The Turkish equivalent of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced on Thursday that his nation would be willing to use military force in Iraq to drive out the terrorist threat posed by Kurds who have crossed borders to carry out or support terrorism in Turkey.

General Yasar Buyukanit said Turkey would employ the option of chasing after Kurdish rebels within northern Iraq, where a semi-autonomous Kurdish regional government reigns. The Kurds are a much closer ally of ours than the the Shiites or Sunnis who make up the bulk of the rest of Iraq. If Turkey ever does begin shelling Kurdish territory within Iraq that would put the U.S. in the precarious decision of having to defend, diplomatically speaking, two of it’s allies. Turkey is a NATO nation and potential European Union member.

Who knows what will happen. This could just be a threat from employed by the Turks to see to it that U.S. forces do more to root out the terrorists in Iraqi “Kurdistan”.

As Buyukanit said of entering Northern Iraq “You are met by Kurdish flags, not Iraqi ones”.

Hopefully, nothing will come out of it, but if it does, the American opposition to Turkish intervention may be hard to justify. After all, the U.S. did invade two nations to stop and preempt terrorist threats (in the case of Iraq, that argument never held much water). We’ll see what happens.