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Posted on 03/27/2003 5:25:20 PM PST by sarcasm
America and Turkey
A friendship on holdMar 27th 2003 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition
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AS AMERICA and Britain keep up their war against Iraq, the finger of blame is turning towards one country for the higher risks being run by the coalition forces. By denying thousands of American troops the use of Turkish soil as a launching pad for a second northern front, Turkey stands accused of throwing Pentagon war plans into disarray and, with them, more than 50 years of strategic partnership with the United States.
“In tatters”, is how Morton Abramowitz, the American ambassador to Ankara during the 1991 Gulf war, described the strategic partnership between America and Turkey in a recent editorial. “The Turks were until last week Saddam's allies, now they are just about neutral,” says another American official, referring to Turkey's belated decision, after much wrangling, to allow coalition planes to use Turkish airspace in raids against Iraqi targets. Much of the blame is being piled on Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AK): a party new to power, whose lack of experience, critics feel, has done much to cause the current mess.
When America's deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, first sought Turkey's help in a war in December, he came away saying he had “very strong” support from all levels of government. In exchange for economic aid ($4 billion, later haggled to $6 billion), Turkey would allow as many as 90,000 American soldiers on its territory and the upgrading of at least ten air bases and two ports.
A still-secret memorandum of understanding, signed on February 8th, apparently allowed the Americans to set up at least nine logistic bases in the country's predominantly Kurdish south-east provinces. American warships, loaded with combat materiel, began docking at Turkey's south-eastern port of Iskenderun. But on March 1st the Turkish parliament refused, by three votes, to approve the troop deployment. Tayyip Erdogan, the AK leader, had underestimated the strength of opposition among his own deputies. So, too, had the country's generals.
The Americans were infuriated. Surely, they argued, had Mr Erdogan and the generals really wanted it, the bill would have passed. Maybe so; but other factors contributed to the parliament's reluctance. The Americans seemed to be asking Turkey to help with a war George Bush had not yet publicly declared he would wage, while much of the rest of the world was still scrambling to find a peaceful way out.
Besides, Turkey's and America's interests have never been so directly in conflict. The Turkish army has long feared that the removal of Saddam Hussein could encourage the Kurds of northern Iraq to declare independence, which is why they wanted to send thousands of their own troops into the Kurdish enclave to prevent this from happening. The Bush administration's natural refusal to provide written guarantees that it did not support Kurdish independence only deepened Turkish suspicions that the Americans had a secret agenda in northern Iraq, though this was, and is, unlikely. For the government, bloodying its hands in a war against fellow Muslims without UN sanction would have angered not only its many openly pious constituents but millions of other Turks who had helped it to power.
Above all, the presence of thousands of American troops in the country's troublesome Kurdish provinces was simply intolerable. Why then, did Turkey lure the Americans along? For that, both the generals and the government share blame. They should have told the Americans from the start that the best they could do was open their airspace, which is what they ended up doing, and no more than that. Allied war planners would have saved much time and, yes, perhaps British and American lives. In the event, AK leaders, and the then prime minister, Abdullah Gul, may have presumed that a northern front was indispensable to the Americans and that, by dragging their feet, they could avert war. Turkey's former foreign minister, Yasar Yakis, admitted last week that Turkey never believed that the Americans had a fallback position.
To make matters worse, when America's secretary of state, Colin Powell, at last let it be known that his government now wanted nothing more than overflight rights, to which the Turkish parliament agreed on March 20th, the government denied the Americans use of Turkish airspace, saying it wanted them to agree to the deployment of thousands of Turkish troops in northern Iraq. The Americans wisely said no, chiefly because their Kurdish allies have threatened to fight the Turks should they come in large numbers, and the government backed down.
Turkey's businessmen, who had been heavily counting on American aid, are in shock, as is the Istanbul stockmarket. The mainstream press, strongly in favour of support for the Americans, complained that the government had now achieved Turkey's complete isolation.
So is this the end of a steady friendship between Turkey and its most important ally? It cannot be, since, thanks to its geography, the country remains a strategic pivot. It is NATO's only Muslim member, a strong friend of Israel and, for all its flaws, a western-style democracy. It was no accident that President Bush this week sought congressional approval for $1 billion of aid for Turkey, which it can use to acquire loans of $8 billion or more. And on March 26th Turkey's chief of the general staff, Hilmi Ozkok, announced that he wanted Turkish troops to enter northern Iraq only in full co-ordination with the Americans. The Turks, said one American official, “still have a chance to prove that they remain our friends.”
All Turks know that; all Iraqies, and Syrians, and Iranians, and Assyrians --- all know that. Which is why the Turks are so nervous. They are also afraid that we may loose control over the Kurds and the latter will move to establish the state contrary to our demands (this may still happen; do you think we will start shhooting at the Kurds? Turks are right to be very, very nervous).
This is just one of those rooms with an antrance and no (nice) exit that history has built.
Basques are in a very similar position. Considered to be decendents of the original Iberians ("people of the river"), who lived on that land even before the Celts invaded the peninsular, they have not been concured by anybody --- not even Romans. THey have their own language, live on their own land concurred by all sorts of foreigners, and this land is even contiguous. Should they become an independent state, in which case France and Spain should give up that land? Go back to a_Turk's reply, and you'll understand better the refernce to the Basques.
The same is with the our Southwest. Surely it was not always ours. What do you do if it wants to "return" to that previous state.
Whatever you decide on these matters, it up to you of course. But you should not through around your accusations and withdraw amity from the Turks so easily: no number of Armenian and Turkish friends qualifies us to do so. Look more deeply into the problem. Things are much more complex. As I said earlier, history leads you into certain rooms from which no suitable exit exists.
Ans, secondly and more importantly, you are measuring with a decade-long stick something that has been created over centuries.
YOu should know that times is measures in decades only in America. Europeans measure it in centuries, and Middle East in millennia. So it is wise not look for "reasonances:" read up and gain some deapth on the issue, or withhold judgement. Otherwise you end up doing what you did earlier: through accusations that are immediately seen as baseless.
Have a good night.
Wow. I don't know what happened there 300 years ago,
and you seem not to know what happened there 3 days ago.
Pleasant dreams.
This is the same mob that sent a homicidal-suicidal psychopath with a napalm bomb under his clothing into a crowded department store in my old stomping grounds in Bakirköy in Istanbul and detonated it.
Freedom fighters they ain't, not by a long shot. Screw the PKK, and making these noble sounding sentiments about Kurdish independence is de facto supporting these Marxist-Leninist psychopaths.
"In democracy it is natural that parties disagree. Usually they do, however, agree on large-scale national questions, and in the times of war they act under common war command. For example, the Chechens demand independence before all, and only secondarily come the questions of the country’s future systems of justice and economy. The Finnish Jäger (Finnish freedom fighters trained in Germany before the independence) included Red and White, Monarchists and Republicans. Among the Kurdish parties, such agreement is missing."
You talk about the Kurds as if there was some unifying common concept among them concerning the ultimate meaning of the Kurdish common weal. This is precisely what is missing in the Kurdish arena, and the only disciplined and ideologically cohesive forces are solidly Marxist-Leninist. This makes the whole area a protracted nightmare.
I will be amazed if we can maintain any command and control over them in the New Iraq, especially with all the neat new weapons we've given them. These people have more in common with the Viet Cong, Pol Pot, and Sendero Luminoso than anything else.
Thats what he said.
I think that maybe the Iraqi Kurds can have a homeland. I know Turkey does not want that but hey, perhaps the Kurds in Turkey will move to the new Kurdistan as a lot of Jewish folks moved to Israel. I am of course assuming that the Kurds can make a STABLE homeland.
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