EDITORIAL: TURKISH NOT-SO DELIGHT

OCRegister, CA
Oct 17 2007

Parliament could vote to OK raids in Iraq.

An Orange County Register editorial

To understand just how significant is the recent friction between
the United States and Turkey, let’s review a little history.

After World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, headquartered in Turkey,
was defeated, Turkey, under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decided to
modernize and established an explicitly secular government in that
Muslim-majority country. Turkey has been moving in the direction of
holding fair elections and so could be seen as developing a model
for a moderate, democratic Middle Eastern country.

After World War II, Turkey was assisted by the Marshall Plan and joined
NATO. It cooperated with the West consistently during the Cold War. Its
economy has been growing rapidly, becoming more market-oriented,
and is attracting significant foreign investment.

Its airbase at Incirlik is a key facility in supplying U.S. troops
in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the Turkish Parliament will vote today on a resolution authorizing
limited cross-border strikes into northern Iraq to chase down
guerrillas from the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). The PKK has been
staging raids from safe havens along the mountainous border between
Turkey and Iraq, killing 13 Turkish troops Sunday and 28 over the
past several weeks.

Northern Iraq, dominated by ethnic Kurds, has been the most stable
and hopeful part of Iraq during the post-invasion U.S. occupation,
and most Kurds are friendly toward the United States. Almost everybody
agrees that raids into northern Iraq by Turkish troops, even if they
narrowly targeted, are likely to destabilize the region and create
resentment that could lead to further conflict.

So how did we get to a situation in which a longtime U.S. ally is
poised to destabilize the most stable part of Iraq and make the
U.S. government’s job in Iraq noticeably more difficult?

Turkey believes, rightly or wrongly, that the de facto Kurdish
government in northern Iraq has done little or nothing to curb the PKK
incursions into Turkey. Turkey also seems to believe the U.S. could
have done more to stop the PKK from operating on Iraqi soil.

>From the Turkish perspective the U.S. invasion of Iraq stirred up
unneeded instability. Southeastern Turkey, bordering Iraq, has long
had a significant Kurdish population and a small but violent separatist
movement, but things had been fairly calm. However, the establishment
of a de facto Kurdistan in northern Iraq raised fears that Kurds in
Turkey would demand to be reunited with their ethnic brethren in an
enlarged Kurdistan that would include part of what is now Turkey,
and the PKK raids have made those fears concrete.

Add the passage by a House committee last week of a resolution to
declare a "genocide" the World War I-era slaughter of more than a
million ethnic Armenians by the former Ottoman Turkish government,
and you have a perfect storm. It seems odd for the present-day Turkish
government to be sensitive about what the regime it displaced did
some 90 years ago, but it is.

Even if the parliament authorizes cross-border raids, we hope Turkey
will try persuasion and diplomacy before unleashing its military. But
we wouldn’t bet on it. A longstanding alliance may be yet another
victim of the ill-considered war on Iraq.