Turkey and Genocide: To Condemn Or Not To Condemn?

I briefly mentioned this on Friday, but it deserves its own post. At issue is a U.S. House resolution backed by Speaker Pelosi and others branding the WWI-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks officially as genocide. The Turkish government is taking offense to this, and it is having ripple effects on U.S.-Turkey relations.

In particular, it has consequences for this already-tense situation-

Turkey's government agreed on Monday, as expected, to seek parliamentary permission to send troops into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there, but said it still hoped this would not be necessary.

"Our wish is that we will not have to use this motion... but the most painful reality of our country, our region, is the reality of terror," government spokesman Cemil Cicek told a news conference after a cabinet meeting.

The United States has urged Turkey, its NATO ally, to refrain from sending troops into mainly Kurdish northern Iraq, fearing this could destabilise the only relatively peaceful area of Iraq and potentially the wider region...

(And let's ignore for now the hypocrisy of American hawks warning Turkey against this, while simultaneously campaigning for the possibility of chasing Iranian agents across their border.)

My initial feeling is that the House would do best to bow to reality and drop this for the time being. Condemning this genocide (and yes, it was genocide) would have no real-world benefits for the Armenian people. On the other hand, they do deserve the acknowledgment of what happened to their people. So should the timing be taken into consideration? And are the demands of the Turkish government reasonable, or diplomatic blackmail?

To me, this is lose-lose. Either you lose on principle, or you lose in international relations.

The Reality-Based Community's Michael O'Hare advocates for pragmatism on this. Philip Giraldion Huffington Post does the same. Mark Kleiman, also from the Reality-Based Community, dissents and makes the case for what the House is doing.