The Inscrutable Turks
Ankara's irresponsibility illustrates the risk of delay.
Tuesday, March 4, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
These columns said hopefully last week that democracies are messy but they usually end up doing the right thing. We'll admit we didn't immediately expect to see the exception that proves the rule in Turkey.
Rarely has short-sighted domestic politics sabotaged national interest quite as clearly as in Ankara on Saturday. Stock prices in Istanbul tumbled by more than 12% yesterday on the surprising news that Turkey's parliament had rejected the use of the country (and about $15 billion in aid) as a staging area for U.S. troops preparing to invade Iraq. Investors realize that the Turkish political elites have thoroughly botched this one.
Unless reversed in a later vote, the decision will damage U.S.-Turkish relations for years to come. The U.S. and Turkish governments had worked out the details at great length, but were undermined by an establishment more concerned with scoring domestic political points than looking out for Turkey's long-term interests.
The Republican People's Party, which includes pro-Western figures such as former Economy Minister Kemal Dervish, voted no in irresponsible lockstep, while the Turkish military failed to speak up at a crucial moment, apparently in order to embarrass the new Islamic-leaning government. All of this after the U.S. fought to win NATO approval to deliver AWACS planes and anti-missile defenses to Turkey.
To be sure, the Turks have ample cause to be wary of U.S. promises after the first President Bush walked away from the Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power. And Turkish opinion polls show large opposition to an Iraq war. But then the role of political leaders is supposed to be to shape public opinion, not follow it, especially when the benefits of assisting the U.S. are so obvious.
The badly needed cash (and U.S. goodwill) aside, Turkey would benefit as much as any nation from a neighboring Iraq that was free of both a dictator and U.N. sanctions. Turkey would also give itself a larger voice in postwar Iraq, especially in dealing with the Kurds. The Turkish military was demanding joint supervision of the disarmament of the Kurds after the war, for example, and for a buffer zone manned by Turkish troops in northern Iraq, presumably in order to limit the free passage of Kurds into southern Turkey. Now the U.S. will have every right to ignore Turkish desires and work with Kurds militarily and politically after the war. And the Turks can forget about any postwar Iraqi oil spoils.
If unreversed, the decision is of course a blow to the U.S. war plan. American troops are sitting on ships ready to unload, so one price is further delay. The Pentagon could still airlift some troops into Northern Iraq, though not as many as the 60,000 or so planned to sweep down through Turkey. The northern front will be militarily vital only if Saddam's regime puts up strong resistance, but that can't be ruled out. The Ankara rejection also hurts the U.S.-British-Spanish prospects of winning a vote for a second U.N. Security Council resolution, if the White House still wants to walk into that French ambush.
Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul said yesterday that there are no immediate plans for a revote. One reason for optimism is that the leader of the Justice and Development Party, Tayyip Erdogan, is expected to be elected to parliament this weekend in a by-election and should soon after that become Prime Minister.
This would end a peculiar situation in which the head of the governing party--and the man really calling the shots--is not Prime Minister. It may give him more leverage with parliament. A majority of voting legislators, 264-250, did approve the U.S. troop deployment Saturday, after all, though the motion failed because 19 abstentions denied an overall majority.
As for the U.S., the lesson here is that further delay in starting the war is only giving the opposition more openings to interfere. American Democrats and the French were both out in force on the weekend pointing to the Turkish vote as a sign that President Bush should give Saddam more time. And of course the Iraqis were delighted.
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