ANKARA, May 7: Turkey on Wednesday rejected a call from Washington for to admit it made a mistake by denying the United States support in the war against Iraq.

“From the very beginning, Turkey has never made a mistake on this issue and has taken the necessary steps with its utmost sincerity. It has followed this path without expecting anything in return,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters.

He was commenting on remarks made by US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz to CNN-Turk television on Tuesday.

“To me the disappointment is that that country, that I admire so much... was prepared to seemingly do deals with one of the worst dictators,” Wolfowitz told CNN-Turk, according to a text of the interview released by the US embassy in Ankara.

“If we are going to have a new page, then let’s have a Turkey that instead of looking with suspicion at everything that goes on in northern Iraq ... steps up and says we made a mistake,” he said.

Wolfowitz singled out the powerful Turkish military, which wields significant influence in political decision-making, as an institutions that did not play “the strong leadership role” on Iraq that Washington “would have expected”.

But Erdogan retorted that there had been “no discord among the institutions which made the decisions”.

Wolfowitz also slammed Turkey’s recent intensification of relations with Syria and Iran, who share Ankara’s concerns that any moves towards self-rule by Kurds in northern Iraq could spark unrest among their own Kurdish minorities.

“I think anything that Turkey does with Syria or does with Iran should fit into an overall policy with us, of getting those countries to change their bad behaviour,” Wolfowitz said.

NATO member Turkey, a key Muslim ally of the United States, dealt a major blow to US war plans in Iraq when its parliament refused to allow US troops to deploy in the country to invade neighbouring Iraq from the north.

Turkey’s plans to send troops to Kurdish-held northern Iraq during the war also strained transatlantic ties. Ankara refrained from intervening only after strong pressure from Washington.

Wolfowitz said the US-Turkey alliance would continue to be a strong one if Ankara understood “what went wrong” during the Iraq crisis.

“There is an opportunity now to work with the Americans to build that (democracy) in Iraq. Let’s seize that opportunity and do everything we can as Turks to support it,” he said. —AFP