PELOSI’S PANDERING AGAINST TURKEY

Washington Times, DC
Feb 20 2007

Not content with undermining the war effort in Iraq, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi has apparently set her sights on Turkey, a NATO ally
and one of the few Muslim-majority nations in the world that is a
democracy. Mrs. Pelosi has scheduled a vote in April on a resolution
(H. Res. 106) that accuses Turkey’s Ottoman Empire of perpetrating
"genocide" resulting in the death or displacement of nearly 2 million
Armenians between 1915 and 1923. With the United States currently
fighting a war for its very survival against radical Islamists,
Congress should have much more important priorities than revisiting
events that occurred more than 80 years ago — particularly when
doing so has the potential to do serious damage to U.S. relations
with Turkey, whose cooperation will be critical to U.S. efforts to
stabilize Iraq.

But H. Res. 106 has far more to do with the power of ethnic lobbies
in Washington than with larger U.S. foreign policy interests.

The reality is that Armenian and Greek lobbying organizations hostile
to Turkey command far more power in Washington than do pro-Turkish
groups. And in their effort to settle old scores dating back to
World War I, they have the potential to damage our current ability
to maintain Turkey’s cooperation in stabilizing Iraq, where upwards
of 140,000 American troops are stationed, and to do grave damage to
our relationship with an ally of long standing, a country that has
long been a bulwark against regional rogue states like Syria. For
many years, Turkey was the only Muslim nation in the Middle East to
have trade and diplomatic relations with Israel.

But today Turkey has plenty of reasons to worry about current trends in
Iraq. Were the United States to "redeploy" its forces out of Iraq or
to dramatically scale back its military presence inside the country,
it would result in a power vacuum that would be filled by al Qaeda in
Iraq and like-minded Sunni jihadists on one side, and by the rogue
regime in Iran and its Shi’ite allies on the other. If U.S. forces
pull out or have their operational effectiveness crippled by harsh
restrictions that Rep. John Murtha is pushing for with Mrs. Pelosi’s
consent, the country would be plunged into all-out civil war. One
likely result would be the creation of millions of additional refugees;
it is not difficult to imagine that at a minimum hundreds of thousands
of these refugees would stream towards the Turkish border and that
Ankara would come under intense international pressure to admit them
as a sign of its goodwill.

One of the most underreported stories of the Iraq war has been
the extraordinary restraint shown by Turkey in dealing with a
volatile situation in northern Iraq — particularly the advent of a
quasi-independent Kurdish state there. Ankara’s relations with the
Kurds have been characterized by tension and violence. (Approximately
30,000 people have died in Turkey since the early 1980s as a result
of a terror campaign launched by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or
PKK). But even as it was coming under fire from Kurdish terrorists,
Turkey beginning in 1991 assisted the United States in providing
support for the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region in
northern Iraq which was protected from Saddam Hussein’s military by
the U.S.-instituted no-fly zone. Since the current Iraq war began
in 2003, the PKK has had a resurgence in southeastern Turkey. The
Ankara government complains that the dominant Iraqi Kurdish groups,
the PUK and the KDP, have done little to stop the PKK from using Iraq
as a base.

And in the coming months, the situation in northern Iraq is likely to
become much more threatening to Turkish interests. Sunni and Shi’ite
Arabs, Turkmen and Iraqi Christians are all upset about Kurdish plans
to incorporate the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which officially lies
just outside the Kurdish-controlled region of northern Iraq, into
a de facto Kurdish state. They accuse the Kurds of seeking to drive
them out of Kirkuk in advance of a scheduled December referendum on
the city’s future to ensure that voters who will support the Kurdish
groups’ position. As Kurdish authorities come under fire for removing
non-Kurds from Kirkuk in advance of the referendum, Shi’ite expellees
are joining the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia, while Sunni Arabs
are joining al Qaeda affiliates, who are blamed for a rash of suicide
bombings in Kirkuk since last summer.

At such a dangerous time, the United States needs to be working
more closely with both our Kurdish friends in Iraq and our Turkish
allies. But Mrs. Pelosi seems more interested in playing ethnic
politics in order to score some cheap political points and win
additional votes.