Oh great, now we're fighting the Kurds, too?

According to Bob Novak (yes, the same Novak who originally outed Plame as a covert operative):

The morass in Iraq and deepening difficulties in Afghanistan have not deterred the Bush administration from taking on a dangerous and questionable new secret operation. High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.

(HT: quaoar on DailyKos) This whole Turkey-Kurd conflict has been simmering for some time. A skillful U.S. might be able to finesse it and keep these two allies from going at it. But now it looks like we might be taking sides. Of course, this carries big risks:

Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded that he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied. Even if all this is true, some of the briefed lawmakers left wondering whether this was a wise policy for handling the beleaguered Kurds, who had been betrayed so often by the U.S. government in years past.

The Kurds are the one Iraqi faction that has been relatively pro-U.S., but when they find out we're helping Turkey go after their militias, that might change. I don't know if it will be possible to go after the PKK (Kurdish militia) without alienating the majority of Kurds. I don't know what the relationship is between the PKK and "mainstream" Kurdish politics. But this sounds like yet another dangerous taking of sides in a region where every time you take a side you get a whole bunch of people really pissed at you.