18 below zero of the deck
For Friday's Alaska World Affairs lunch event I estimated we would have 82 people for lunch and 10 for coffee only. The hotel count was 80 lunches and 13 coffee onlys. My estimate was right on!
I thoroughly enjoyed General Ralston's presentation. He's a good speaker. As Special Envoy to Turkey it is his task to work with Turkey and the Kurds to get Turkey to be less hostile to the Kurds and to try to get the small minority of Kurds to quit making terrorists forays from northern Iraq into Turkey. (The Kurds also make terrorists forays into Iran.) The Kurds want to create a Kurdish country by annexing the Kurd part of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Turkey is totally uninterested in this idea. General Ralston is trying to get the Kurdish government to squelch the terrorists. He thinks that if the Kurds are unwilling or unsuccessful in stopping their terrorists from going into Turkey, that by later this spring Turkey will invade northern Iraq to stop it.
The analogy that Ralston used was how would we feel if a band of terrorists kept regularly coming across the border from Mexico with car bombs, etc, and the Mexican government did nothing about it.
General Ralston discussed the booming economy in northern Iraq where the Kurds live. He stated that one would never know there was a war going on in the rest of Iraq. By next year there will be nonstop flights between New York City and the main Kurdish city in northern Iraq. Northern Iraq, the Kurd area, has had 12 years of protection under the No-Fly Zone, a lot of U.S. assistance and money in reconstruction and setting up their government. Hence their current quality of life. Their government is now a reasonably robust representative government that is working well. Ralston hopes to get the Kurds to understand that a Turkey invasion is not in the their best economic interest.
Ralston had just returned from Iraq and said that Baghdad was at least as bad as the media shows. However, he reminded us that South Korea was in even worse shape than Baghdad when the truce with Northern Korea was declared. Look at South Korea now.
11:39:59 AM 
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