Turkey Reapproachment?

[Annie]

http://www.nationalreview.com/tks/059227.html

A BIT OF A THAW IN U.S.-TURKISH RELATIONS?

You’ll recall there was a bit of grumbling by a senior Turkish military official recently, complaining, “we have no Iraq policy.”

A U.S. source who is well-connected to the Turkish government agreed with the interpretation of Prof. McMeekin at Bilkent University in Ankara, that clumsy American diplomacy dropped the ball and botched any chance the Bush administration had to persuade the Turks to join the coalition against Saddam.

Of course, the invasion of Iraq was phenomenally unpopular here, and has been a driving force in much of the anti-Americanism seen in Turkish society in recent years — at least according to the Americans in Ankara I’ve been speaking with recently.

But as Iraq gradually improves and stabilizes, and the new elected government in Baghdad starts getting its act together, Turkish officials seem frustrated with their extraordinarily limited ability to influence anything regarding its southern neighbor. Had they joined the coalition, the thinking goes, they would have at least had a seat at the table and better shot at getting the Bush administration to listen to its concerns (the PKK, opening a second border gate between Iraq and Turkey).

The New Anatolian reports that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is planning to visit Washington in mid-May, as what looks like a Turkish counterpart to Bush’s post-election “charm offensive.” They also might be making a policy shift to reach out to the U.S. – as the Turkish Daily News reports,

The proposal to use İncirlik Air Base, located in the southern city of Adana, as a cargo hub for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq has been on the table for several months. U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said during a visit to Ankara in February that Washington was discussing the issue with Turkey with a view to finding an agreement.
Turkish officials have avoided commenting on the U.S. proposal publicly but the government, eager to mend strained ties with Washington, is widely expected to respond favorably.


We have seen and heard that after the elections in Iraq, certain European officials began rethinking their adamant “we want nothing to do with coalition operations” stances. The new Iraq is being formed. Actions like training police, prosecutors, judges, or their military to defend themselves no longer mean acquiescing to a vast neocon conspiracy but now represent a matter of building relations with the new Iraqi government.

It’s one thing for, say, Germany to appear to have an Iraq policy that hasn’t adapted to changing circumstances. It’s another for Turkey to appear directionless when serious and historic events are happening right on its doorstep.

I wrote a few days ago that perhaps the AKP had “jumped the shark” – I probably ought to revise that to “anti-Bush, anti-invasion rhetoric may have jumped the shark.” The March 2003 decision is made, and debating the merits of the invasion is turning into a job for historians.

Then there is this:

http://austinbay.net/blog/index.php?p=182

Incirlik, Turkey: Launchpad to points East?
Filed under: General— site admin @ 7:50 am
The huge NATO airbase complex at Incirlik, Turkey, played a key role in the Cold War, in the Persian Gulf War, and in enforcing the northern “no-fly zone” against Saddam.

Now it’s being prepared to provide logistical support for potential “operations” to the east. The article says Afghanistan and Iraq. But other nations may read this quote from Defense News in different ways– peacekeeping requires logistical support (eg, the UN faces a huge logistics burden when it deploys 10,000 peacekeepers to Sudan later this year). Iran will read it as a building military threat. Kyrgyzstan may see it as either a peacekeeping lifeline– or the launchpad for western troops. Syria is only “slightly east” of Adana (more south, actually).

What the report means is that Turkey and the US are preparing “operational options.” It also says the contretemps –wrought by Turkey’s refusal to allow US troops to base out of Turkey in the March 2003 attack on Saddam– is now history...

 

[onedomino]

Why do we need İncirlik Air Base in Turkey, when we have more reliable air bases next door in Iraq? The Turks better bring a lot more to the rapprochement party than an old NATO air base. Maybe we should let the Iraqi Kurds put some pressure on the feckless “ally” in Ankara. The US supported Turkey’s admission to the EU. And for fifty years, America defended the Turks against the Soviets. When the US asked for assistance and help with a northern Iraq invasion route, the Turkish Parliament told us to get out of town.

 

[onedomino]

Cold Turkey
By Arnaud de Borchgrave

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2005/03/07/World/Cold-Turkey-890183.shtml

No one noticed as Turkey, an erstwhile ally, nabbed the gold medal recently in the global anti-American stakes.

Those with the most negative views of the Bush administration's policies are (1) Turks with 82 percent; (2) Indonesians, 81 percent; (3) Lebanese, 80 percent; (4) Argentines, 79 percent; (5) Brazilians, 78 percent. Mercifully, half the 22,000 people surveyed in 21 countries by the BBC around the world did not agree, "America's influence on the world is very negative."

For those who see thousands of demonstrators in Beirut excoriating Syria as pro-American voices for freedom, think again. In Egypt, far more people are angry with President Hosni Mubarak for his close alliance with the United States than for denying them their political freedom.

After reading a long list of lies and distortions published by the Turkish media, the gold medal is hardly surprising. From left to right, and from centrist to Islamist, the United States is raked over hot coals with odious comparisons to Nazi Germany.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has once again scored in bringing to our attention trends our mainstream media have ignored. It is difficult to detect the difference between what Osama bin Laden said in his 19 audio and videotapes since September 11, 2001, and what some Turkish journalists write. If anything, the Turks outvenom bin Laden.

Columnist Suleyman Arif Emre wrote in the pan-Islamist daily Milli Gazette: "As we know, Germany's Hitler started World War II, and about 50 million people perished because of his ambitions. Bush is America's Hitler. Like Hitler, he too has become a curse for the world. If the world's sensible leaders don't unite against Bush to stop him, a great number of people will die because of his ambitions."

"Bush," the venomous Turk continued, "who is an ally of the Zionists, belongs to the racist philosophy too. The beliefs of Bush's evangelical church coupled with Jewish racism, which exceeds Hitler's, are sufficient proof that the 'Sharon-Bush duo' is militants of the same fanatical philosophy. Hitler said he would establish a new order if Germany won. Bush is after similar invasions."

Following Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush's map of invasions, Mr. Emre says, includes 22 additional Islamic countries. How did he reach this figure? Because Mr. Bush is carrying out a 5,000-year-old Zionist dream to conquer everything between the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. Mr. Bush has already "blurted out the names of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt."

Nuray Mert, another columnist for the center-left liberal daily Radikal, described Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "one of the leading architects of the American project to push the world into chaos and carry it out in the most barbaric way." Burhan Bozgeyik, in Milli Gazette, added the Bush administration is in the hands of the worst enemies of Islam. Their hate is so deep no amount of Muslim blood (spilled by them) satisfies them ... even hundreds of thousands of dead seem little for them."

The "evil triangle" -- the U.S., U.K. and Israel -- whose "hatred for Muslims has reached the point of madness, pretends to be Turkey's ally, but in fact it is weakening her foundations and planning to destroy her. ... The so-called 'elections' were nothing but the first step toward dividing Iraq."

This would be hilarious if not for the incontrovertible fact it is believed not only by Islamist extremists but by countless millions of Muslim fundamentalists, including all who subscribe to Wahhabi tenets. And we only have ourselves to blame. (bullshit meter just went off the scale for that last sentence)

America's public policy voice is pathetically defensive. It lacks credibility. Even Al Hurrah, the federally funded U.S. satellite feed to the Arab world has at times sounded too critical of the Bush administration. This, monitors reported back to Pentagon inquiries, was "to gain credibility."

Burhan Ozfatura, a former mayor of Izmir and a columnist for the business daily Dunya, writes, "It is my sincere belief ... the U.S. is run by an incompetent, very aggressive, true enemy of Islam, brainwashed with evangelical nonsense, a bloodthirsty team that is a loyal link in Israel's command-and-control system." The United States, he concludes, is the "biggest danger for Turkey, today and in the future."

Anti-Americanism is a relatively new phenomenon in Turkey. Throughout the 1990s in Turkey, 60 percent of the people had favorable views about the U.S. and its policies. The 2003 Iraq war closed many minds. The mood began souring with the advent of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-leaning ruling party.

The low point came when the Turkish parliament rejected the U.S. plan to open a northern front against Iraq. A $6 billion sweetener plus more billions in credit didn't change any minds. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division that was to spearhead the northern offensive was confined to the troopships offshore. Eventually, they sailed around the Arabian Peninsula and entered Iraq from Kuwait.

Turkish paranoia fed suspicions the United States wishes to create an independent and oil-rich Kurdish state. (maybe we should) Turkish journalists convinced themselves, in turn, that Turkey's restive Kurds would then try to secede.

Mr. Bush has reassured Mr. Erdogan time and again the United States is firmly committed to Iraq's territorial integrity. But time and again, disinformation about U.S. intentions resurfaces courtesy of the wild bunch in the Turkish media.

Turkey's bid to join the European Union has also lost momentum over Ankara's reluctance to recognize Cyprus, an island nation Turkish troops invaded in 1974 to block a Greek Cypriot coup that sought union with Greece. EU says it's a sine qua non. The Turks still occupy the northern third of Cyprus.

Negotiations for EU membership are expected to take 10 to 15 years -- and the first session isn't scheduled till next Oct. 3.

-

 

[NATO AIR]

Happy Easter to everyone!

I read a very enlightening article in the Weekly Standard this past week, taken alongside of what I've read in several great books about modern Turkey, it makes a considerable amount of sense. Mainly, our relations with Turkey and Turkey's support of the US is going to recover from its low point of the Iraq invasion. Remember that Turks' main concern was with the already independent Kurds development in the north and how Turkish Kurds would react....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/005/382ifjiw.asp
Hating America, Turkish Style
This too shall pass.
by Mustafa Akyol
03/28/2005, Volume 010, Issue 26

LONGTIME ALLIES OF THE UNITED States, the Turks have been sympathetic to American values for decades. Nevertheless, a new BBC World Service poll of 21 countries shows Turkey to be the least friendly to America, especially the current administration. Eighty-two percent of Turks said they found President Bush's reelection "negative for peace and security in the world." While this sentiment doubtless reflects a global reaction to the war in Iraq, there are also distinctive local factors that explain the current wave of Turkish anti-American feeling.

One of these is the Kurdish question. The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, under the influence of secularist European nationalism. Rather than building a national identity around the shared Islamic heritage of its various peoples, modern Turkey sought to achieve national cohesion by converting its non-Turkish ethnic groups--notably the Kurds--into Turks. This effort at social engineering has only partly succeeded.

Most Kurds retain their ethnic identity--and their suspicion of the Turkish state. In the 1980s and '90s, the Marxist-Leninist Kurdish radicals of the PKK exploited this distrust. The PKK carried out a bloody terrorist war against Turkish rule and assimilated Kurds--a war that killed more than 30,000 citizens of Turkey. Today the PKK is weakened--thanks partly to American support of Turkey--but the fate of the Kurds remains uncertain.

The Kurds, of course, live in Iraq as well as in Turkey, divided in two by the border between these neighbors. For hard-core Turkish nationalists of both left and right, the best Iraq is an authoritarian one, ruled by a strongman in Baghdad who suppresses the Kurds in the north of his country, keeping Turkey's southern border quiet. This explains these nationalists' enduring sympathy for Saddam Hussein. For them, a free and democratic Iraq sounds alarm bells, for if the Kurds flourish in Iraq, they may inspire their brethren on the other side of the border to attempt to secede from Turkey and join them.

That perceived threat might not be entirely fanciful, but the best solution would seem to be to make Turkey's Kurds so free and prosperous that they wouldn't want secession. Indeed, the current parliament, led by the AKP government, has granted many cultural freedoms to the Kurds in the last two years. Nevertheless, many hard-core nationalists wish to return to the "no Kurds allowed" policy of the good old days. For them, the Kurds are not countrymen to be won, but bitter enemies to be fought.

Anti-Americanism comes naturally to this mindset. The more the Iraqi Kurds can be portrayed as agents of "American imperialism," the more suspicion of the Turkish Kurds will seem justified. As the prominent Turkish columnist Cengiz Candar has noted, some Turkish nationalists are pressing an anti-Kurdish agenda under the guise of anti-American propaganda. (A U.S. crackdown on PKK camps in northern Iraq would help neutralize that propaganda and answer Ankara's justified concern about the resurgence of this terrorist threat.)

The prominence of the nationalist establishment in Turkey's media is another factor in the current anti-Americanism.

Actually, two camps dominate the Turkish mainstream media. The first and smaller one consists of hard-core nationalists--the "Kemalists," who claim to follow in the footsteps of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What they really do, however, is carve a frozen ideology out of Atatürk's pragmatic legacy. The second, larger camp is the more relaxed, cosmopolitan, somewhat liberal, highly Westernized intelligentsia known as the "White Turks."

While Kemalists are categorically anti-Western, White Turks champion Turkey's bid to join the E.U. Most have been big fans of the United States, but they, too, have some quarrels with the Bush administration. Some of these are related to the Iraq war. The White Turks are attuned to the liberal media in the United States, and their heroes are figures like Michael Moore and, for the rare sophisticate, Maureen Dowd.

Moreover, most senior White Turks are former left-wing activists of the '68 generation. They chanted antiwar slogans during Vietnam, and their present-day protests against "American imperialism" carry a whiff of nostalgia.

The other problem that most White Turks and all Kemalists have with President Bush is more philosophical: They consider him far too religious. They have always believed that modernization means secularization, and they don't like the fact that the most modern nation on Earth is also among the most religious, with a president who starts the day by reading Scripture. It is no accident that the fiercest salvos in the Turkish press against President Bush and the values voters who helped reelect him come from columnists who are also, in the Turkish context, fiercely anti-Islamic. One such figure, the columnist Ozdemir Ince, recently wrote that the Americans who voted for Bush must be "ignorant" because "they believe in things like . . . man is created, or that heaven exists." For good measure, Ince frequently attacks "American secularism" for being too soft on religion and rails against Turkish conservatives who sympathize with it.

In fact, Americans may be surprised to learn of an interesting conspiracy theory to which both Kemalists and White Turks subscribe: namely, that the United States intends to abolish the secular regime in Turkey and replace it with a moderate Islamic one. The best "evidence" for this, they say, is that top U.S. officials have mentioned Turkey as an exemplary "moderate Muslim country." While this characterization obviously refers to Turkish society, not the state, it is unacceptable for the ultrasecularist camp. They simply can't stand to hear the words "Islam" and "Turkey" in the same sentence.

A third important factor in Turkish anti-Americanism is the role played by radical Islam.

Traditionally, Islamic conservatives in Turkey have been sympathetic to the United States, which helped save Turkey from godless communism and has strong religious and moral values. Since the early '80s, however, an alien strain of radical Islam has poured into Turkey from the Middle East, a strain that is constitutionally anti-American, and virulently anti-Semitic. The boundaries between traditional conservatism and the new Islamism are not always clear-cut. Thus, the AKP government is conservative, but Islamist conspiracy theories about the imagined "American crusade" against Islam influence the thinking of some AKP supporters.

None of this is to deny that there are facts feeding anti-American sentiment. Of these, the shameful mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the civilian deaths in operations against the Baathist/Zarqawist insurgency in Iraq are the most conspicuous.

The overwhelming success of the elections in Iraq, however, has been an inspiration for many, including some Turks heretofore suspicious of America. Once a stable democracy is established in Iraq, the conspiracy theories that prey on Turkish minds should start to fade away. Then anti-Americanism in Turkey should retreat to its usual strongholds--the Marxist left, the orthodox Kemalists, the ultrasecular portion of the White Turks, and the radical Islamists--for they despise America for what it really is: a nation that is modern, free, and open-minded, yet religious and moral, and that stands for liberty in the world.

Most Turks, in fact, cherish the same values. That's why their bitterness towards Americans is almost surely temporary. These two nations are natural friends and allies, pushed into temporary distrust by some unfortunate events and poisonous ideologies.

Mustafa Akyol is a columnist and writer in Istanbul. He is the author of The Opium of the White Turks (forthcoming), a critique of the ultrasecular Turkish elite.

© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

 

[Annie]

Hey Nato, you 'home?'

 

[NATO AIR]

Yes maam, stuck on the ship on the first day back thanks to being on duty!

Glad to be back on USMB for a good few weeks on a regular basis.

 

[Annie]

Yes maam, stuck on the ship on the first day back thanks to being on duty!

Glad to be back on USMB for a good few weeks on a regular basis.

Yay! Glad you are back too. So much easier to read and send links!

 

[Annie]

I know I started this thread. I know what it's about. So why do I keep thinking someone is looking at recipes?

 

[NATO AIR]

I know I started this thread. I know what it's about. So why do I keep thinking someone is looking at recipes?

ummm. turkeyyyyyy.... :cof: