[A-List] The Turkish Card

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15665-2003Sep15

washingtonpost.com 
The Turkish Card 

By David Ignatius

Tuesday, September 16, 2003; Page A19 


ISTANBUL -- One hidden casualty of the Iraq war has been the strategic
partnership between the United States and Turkey. Like so many other
things, it was a victim partly of the Bush administration's
overconfidence and wishful thinking.

Now the two countries are near agreement on a plan to send up to 10,000
Turkish troops into the savage battleground northwest of Baghdad known
as the Sunni triangle, where U.S. forces are facing almost daily
attacks. It's a bold plan that could bolster the American occupation --
and also revive the battered Turkish-American relationship.

But playing the Turkish card in Iraq is dangerous, too, for both the
United States and Turkey. The widespread concern among Turkish analysts
is that the two countries, in their rush to solve short-term problems,
may be creating long-term ones that haunt them for years.

The old U.S.-Turkey relationship went off the tracks March 1. That was
the day the Turkish parliament voted against allowing U.S. ground troops
to cross Turkey on their way into Iraq. That decision shocked the Bush
administration, which had assumed that whatever political objections
they might raise, the Turks would come around in the end.

It was a costly mistake. Without Turkish approval, the United States
couldn't send heavy armored units in from the north. And without this
northern front, it could not crush pro-Hussein forces in the Sunni
triangle. That's where the troubles began for the U.S. occupation.

"The March 1 vote was a catastrophe, and it could have been avoided,"
says Sedat Ergin, the Ankara bureau chief for the Turkish newspaper
Hurriyet, who has written a history of the affair. "It was a
constellation of mistakes, blunders and miscalculations."

The initial mistake, according to Ergin, was the administration's
attempt to cut a deal last year with the government of Prime Minister
Bulent Ecevit at a time when his party was disintegrating. The
negotiations were handled by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
who visited Ecevit in July 2002 and thought he was near agreement for
about 90,000 U.S. troops to transit Turkey.

But in Nov. 3 elections, Ecevit's party lost in a landslide to the
Justice and Development Party, which has Islamist roots. Despite that
political shift, Wolfowitz returned to Turkey in early December and won
tentative agreement for the military to begin surveying roads and
bridges that would be used by U.S. forces.

By February the two sides were dickering over the price of Turkish
support. Ankara reportedly asked for $92 billion; the administration
finally offered $24 billion in loans. The Americans also agreed to let
the Turkish army enter Iraq to prevent any breakaway move by Kurdish
rebels. The haggling left both sides feeling used, but the
administration assumed things would work out.

But when the vote finally came, even the Turkish military was getting
cold feet. The generals feared that the Americans were quietly tilting
toward the Kurds, because of disputes over the rules of engagement for
Turkish troops if they encountered Kurdish terrorists, and over whether
the United States should give the Kurds heavy weapons.

A sign of how frayed relations had become was that some Turks thought
Pentagon officials were bluffing when they began moving troop ships away
from the Turkish coast in mid-March and sending them toward Kuwait.

"If [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had come, it might have made a
difference," argues Soli Ozel, a professor of politics at Bilgi
University and a columnist for an Istanbul newspaper. He says the
administration didn't understand how widespread antiwar feeling had
become in Turkey.

Now, seven months later, the two sides are finally close to a deal. But
the old issues and anxieties remain. The Turks are still demanding a
free hand to deal with Kurdish terrorists, the Kurds are still wary of
having Turkish troops inside Iraq, and America is still caught in the
middle. Some analysts fear that the administration, in its eagerness to
get a multinational force in Iraq, may be overlooking warning signs once
again.

"There's an idea that we should just get Turkish troops on the ground
and see what happens, but that's a mistake," says Bulent Aliriza, a
Turkish analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington. He argues that any troop deployment should be part of a
broader strategic pact that makes Turkey a partner in stabilizing and
rebuilding Iraq. Otherwise, he says, "once the bodies start coming back
to Turkey, the public won't understand."

The old Turkish-American relationship was a leftover of the Cold War,
and it effectively died on March 1. With their decisions on Iraq, the
two countries are now writing the rules for a new relationship. Let's
hope it will be solid enough to outlive America's current troubles.

davidignatius@xxxxxxxxxxxx