WASHINGTON: An outspoken US Foreign Service officer who resigned with a blast at the administration’s Iraq war plans said recently that one of his major concerns was long-term collateral damage to his country — as seen in the recent conflict with Turkey.
John Brady Kiesling, 45, a 20-year veteran at the State Department, told the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington that the pressure to get Turkey to allow 62,000 US troops to cross on a land route to northern Iraq had also had a disastrous ripple effect on Turkish-Cypriot relations.
Kiesling, a specialist in Greek-Turkish affairs who was based in Athens when he resigned in February, said the bid for the land access route — sweetened with the tempting bonus of billions of dollars in new financial aid — had so distracted the new Turkish government that it failed to step in to save a long-sought Cypriot settlement.
The negotiations between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots were earlier this year coming to a conclusion which would have led to a peaceful resolution after nearly 30 years of tension between the two sides. At the last minute, the president of the Turkish Cypriots resisted the settlement, with the world looking to Turkey to put pressure on the Turkish Cypriots.
But, Kiesling said, the new and shaky Turkish government did not have the political resources to take on another battle while it was fighting to accommodate the United States. More than 90 per cent of the Turkish people opposed the US attack on Iraq.
Kiesling said the Turkish government “couldn’t fight a two-front war” so no pressure was brought by Ankara on Cypriot President Denktash. Thus the best chance in a generation to solve the Cyprus problem collapsed, Kiesling said; Turkey winds up with no US aid and no peace in Cyprus; and the Turkish people will blame the United States.
“US policies are losing people and losing badly. We have lost all of the Middle East and half of Europe,” Kiesling said. “We were starting to build an effort to fight terrorism. It was happening. There was cooperation.”
That joint effort will now stop, he said, and the United States will essentially have to fight terrorism alone at a time when US policies are creating fertile soil for a whole new generation of anti-American terrorists around the world.
“Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offence and defence since the days of Woodrow Wilson,” Kiesling said in his resignation letter to the US government.
The battlefield pictures and the accounts of the correspondents who accompany the British and American units cover one side of the war. The other side — the long-term results in terms of the cost to the United States and its policies — cannot be judged at this early stage.—dpa