With more than 100,000 troops and all those F-16s, tanks and helicopter gunships massed on the Turkish-Iraqi border, the new George W Bush greater Middle East war - that is, the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan - is ready to roll.

To say this is all part of a "structural crisis" between Turkey and the US would be the understatement of the century. Turkey is actually deciding nothing less than its real geopolitical position in a mesmerizing balancing act involving Iran, Israel, the Arab world, Europe, Russia and the US.

Iraqi Kurds definitely will not betray their cousins, the Turkish Kurds - although they did so, for instance, in 1992, when they collaborated with the Turkish military in an anti-PKK joint offensive.

This mini-war transcends the PKK. Ankara's ultimate nightmare is an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, a virtual certainty after the incorporation of oil-rich Kirkuk

"vision" in fact presupposes the partition of Iraq.