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Out with the US, in with the
Turks
By Robert M Cutler
Part 1: Turkish
parliament's double-fisted knockout
The
Turkish Grand National Assembly, in failing to approve
the economic assistance package to be provided to Turkey
by the US in return for American troops using Turkish
soil for an attack on Iraq, also failed to authorize
Turkey's army to enter northern Iraq. The Turkish
constitution requires a parliamentary vote to send the
country's armed forces outside its own borders. With
this not being approved, the dynamics of the impending
war have changed somewhat.
At greatest issue in
northern Iraq for the US, of course, are the oil fields
of Kirkuk; but they are not the whole story. It would be
fair to say that most everyone who actually lives in the
region is at least as concerned about the post-Saddam
Hussein political order in Iraq, specifically whether
the country will be federal or unitary.
It was
in the attempt to calm Kurdish fears of Turkish
occupation, in particular, that President George W
Bush's special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad - a protege of
deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who cut his
teeth on constructing post-conflict regimes in
Afghanistan - met with the assembled Iraqi opposition in
northern Iraq this past weekend. Khalilzad's mission was
part of the hesitation-waltz between Turkey and the US
leading up to the assembly vote on the American economic
assistance package, which, unexpectedly, failed to win
Turkish parliamentary approval.
From the
American perspective, Khalizad's most important tasks
were to dissuade the opposition from forming a body that
could be taken to represent a provisional government and
to get them to acquiesce in a Turkish military
incursion. On both counts he was less than successful.
Concerning the first of these, the opposition
established a leadership council that styles itself as
the nucleus of a post-Saddam government, rather than
just an advisory council that might work with an
American viceroy. Indeed, inside Iraq the opposition is
spinning this as suggesting parallel civilian and
military administrations. Concerning the second matter,
important despite the final statement's relatively soft
language, elements within the Iraqi opposition strongly
object to any Turkish intervention at all. In fact,
Khalilzad's language that the Turkish military role
would be "fully coordinated" with the American presence,
and that the Turkish army would leave when the Americans
did, contains enough holes to drive a truck through.
Full coordination does not exclude autonomy: the
military planning done within the framework of the
US-Turkish agreement put before the Turkish assembly
foresaw 80,000 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq - more
than twice the number of Americans - as well as Turkish
(or joint US-Turkish) supervision of the subsequent
disarmament of the Kurdish forces to be armed by the
Americans to assist in the first stages of the war.
If the US is now limited
to leapfrogging airborne divisions into northern Iraq from
the Gulf, which press reports have long suggested to
be the American "Plan B", then American troops will be
far less numerous than the 40,000 they planned
for ground insertion via eastern Turkey. Moreover, with
the Ankara parliament's rejection of the terms of
the US-Turkish agreement, the American
engineering enhancements projected for Turkish bases, which were
intended to permit the more rapid transit of US
troops through Turkey into Iraq, will not be completed in time if they
are completed at all. This constellation of events raises
the interesting possibility that, should the Turkish
parliament approve a Turkish role in northern Iraq after
the de facto leader of the ruling Justice and
Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is elected from
the Siirt constituency this weekend and becomes prime
minister, then the ratio of Turkish to American troops
on the ground in northern Iraq will be far greater than
two-to-one.
If the US arms the Kurds, as
foreseen in the first stages of the invasion, and if
Turkey decides after Erdogan forms a government that he
could present the motion on military cooperation to
parliament again, then the subsequent Turkish
introduction of troops into northern Iraq would only
enhance the probability of Turkish-Kurdish clashes in
the north, where the US may not have the troops
effectively available to separate them or establish a
ceasefire.
In conclusion, one should take note
of a secret seldom whispered in the English-language
press, that even today there are exiled Iraqi parties
that are not sympathetic to the projected American
intervention. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution
in Iraq, a body representing Shi'ite Arabs in southern
Iraq and participating in the meetings with Khalilzad
but which objected to language "welcoming" American
troops, is is one such party. Islamic Call, another
Shi'ite group but not present at the Khalilzad meeting,
is another. (Islamic Call is also called "Da'wa" in
English-language reports, after its Arabic name
"al-Da'wa al-Islamiyya".) The Iraqi Communist Party,
which was the largest Iraqi party before Saddam achieved
power, also opposes US intervention. Finally, even the
Kurdistan Democratic Party is split, with memories of
previous US betrayals of the Kurds in uprisings in 1975
and 1991 motivating some of its leaders to oppose
American intervention if a Turkish invasion is
inseparable from it. It is to be noted that these
parties represent non-Sunni ethnic groups in the north
and south of the country. They may be counted on,
especially the Kurds, to insist strongly on a federal
post-Saddam Iraq.
Washington, meanwhile, seems
split between those for whom "nation-building" has
passed from political anathema to political practice (if
not doctrine) on the one hand, and on the other hand,
those who would be happy merely to replace the several
dozen super-elite of the Iraqi leadership - many of whom
are linked to Saddam by kinship and clan ties - while
leaving the unitary Saddamite state apparatus more or
less intact and carrying over the vast majority of its
officials into the post-Saddam era. Such a political
design, however, does not qualify as "regime change": it
amounts to nothing less than a coup d'etat.
Dr Robert M Cutler, http://www.robertcutler.org,
is Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada.
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