More Unwarranted Congressional Resoluting?

I've been hard on Congress recently for wading into various political free speech controversies. It's an area into which it just shouldn't go. Similarly, I tend to think the House Foreign Relations Committee should stay out of the business of resolving historical disputes in other countries. Yesterday, the Committee voted 27 to 21 to recognize the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey during the dying days of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire.

The Turks are touchy about that time in their history. While they don't deny that tremendous loss of life occurred, they argue that it was a natural byproduct of war and not genocide. Ethnic Armenians around the globe have campaigned for its recognition as genocide for years, with limited success. The French Parliament recognized it in 2006. Oddly, the House Committee isn't the first US agent to use the label - Ronald Regan did during his presidency (his quote rolls at the end of Atom Egoyan's Ararat, IIRC). But, as the Times article points out, his successors have backed off that label in the interest of good relations with Turkey.

I think there's a tremendous amount of denial involved on the Turks' part - a forced evacuation of an ethnic minority leading to a death march across the country sounds like genocide to me.
But a resolution from a House Committee isn't going to settle the debate - it's not as if they're a panel of historians, after all.. And it only serves to strain relation with the Turks at a time when they're keen to charge into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish separatists. So why do it now? Of all the times to put aside politics and do the right thing!