Saturday, March 15, 2003

Treble trouble for US

PV Vivekanand

THE US is facing treble trouble in Turkey. It has all but given up hope for access to Turkish territory to wage a war against Iraq and Ankara has yet to allow the use of its airspace for American warplanes to bomb Iraq. Worse still is the possibility that Turkey might send in its own military into northern Iraq to seize key oil-producing areas of that country citing its Ottoman-era claims and fears that Iraqi Kurds would gain control of oil resources and spark nationalist fever among Turkish Kurds.
A war between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds could be in the offing unless Washington comes up with an elusive magic formula to contain both sides, and it is an effort it could ill-afford against the run-up to and execution of its war plans.
As of Saturday, it seemed highly unlikely that the US would have access in time to Turkish territory to deploy more than 62,000 soldiers in the war effort. The new Ankara government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has further delayed any vote in parliament for at least another week. The US had to make alternate arrangements and move some of its warships off the Mediterranean to the Red Sea from where missiles would not have to fly through Turkish airspace.
To express its anger at the Turkish stand, Washington has withdrawn an offer of up to $26 billion in American aid and loans. "The package was time-bound and we have moved on time wise," according to a US official quoted by the Associated Press.
Erdogan, a hard-line Islamist who is perceived to have softened his stand in the wake of his Justice and Development Party's landslide elections late last year, says that he wants his cabinet to secure a vote of confidence in parliament before bringing up the American request for use of Turkish territory for war against Iraq.
Obviously, Erdogan wants to pre-empt the repeat of a "no" vote that came early this month when about 100 of his own AKP members of parliament voted against the motion and others stayed away from the session. Opinion polls have shown that more than 80 per cent of Turks reject a war against Iraq.
Going to parliament first with a demand that his Islamist followers endorse a move to help the US fight a war against a fellow Muslim country might not be the best idea for Erdogan because a "no" vote could have a damaging effect on his political standing and might find reverberations in a subsequent confidence vote for his government.
Washington could not find fault with his logic and pressure him into rushing a vote on its request as a priority.
Then came the second jolt; Ankara has yet to approve American use of Turkish airspace for US warplanes to launch strikes on Iraq. It remained unclear over the weekend whether the Turkish airbase that the US and Britain are using to enforce the "no-fly" zone in northern Iraq would still be available for use once military action is launched, perhaps as early as this week.
The Turkish reticence in granting airspace rights is a serious strain in Ankara-Washington relationship. Both countries are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), whose charter calls for granting such rights to fellow member countries. Even France, which is in the forefront of opposition to a US-led war on Iraq, has respected that right and granted use of its airspace to the US. This point was emphasised by US President George W.Bush in a message to Erdogan after the Turkish leader's victory in a by-poll that saw him enter parliament last Sunday. He was banned from running in elections under a constitutional provision in view of an earlier court verdict against him. His party amended the constitutional provision after emerging as the dominant party in parliament and cleared the way for his election.
The US, which seems to have given up hope of using Turkish territory for its planned war, is getting impatient with the Turkish posture over airspace.. Ankara newspapers reported that US Vice President Dick Cheney told Erdogan during a phone call last week that: "We're calling for the last time."
If indeed, Erdogan fails to secure a parliament vote in favour of American military deployment -- although it might be a bit too late, given the course of present events -- and continues to deny the US use of Turkish airspace, then serious troubles could start for the Turkish Islamists. Washington would have little use for them and might even find them a hurdle in its plans in the region after the war. That is where the strong links between the US and Turkish military establishments could come into play, and that would not be in the interest of democracy in Turkey.
In what seemed to a last-ditch American effort, Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition Zalmay Khalilzad met Turkish officials in Ankara on Friday and Saturday.
Surely, Khalilzad's mission would not have been limited to discussing the request for airspace.
He is burdened with the task of convincing Ankara to stay put and not to send in its military into northern Iraq when the US launches the expected military action.
That would take much of an effort to convince Turkey, which fears that Iraqi Kurds might declare an independent Kurdistan, and stir trouble among Turkish Kurds.
On the ground, Turkey has already deployed tens of thousands of soldiers on the border with Iraq.
Iraqi Kurdish groups, who control among them a fighting force of about 80,000-85,000 members -- not to mention several thousand pro-Iranian Shiite fighters deployed near the Iraqi-Iranian border -- have condemned the Turkish moves. Some of them have said publicly that they would not move to create an independent state in northern Iraq, but Ankara is not buying their promises.
The Iraqi Kurds would definitely put up a bitter fight against Turkish soldiers entering northern Iraq and this would only complicate the US war effort aimed at replacing the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.
Erdogan has hinted that he was seeking fresh US guarantees over its concerns over the intention of the Iraqi Kurds.
"We want to get a second motion through parliament, but the United States should also make some openings to facilitate this," he said on Saturday.
However, Bush might not be able to offer such guarantees, given that the Iraqi Kurds are suspicious of American intentions in Iraq and have rejected reported Washington plans to set up a military regime headed by Americans to run the affairs of post-war Iraq.
It is definitely a tight-rope for Washington in Turkey, and a razor thin rope at that.
US hopes are now set on a meeting on Monday grouping US and Turkish officials with Iraqi opposition leaders with the focus, as a Kurdish official said, on Ankara's "military intentions in the event of war and arrangements for the interim (period) after a war."
The meeting was arranged by Khalilzad, but, given the mutual suspicions between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds, particularly given Turkey's record of using force to suppress its own Kurds, it is unlikely that the US envoy would be able to pull off a deal.
From the Ankara vantage point, allowing the Iraqi Kurds access to the oil-rich areas is a pre-cursor for trouble since the hydro-carbon resources would allow the growth of the Iraqi Kurds into an independent state.
But the underlying fear of the Iraqi Kurds is that Ankara, which recently stepped up references to the presence of a two- million Turcomen community -- who hold Iraqi nationality -- around the oil areas of Kirkuk and Mosul, might seize and annex the areas and thus realise its grievance that post-World War I borders were drawn up by Britain at the expense of Turkey.
In either case, the US would find its plans going terribly wrong since a key pillar of its projections of post-war Iraq includes its own control of the country's oil resources -- unless of course Washington is prepared to fight off both Iraqi Kurds and Turkish soldiers from the oil-producing areas.