Time:

Turkey has voted itself the right to launch cross-border military attacks on Kurdish separatist fighters holed up in Northern Iraq, but it has not yet decided to exercise that right. The Turkish Parliament on Wednesday authorized military operations into neighboring Iraq to hunt down guerrillas of the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which continues to launch attacks inside Turkey that have killed more than 30 Turks in recent weeks. Although Turkey has sent troops on similar missions in northern Iraq on up to two dozen previous occasions during the 1980s and 90s, this would be the first such incursion since U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and took responsibility for security in Iraq.

It may be terribly inconvenient for us if Turkey decides to go ahead and launch cross-border military attacks on what they (as well as the U.S.) regard as PKK terrorists, but are we really in any position to tell them that it ain’t right, or that they don’t have the right?

Isn’t this precisely the justification with which we invaded Afghanistan and overthrew their government? That we had the right to retaliate against past terrorist attacks and protect ourselves against future terrorist attacks by invading a third country where the terrorists were hiding out?

Fittingly, cross-border attacks are to a full scale regime-change invasion as the scale of PKK terrorism is to the scale of the 9/11 attacks. So we can’t even tax Turkey with a disproportionate response.