Turks and Armenians, wolves and wolverines

Slate magazine has a piece on BMW diplomacy:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got her first taste of shuttle diplomacy Saturday, when a deal between Turkey and Armenia that had been in the works for months almost fell apart in the final hours of negotiations. An unspecified "dispute over wording" had Clinton working two cell phones from the back seat of a BMW in Switzerland, where she had come to lend a show of American support to the signing of an historic agreement between the two countries. Turkey and Armenia have long been at odds over Turkey's don't-call-it-genocide attitude regarding the slaughter of Armenians during World War One, and Armenia's squabble with Turkish ally Azerbaijan over an ethnically Armenian area in Azeri territory. Turkey closed its border with Armenia more than fifteen years ago but, under the freshly-inked deal, the two countries will open the border and set up an historic commission to investigate what happened to Turkish Armenians during World War One.

Rico says what happened was that, while the world was distracted by the war in Europe, the Turks slaughtered as many Armenians as they could; not owning up to that shows a paucity of big-country attitude. Of course, it took America a hundred years or so to admit the same about our slaughter of the Indians...