Musings on the daily events in politics and sports as well as some local bar stops along the way in LA.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Woah… did we just start a war?

Ok so for about… well for about my entire life I have been active in trying to get an Armenian Genocide resolution passed in Congress and it looks like that time has come. Now we’ve been working on this for so long that we completely forgot that there are actual repercussions to our actions. Turkey has always been thought of as that government out there that denies the genocide, but never as an actual government that can react when being confronted with the truth about their past its citizens have grown up denying. Well after the resolution passed the committee, I went to CNN.com and saw the banner headline of breaking news that Turkey recalled its ambassador to the US. Now the very first thing a country does before things get bad is recall its ambassador, and that got me thinking. We all assume that Turkey is all talk, but how do we actually know that? What if they aren’t, we sure are screwed if that happens. But more realistically it got me thinking about the Karabakh situation and how Azerbaijan has turned up the war rhetoric ever since they got their pipeline going. In the US we are using every single cent of political capital we have to get this genocide resolution passed, but then what do we do when it passes and we have 0 capital left and a really pissed off Turkey giving Azerbaijan the green light to go for Artsakh? Its going to be much harder to press our government in Washington to intervene since we just used up all of our favors and are going to be seen as those Armenians who are always complaining about something. Basically my point is if youre an Armenian-American like me doing everything you can to get this bill passed, I better see you in Armenia if there are any real repercussions out there. Just a thought.

Now on to more realistic thoughts. The bill looks like its going to go to the House floor. Speaker Pelosi is getting pretty far out on this issue that it doesn’t look like she’s gonna back down to the Bush administration this time. This is it people, the committee vote was nothing. Remember we had a committee vote in 2005 and that one passed 40-7, this one was only 27-21. People are jumping ship like nothing, were losing co-sponsors due to the intense lobbying by Turkey. The war-hawks are gonna keep going against us so you HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN. If we end up losing this vote, don’t expect to see another one for 10 years or so, nobody is going to bring this issue up on the floor again. After all of our attempts these next few weeks are the most important for any Armenian-American activist out there, call your member of congress and make sure theyre on the right side of this issue, tell all your friends and collegues from those random districts that you never wanted to bother before. Cold call random people if you have to-just do something because this is the least you can do to remember those who perished at the hands of the Turks in 1915.

Now get to a phone.