| |
Turks, Kurds and the
US-Turkish relationship
By Robert M
Cutler
The recent detention of Turkish soldiers
by US troops in northern Iraq is only a symptom of the
divergence of interests between erstwhile Cold War
allies. The vote of the Turkish Grand National Assembly
this year against allowing the United States to use
Turkey's territory for transit of military forces in the
run-up to Gulf War II is likewise only a symptom of that
divergence of interests.
At the origin of that
divergence is the response of US foreign policy to the
events around September 11, 2001. Look for those
divergences to continue to manifest, despite Turkish
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's recently concluded visit
to Washington.
The naming of the trinity of
Iraq, North Korea and Iran as the "axis of evil" covers
over the "deterritorialization" of US security and
defense policy. What does this mean? It means that
geography no longer has fundamental strategic, but only
tactical, significance. The term "deterritorialization"
arose among political scientists in the late 20th
century to refer to the emergence of non-traditional
security issues and the significance of the
psychological aspect of social mobilization. Under
conditions of contemporary US security and defense
policy, it has been given a new connotation.
Euro-American international political studies
drew attention during the 1980s to the new emergence of
security issues, from the danger of "nuclear winter" to
that of global warming, which required international
cooperation to be resolved and so were no longer based
in zero-sum notions of traditional military-strategic
calculations. They were therefore called
"non-traditional" security issues. (Mikhail Gorbachev
and his ideologues in fact drew upon that Western
academic work when they reformulated Soviet
foreign-policy doctrine so as to place the common
interests of mankind above even those of the Soviet
state.)
As for social mobilization, Western
social scientists in the 1990s, caught up short by the
eruption of ethnic conflict throughout Central Eurasia,
had recourse to so-called "constructivist" theories of
"identity politics". These theories were often divorced
from systematic consideration of the social bases for
the emergence of those identities or, indeed, the role
of (indigenous) intellectuals in creating them and so
fomenting ethnic conflict. The Wars of the Yugoslav
Succession illustrate this process, and Valerii Tishkov,
head of the Ethnography Institute of the Russian Academy
of Sciences, is one of the few scholars who has
attentively examined its significance in the former
Soviet areas.
But because identity is a
wonderful concept about which to speculate, these
"constructivist" Western theories frequently tended to
slight the importance of geography and other tangible
resources that condition the actual outbreak and course
of ethnic conflicts.
If we look back on the
evolution of US Cold War doctrine over the years, it
becomes clear that the collapse of the Soviet bloc,
including that of the Soviet Union (a process distinct
from the former), signaled a late victory for the
earlier Cold War doctrine of "rollback" over the later
Cold War doctrine of "deterrence". Deterrence doctrine
(along with its concomitant war-fighting strategy of
"escalation dominance") was fundamentally a
psychological artifact. It was really grounded more in
presumed cognitive processes of Soviet decision-makers
than in any immutable facts of geography. By contract,
rollback at least suggested the relevance of geography:
rolling "back" was a spatial rather than psychological
concept. In a particularly striking manner, however, we
have since September 2001 watched, following the
validation of a geographically based Cold War doctrine,
the progressive deterritorialization of US security and
defense doctrine.
This means that geography no
longer matters from the standpoint of defining US
national interests. The "war against terrorism" is an
all-subsuming rubric under which the doctrine of
"preemptive war" is asserted without respect to military
theater. The current US administration brings the "war
against terrorism" home through such legislation as the
"Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism" (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001. US security and
defense policy has been "deterritorialized" not because
it is has become without reference to territory, but
because it does not distinguish among territories.
That fact establishes the parameter within which
Turkey has lost its relative geopolitical significance
to the United States as a regional power allied against
a territorially defined enemy (the erstwhile Soviet
Union). Turkey has, since September 2001, been
transformed in practice from a strategic regional ally
into a tactical facilitator of the deterritorialized
"war against terrorism". Thus when the Turkish Grand
National Assembly failed to approve the US deployment
into Iraq through the country, the Americans simply made
other plans.
The war on Iraq was not really
fought against an enemy capable of inflicting
fundamental harm upon the United States; the US reply to
the events of September 2001 illustrates the country's
resilience. The war on Iraq was, rather, a means to an
end: it is intended as a demonstration of Washington's
capacity to assert US prerogative without restriction,
anywhere, any time: when reach is ubiquitous, territory
ceases to have meaning. One unintended consequence has
been, as a conservative Eastern European diplomat has
put it, that former anti-anti-Americans in his region
have found themselves turned today, against their will,
into anti-Americans. This is the dynamic that threatens
to play itself out also in Turkey, but with much greater
violence and unpredictability.
Why will this
happen so? To be sure, Turkish public opinion was
overwhelmingly opposed to the US deployment. Yet as
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recognized
during a visit to Ankara in late May, the Turkish
government allowed a parliamentary "free vote" (ie, not
subject to party discipline) because "the military [did
not] say it was in Turkey's interest to support the
United States ... with the kind of strength that would
have made a difference". And this was because the
Turkish military, still thinking itself a strategic
rather than tactical player in Washington's eyes,
miscalculated and sought to impose upon the US its own
conditions for acquiescing in a war that it did not
really need on its own border. These conditions included
the deployment of tens of thousands of Turkish troops in
northern Iraq and, by implication, Turkey's policy
toward the Kurdish people within Turkish borders.
Thus Gul's visit to Washington occurred in the
context of the creation of a high-level US-Turkish
military committee to investigate the detention of
Turkish soldiers by US forces in northern Iraq this
month. News reports from Ankara indicate that
discussions in the joint committee included exploration
of possibilities to create an "international protection
force" for northern Iraq.
With the refusal of
India, France and Germany to supply forces to backstop
the US occupation of Iraq, and with United Nations
Secretary General Kofi Annan's invitation to Washington
to supply a timetable for withdrawal of US forces
unlikely to be accepted, an international aegis for such
a force is unlikely. Press reports from Ankara state
that the United States has accepted the principle that
Turkey will take command of any region in northern Iraq
where Turkish soldiers may be deployed.
In the
absence of UN authorization, then, it seems increasingly
likely that the US will come to rely at least in part
upon Turkish troops to be sent into northern Iraq. How
far "mission creep" will go remains undetermined.
The quid pro quo for this could likely be US
acquiescence, if not assistance, in suppression of Kurds
in Turkey. That would be an ominous development in light
of a recent statement by the presidency of Turkey's
Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK), the
political and social organization into which the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) transformed itself in the
late 1990s, during and after PKK leader Abdullah
Ocalan's arrest and trial.
KADEK has stated that
if the Turkish state does not reciprocate its own policy
of compromise (in effect since the late 1990s at
Ocalan's suggestion and insistence), then it will resume
armed combat. With the Kurdish ethnos spread across the
map from Syria into Iran, and with a political and
territorial foothold in northern Iraq - where the main
Iraqi Kurdish parties wholly support US policy and seek
to establish a degree of relative autonomy from Baghdad
within a federal state - the stage would be set for
further "unintended consequences" of the US invasion:
just what Washington doesn't need.
Robert M Cutler (www.robertcutler.org) is
research fellow, Institute of European and Russian
Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
