Five million dollars, and I live in ID so my presidential vote isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on.
Which didn’t stop the idea of taking the money and running away laughing from being appealing until war crimes rather abruptly entered the equation.
This is overly simplistic, and it paints a cartoonish portrait of Erdogan.
The Turkish government has shown it can tolerate Kurdish militias on its border just fine when it suits it (the Peshmerga).
Erdogan has adopted a strongly nationalist posture since his party lost many conservatives, including Kurdish conservatives in the first general election of 2015.
The Turkish government labeled the YPG as a terrorist threat on its border because of its affinity to the PKK and this nationalist posture Erdogan has adopted. It’s reasonable to view them as a threat but it’s on the level of Gulf War II hysteria and rhetoric to just start invading without any provocation.
I’d be more concerned about the civil war among the Kurds that would result from just turning parts of Syria, Iraq, and Iran into Kurdistan. It’s not like they see eye-to-eye on everything.
Unprincipled leader? How about this interpretation: The Kurds weren’t ready for a state in Northern Iraq because the loyalties of the Kurds themselves are to families like Barzani and Talabani and not to a state.
To the OP: I’d pay these governments and the Kurds off to find a way to peacefully coexist, but “freeing the Kurds” isn’t a straightforward proposition and the goal of a nation state is probably a bigger mess than what we have now. How about getting the Kurds living under peaceful, democratic, liberal governments that respect their ethnicity? That’s the only truly stable solution to the problem.
Sorry, that was an answer to the question in the OP. Very truly yours, Dr. Evil. 
Whether there is any way, bribing politicians, bribing the people, or whatever, to give up the Kurdish territory.
Despite assertions that the Turks, and others, really really care about continuing control of their land, despite hating the Kurds, I don’t know that I believe that.
In cases where, for example, some real estate developers wants to buy several blocks of land in the run-down part of the city and replace them with new upscale apartments, malls, and restaurants, you’ll hear lots of people saying, “Oh, all those people have lived there for 20 years, they love their homes, they’ll never move!” …And then 98% of them move, when offered a reasonable price for their land.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t true believers, but for something like this, we’re looking at the popular vote not the lone holdouts.
There’s also the question of framing.
If I frame something as, “We’ve got this crap slum in the middle of town, and I want all those people out of this area, so better people can come in and give me some money.” Well, I suspect that the number of holdouts won’t be 2% and the amount of money that I have to pay to get people to move is going to be higher than if I frame it as, “This is where I grew up and I’m sad to see it looking so run down. The schools are falling behind, the electricity isn’t stable, it’s a bad place to live. I want to make it into a better place, and I want to allow the people who live there today to move to a place where they can live in greater safety and greater comfort or, ideally, come right back in after we have brought everything back up to regulations and modern standards of living.”
There are a wide variety of options for how you give people money, who you give money, how you frame it, etc. and I feel like there’s at least one where even if they refuse the money, they’re going to come out of it looking bad enough that they’ll have to make peace anyways.
If you come in saying, “I am trying to save the lives of the Kurdish people, who are now trying to have their land stolen from them, after defending Turkey at great loss of life from the spreading terror of ISIS. Please, Turkey, how much do you want? Bleed our veins, not theirs! Only let the Kurds live!” How do they respond and not look like heels? No one wants to look like a heel in front of the entire rest of the world.
A lot of the AK party’s base, I believe, is in Eastern Turkey, which is the poor and less densely populated area of the country. The average household income of Turkey is $3,800 a year. If you’re making $2500 a year selling chickens to Western Turkey. If we give you $500 more, that’s a significant boost in your income. If we choose 10m people who live near the Syrian border, in prime AK territory, and offer them that $500 each, for the next decade, that’s only $5b a year and will certainly have a pretty big impact on how that segment of the population interprets the politics of the situation.
Iraq has 153 billion barrels of proven oil reserves with about 40% of that in what Kurds claim as their land. That works out to a touch over 4 trillion worth of oil transferring out of Iraqi territory at current prices. Obviously, we won’t pay market prices for oil that still needs extraction and the Kurds own. It’s likely to be a difficult and costly hurdle to get over, though.
This is a warning for accusing another poster of trolling. Do not accuse others of trolling in this forum. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
[/moderating]
As I noted to you in PM, I wasn’t intending to accuse him of “trolling” in the sense that the internet abhors. It was simply an extension of the “red herring” metaphor. If Sage Rat was offended, I apologize. I didn’t mean in any way to accuse him of skulduggery, simply was attempting to find out what the OP actually was asking.
Which I see has been answered. 
Perhaps you meant “trawling”, not trolling. But in the context of this MB, it’s kinda the same thing.
Sure. I may well vote for him anyway.
I would say that attempting to frame issues like this as if they are merely exercises in economics is doomed to failure. First of all, economics is the study of how to distribute scarce resources; the issue between the Kurds and the Ottoman rulers and Turkish peoples is not one of scarcity of resource. It is, rather, a question of control, power, and the shared history of conflict between two peoples, each with its own desire for control of destiny. The area which would become “Kurdistan” if the Kurds were successful in obtaining independence from Turkey is an area vital to Turkish control of their central plateau. The Turks have no intention of letting that land go; they fought long and costly wars with the various Persian rulers to obtain that land in the first place.
Then, there is the simple fact that the Kurdish Workers’ Party has over the last 40 years engaged in various acts of terrorism. You might as well ask the Israelis how much it would take in payment for them to concede a separate state to the Palestinians. Regardless of how attached a country feels to its lands, it most certainly is not interested in being seen as “giving in” to terrorists.
In short, you have ethnic, political and historical reasons why Turkey and the Kurds are in conflict. Those tend to have very few “economic” solutions. 
From the Google dictionary, a definition of “trolling”:
“fish by trailing a baited line along behind a boat.”
ex. “we trolled for mackerel”
I was trying to throw you a bit of a lifeline, but OK.
Dunno where this “hate” assertion comes from. It’s not like the Kurds and Turks are traditionally implacable enemies or anything. The Ottomans were cosmopolitan and had no such animosity( and the Ottoman ruling class themselves used the word ‘Turk’ as a perjorative synomym for ‘country hick’ ). Even with the rise of Turkish ethnic nationalism in the 19th century the Kurds didn’t become outsiders so much as “not-yet-Turks.” The goal of Turkish nationalism at least up until the early 1990’s wasn’t to keep the Kurds as an underclass, but rather to assimilate them by referring to them as ‘mountain Turks’ and banning the use of the Kurdish language and some cultural trappings. The cultural clash was almost more social/class-based than ethnic.
A certain degree of tribal animosity might be on the rise recently as the idea of Turkicizing the Kurds may be fading as an achievable goal and with the agitation across the borders in Iraq and Syria. But we still are talking almost 3 million Turko-Kurdish intermarriages here. The relationship is probably rather closer( though not AS close )to that between Turkish and Persian Iranians. And hell I’ve met Iranian Kurds who consider themselves Iranian first, Kurds second. You can find the same in Turkey.
And while DSYoungEsq is absolutely correct that this doesn’t boil down to economics, the Kurds represent anywhere from 15-25% of the population. Screw the land, why would Turkey want to lose that tax base ;). OR the votes - the more conservative Kurds are frequently reliable AKP voters who are seen as having been more responsive than other parties to the economic plight of the underdeveloped rural east, where the majority of Kurds live.
In short - Turkey does not desire to be free of the Kurds. It WANTS its very large Kurdish population. It rather wishes they were Turks, but they want them even if they aren’t as a complementary population, just like the Turks in Iran. You can’t buy them off, because the Turks have no interest in selling.
Too late to add: And it is a near-certainty that many Turkish Kurds have no interest in being bought. The PKK and the idea of an independent Turkish Kurdistan( rather than increased autonomy)is far from universally popular.
Small nitpick: Turkey considers Kurds to be Turks, I believe. That’s of course not quite accurate (they are probably more related to Persians than to Turks), but they were so long intermingled with the Turks that Turkey prefers to treat them as actual Turks.
Cite?
The government’s promoting “Mountain Turks” as a name for Kurds is something that came from Ataturk and military governments. This term hasn’t been used in the past 30 years. I doubt there are many Turks or Kurds who ever really adopted this ideology.
Turkish Nationalists fought a war almost 100 years ago to stop Anatolia from looking like this after the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which was probably the last time there was any possibility of substantially different borders in the area.
Why don’t you go look up Kurdish support for the AKP or the ‘Yes’ vote for the Presidential referendum and learn something of what Tamerlane was trying to teach you.
This topic is far more complex than your simplistic proposition, but it’s hardly surprising given America’s series of blunders in the Middle East. All of these blunders are based on simplistic notions of who wants what.
Very few political questions, especially about forming a new country, are ever universally popular.
