In Progress Fareed Zakaria: You're from Turkey; how do you--how do Turks look upon this situation? There's a great deal of fear in Turkey about the removal of Saddam and what it would mean because there are many Kurds in Turkey, but a minority often persecuted; now the government has a much more accommodating policy towards the Kurds of Turkey. It looks to me like Turkey should be relieved because it feared the--you know what would happen when the Kurds became autonomous or in Iraq; they're being pretty good citizens; they're--they're playing by the rules of the game; they're not trying to declare their own republic; they're not telling the Kurds of Turkey let's all create a greater Kurdistan. Is that--(a) is that your sense and (b) are Turks seeing it that way?
Omer Taspinar: That's right; yet George Bush would definitely lose in Turkey big time because of the--[Laughs].
Fareed Zakaria: Because of the same issue. [Laughs]
Omer Taspinar: The--the perception in Turkey is that the Kurds now have it very good in--in Northern Iraq and that they are on the path to establishing first a very strong autonomy and if they have as their capital city Kirkuk and the oil resources of Kirkuk they will in the long run try to establish independence and that's a doomsday scenario for Turkey because more than half of the Kurds who live in the Middle East are in Turkey and Turkey still has this fear of dismemberment which is a legacy of the Ottoman Empire that if the Kurds establish a state in Northern Iraq that would set a very dangerous precedent for Turkey's own Kurds--not only the seven--eight millions living in the Turkish part of the Kurdish region, the southeast, but also for the Kurds who live in Istanbul, Izmir, Garzanti, the places in the western parts of Turkey. So there's a great deal of fear.
Watch the Interview