WASHINGTON: Turkey has long occupied a very special place in the hearts and minds of the ‘Attack Iraq’ crowd that remains the dominant voice in the administration of President George W. Bush.
First, it is the only predominantly Muslim member in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Second, its generals have cultivated a military alliance with Israel against hostile Arab states, one that was heavily promoted by the Jewish neo-conservatives who dominate the top ranks of the political appointees around Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the administration’s leading hardliners.
In fact, the chairman of Rumsfeld’s Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and his undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, have worked as paid lobbyists for Turkey and have also advised the Likud Party, proposing five years ago the creation of an Israel- Turkey-Jordan axis that would permanently alter the balance of power in the Middle East.
Third, Turkey occupies an especially valuable piece of real estate for anyone contemplating an invasion of Iraq. While the main thrust of any US ground attack will almost certainly be launched from Kuwait, the advantages of a second front in the north are deeply compelling to US military planners.
Fourth, and by no means last, the fact that Turkey holds regular elections and enjoys at least the formal institutions of a democratic state makes it particularly attractive at a moment when the United States is trying to persuade the rest of the world, particularly the Middle East, that it should be seen as a liberator, not as an invader of a benighted Arab nation.
In this view, long espoused by the neo-cons, Turkey “can be an example for the Muslim world” as the most hawkish of the Pentagon neo-cons, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said last March in one of the administration’s first public utterances of its oft-repeated mantra that invading Iraq could transform the entire region by bringing democracy to Arab states long denied it.
During his visit to Ankara last week, precisely to persuade the new government of Prime Minister Abdullah Gul to permit tens of thousands of US troops to use Turkish territory as a launching pad into Iraq, Wolfowitz was effusive in his praise of Turkish democracy.
He even invited the powerful chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to meet Bush at the White House, despite the fact that Erdogan, a devout Muslim whose party swept out the traditional secular parties in elections last month, is barred from holding public office for violating the country’s long-standing secularist constitution.
As a message to Arab states and others who doubt Washington’s altruistic intentions, Erdogan’s appearance at the White House should speak very loudly to those who fear that Washington’s confrontation with Iraq and its “war on terrorism” is stoking a “clash of civilizations”, say US officials.
“Our receptivity to the outcome of last month’s election in Turkey clearly demonstrates this point,” said Richard Haass, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, in a major address on US support for “Democracy in the Muslim World”.
Haass quoted approvingly from Gul’s remarks on taking office last month that his party wanted to prove that a Muslim identity can be democratic, transparent and compatible with the modern world.
“Americans are confident that the Turkish people can prove all this and we want to help them make it so,” said Haass, who stressed that democracy went beyond elections in requiring adherence to the rule of law, checks and balances “such that no one voice dominates unquestioned,” and “competition between legislative and executive branches”, among other key attributes.
In this context, some analysts were surprised to read The Washington Post’s account of the Wolfowitz trip to Ankara, published within hours of Haass’ address.
Turkey’s 20-year-old constitution requires the nation’s parliament to approve the deployment of foreign troops on Turkish soil, according to the Post. “But a Western diplomat noted that most of the US requests likely will be decided by Turkey’s National Security Council, which includes the military’s politically powerful general staff, along with senior elected officials.”
Moreover, when Turkey’s Foreign Minister Yasar Yakis, citing domestic “public opinion”, suggested that US troops could operate from Turkish territory only if the United Nations Security Council authorised military action in a new resolution, the same “Western diplomat” told the Post that the foreign minister had gotten it wrong.
“He was trying to straddle a position and he just went too far,” the not-so-mysterious source told the Post’s reporters, who travelled with Wolfowitz from Washington. “He was trying to bridge this public position that action in Iraq must await a second UN resolution, and the position of many others in the government that ... it is in the Turkish national interest to line up.”
Lest there be any doubt about who these “many others in the government” may be, the Post gave a hint when it quoted “one senior general” as dismissing Yakis’ statements as “personal opinion”.
“Turkish support is assured,” said Wolfowitz on the record, after meetings with top Turkish officials, including senior generals.
While that may be true for senior generals, it almost certainly did not apply to the Turkish general public, according to the results of major surveys that were released here after Wolfowitz’s visit by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
According to one poll taken in Turkey just last month, 83 per cent of Turks oppose allowing US forces to use bases in their country to wage war in Iraq. Moreover, a solid majority rejected the notion that Washington’s motivations in waging war were for anyone’s benefit but its own.
Indeed, less than one in three of more than 1,000 Turkish respondents said they approved of Washington’s “war on terror”, compared with better than two-thirds approval in all five NATO member-countries surveyed. Three in four Turks agreed with the statement that the United States fails to consider the interests of other countries in conducting its foreign policy.
The survey found that only 30 per cent of Turks had a favourable image of the United States, a whopping 22 per cent drop from the same survey two years ago, and the fourth lowest of the 44 countries surveyed, after Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan.
The poll results for Turkey, observed former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, helped illustrate the gap in “what we’re asking countries to do in terms of (their) leadership versus what people want us to do”.
“The essence of what we believe in — we in the United States — is that people should be free to determine their own future,” Wolfowitz told a group of Turkish reporters last July. “Turkey is proof that democracy can work for Muslims.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.