Talking Turkey
The Turkish parliament’s rejection of the United States’ request to station troops in the country for an attack on Northern Iraq is a stunning blow to US foreign policy, and not just because we didn’t get what we wanted. The unseemly public negotiations laid bare the cynical contradictions that Bush’s drive against Iraq has generated, and shown the extent to which his government is loathed and distrusted even among our closest historical allies.
Since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Turks have had a fetish about their minority populations. The 1910s and 20s saw wholesale slaughters perpetrated against Armenians and Greeks living in the Turkish heartland of Anatolia. Turkey colluded with Stalinist Russia to suppress the national aspirations of various ethnic groups on their shared border, and worked with some of the region’s most unsavory governments toward their common interest of preventing the formation of a Kurdish state.
This is all well and good for the Turks, who have their own historical and geopolitical reasons for their position. But the fact is that the Kurds have been America’s most reliable ally in the 13-year battle with Saddam, and, previously, as intelligence resources against the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran. They are objectively the victims of a historical injustice, having been sold out by the British after WW1 and left to the tender mercies of Turkey, Syria, the USSR, Iran and Iraq. As a matter of pure principle, there is no reason consistent with the traditional American values of freedom and self-determination that the US government should oppose the emergence of a Kurdish national homeland in the aftermath of an Iraq war.
One thing this situation has revealed is that President Bush, for all his talk about “good” and “evil” and basic American virtue, has absolutely no problem stabbing the Kurds in the back to win the favor of Turkey. That sends something of the wrong message to the rest of the world, don’t you think?
And how about this one? The latest reason to emerge for the war against Iraq is to bring the benefits of democracy to the Middle East. Turkey is the only Muslim democracy in the region, and we are pulling out all the stops to get the recently-elected government to defy the wishes of upwards of 85% of its own population. I’m sure Wolfowitz and company are thinking to themselves how much easier it would be if they were a dictatorship, and there was only one person to negotiate with. Maybe they should try talking to Syria instead.
And then there’s the money. I read somewhere that, by offering $26 Billion to station 40,000 troops in Turkey, the cost breaks down to $650,000 per soldier. Hell, I’d let a soldier stay in my house for $650K. Of course, as Ari Fleischer piously insists, governments cannot be bought – they need to be convinced on the merits. Among many other things, Turkey proved him right.
Finally, our efforts to strongarm Turkey have damaged a critical historical relationship, perhaps beyond repair. In 1947, President Truman lent his name to the doctrine that put the protection of Greece and Turkey from Communist domination at the center of US policy in postwar Europe. We sponsored Turkey’s entry into NATO and have been a stronger and closer supporter of them than many of their European neighbors, who continually stall and prevaricate on their petition to join the EU. During the Cold War, Turkey provided invaluable strategic cooperation in intelligence gathering, and even allowed its territory to be the staging ground for American medium-range nuclear missiles, at enormous risk from the USSR on its border.
When I visited Turkey a few years ago, I often received better treatment from people once they realized I was American and not European. The Turks are proud of their democracy, proud of their relative success in modernizing their country, proud of the importance of their role in regional security, and none too fond of the “backward” Arab governments to their south and east. It takes a lot to alienate them. But leave it to Bush – there’s nothing he can’t accomplish when he sets his mind to it.
8:17:39 AM 
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