America and Turkey: A friendship on hold - The Economist

[MKSheppard]

http://www.economist.com/world/na/Print ... ID=1667322

Turkey's promises were always too hard to keep

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.”