Unified internal Iraqi political response to the Turks

I was reading through the post Cernig put up earlier today on the "interesting" news that the Iraqi government was warning Turkey to not invade northern Kurdistan to go after the PKK and a memory was motivated by the following excerpt:

``Iraq is a sovereign country and Turkey or any other country has no right to enter Iraq, but if this happens, it will be confronted by all sides in the Iraqi government, and the whole Iraqi people will confront the Turkish intervention,'' al-Dabbagh told reporters.

Some of this is bluster as the Iraqi Army is incapable of feeding itself much less fight a major conventional engagement, and some of it is a straight promise that the Kurdish peshmerga units of the Iraqi Army will go back to their roots and fight as a local defense force using guerrilla tactics. However there is a little bit more here. The Turks are seen as an existential threat by all relevant Iraqi groups and this has provided few of the rare moments of unified Iraqi political action in the past four years.

In 2003, the US government realized that the Rumsfeld fantasy of invading, taking Baghdad and installing a friendly dictator after the illusions of democracy were allowed was a sick joke, and that the US military was stuck with an insurgency of some sort. The US military does not have the manpower to fight a large insurgency, and our doctrine since Vietnam has been to outsource that fight to infantry heavy armies such as the Turks while the US provides logistics and rapid response forces. So in the summer and fall of 2003, the US went begging for brigades. India turned us down, Pakistan turned us down, Nigeria and Bangledesh turned us down. The Turks agreed to provide two brigades of infantry to deploy to Anbar and Ninevah Provinces.

One of the provisos of that deal was for the US to crack down on the PKK. Whoops that never happened.

And the Turkish deployment also never happened. The very weak IGC, the handpicked 'representatives' of the major non-Ba'athist Iraqi factions, was able to maintain a unified front and force the US to turn down the two brigades that Turkey was offering.

The Maliki statement is consistent with this previous action: everyone who matters in Iraq considers Turkey an existential threat to their own hide and therefore they are willing to stick together to minimize and mitigate against this threat.