroy the Armenian people." This would, essentially, condemn all Turks.

Here's where our Congress comes in - in all its exemplary intelligence:

At this time, especially in that part of the world, Turkey is on our side. It borders the northern section of Iraq, you see, where there are treacherous, dangerous, hazardous mountains that are, to put it succinctly, the toughest to negotiate in the world, unless, of course, you are a Turk. The Turkish people - and they alone - have literally established mountain paths so that American soldiers will be able to get supplies to various areas of Iraq; needed supplies, both for the war effort and for subsistence of destitute Iraqis.

We also have a large airbase near the Turkish mountainside - the only airbase close enough for us to supply our troops properly.

Now, the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week brought up the question of a resolution vote that would officially and formally call the 1915 massacre of Armenians a "genocide." Not only was this met by a great deal of consternation by Turkish leaders, but they were so aggravated they suggested it would be awfully hard to get American supplies to our troops down that mountain path without a guide. It would also be awfully hard to land a big, fat C-130 USAF aircraft carrying supplies to our troops if there was no airport on which to land it.

Now, by all means, we all know the massacre to be a genocide - an attempt to rid the world of an entire people. But we also know there is a time for everything. This is not the time to hurt our relations with Turkey and possibly reduce their cooperation in the war.

The only reason Congress wants to bring this up now is purely political. They can't see anything beyond the next election!

Yes, it should have been done in 1920, perhaps, but not now. Not when we need Turkey.

There should be no question that the resolution should be shelved.

Yeah. They're a bunch of idiots!