Turks, Kurds and the US-Turkish relationship

Some light on a murky subject:

The recent detention of Turkish soldiers by US troops in northern Iraq is only
a symptom of the divergence of interests between erstwhile Cold War allies.
The vote of the Turkish Grand National Assembly this year against allowing the
United States to use Turkey's territory for transit of military forces in the
run-up to Gulf War II is likewise only a symptom of that divergence of
interests.

At the origin of that divergence is the response of US foreign policy to the
events around September 11, 2001. Look for those divergences to continue to
manifest, despite Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's recently concluded
visit to Washington.

The naming of the trinity of Iraq, North Korea and Iran as the "axis of evil"
covers over the "deterritorialization" of US security and defense policy. What
does this mean? It means that geography no longer has fundamental strategic,
but only tactical, significance. The term "deterritorialization" arose among
political scientists in the late 20th century to refer to the emergence of
non-traditional security issues and the significance of the psychological
aspect of social mobilization. Under conditions of contemporary US security
and defense policy, it has been given a new connotation.

Euro-American international political studies drew attention during the 1980s
to the new emergence of security issues, from the danger of "nuclear winter"
to that of global warming, which required international cooperation to be
resolved and so were no longer based in zero-sum notions of traditional
military-strategic calculations. They were therefore called "non-traditional"
security issues. (Mikhail Gorbachev and his ideologues in fact drew upon that
Western academic work when they reformulated Soviet foreign-policy doctrine so
as to place the common interests of mankind above even those of the Soviet
state.)

Asia Times