So what happened?
After nearly 24 hours of rumors, confirmations, denials, and conflicting statements, we still don't really know what happened yesterday along the Turkey-Iraq border. Near as I can tell, there was a minor border skirmish of the kind that's happened regularly for a couple of years now, but the notoriously unreliable Debkafile site ran with an account that made it out to be much bigger, and as reporters for mainstream media tried to pin down the story, assorted sources in Turkey with various axes to grind played them like fiddles.
This is a truly frightening situation. The standoff between Turks and Kurds could send the whole Middle East up in flames, with Team Bush forced to choose sides among two of its allies, but the wire services don't even have reporters stationed near the border to find out first-hand what's going on, relying instead on spokespeople in Ankara and Irbil and Baghdad and Washington.
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