Bush Will Meet a Leading Turk on Use of Bases

The reason for Mr. Bush’s invitation seems clear.

Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, a Muslim-based political organization with a decidedly pragmatic agenda, leads the coalition that came to power in the election last month. So Washington is eager to shore up ties with Mr. Erdogan and, in the event of war with Iraq, secure his support for the Pentagon’s plan for ousting Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Erdogan, for his part, is eager to burnish his credentials as a forward-thinking moderate and advance his country’s bid to enter the European Union, a move Washington strongly supports.

But a big question is whether the two sides will agree on the scope of American military deployment in Turkey. If Mr. Bush decides to authorize an attack on Iraq, the Pentagon hopes to carry out airstrikes from Turkish air bases as it did during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But this time the Pentagon wants to do more. It also wants to use Turkish soil as a staging area for American ground attacks in northern Iraq.

The idea is to open a northern front that could complement the main attack from Kuwait and therefore enable the United States and its allies to quickly overwhelm Iraq’s overstretched forces.

United States officials also calculate that the deployment of American ground troops in northern Iraq would enable Washington to fend off an Iraqi attack on the ethnic Kurds who dominate that region, a mission that might be difficult to accomplish by air power alone. They believe that American forces would stabilize the Kurdish area if Mr. Hussein was toppled. That is no small consideration given the tensions between Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish minority, and the Iraqi Kurds.

"We’re quite comfortable with what we can do from the south," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said during a visit to Turkey last week. "Obviously, if we are going to have significant ground forces in the north, this is the country they have to come through. There is no other option."

Besides pushing for an early date to start negotiations to join the European Union, Turkey is also involved in negotiations over a United Nations plan to settle the longstanding Greek-Turkish impasse on Cyprus. The Bush administration has been pressing for progress on both fronts by the European Union summit meeting in Copenhagen, which starts on Thursday.

American officials say headway in those areas would be a major achievement that would help integrate Muslim Turkey into the West and resolve a long-simmering international dispute. Washington, however, is also hoping that its support for Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union — and the $5 billion in assistance that Turkish officials say the Bush administration is offering as compensation for the economic dislocation that would result from a war with Iraq — will help win Mr. Erdogan’s support for a possible military operation in Iraq.

As a NATO member, Turkey has long been a close ally of the United States. But the extent of its cooperation with Washington in the event of a war with Iraq is far from settled. American officials said they were confident that the United States would eventually secure access to air bases in Turkey.

But Turkey’s foreign minister, Yasar Yakis, cautioned publicly during Mr. Wolfowitz’s visit that the deployment of larger numbers of American ground troops on Turkish soil was not politically feasible, a view that was also conveyed privately to the Bush administration by other senior Turkish officials.

Some former United States officials say Turkish public opinion is not the main reason Turkey is resisting the deployment of American ground forces. They say the Turkish military wants to retain the option of sending its own forces into northern Iraq to ensure that the Kurds there do not declare a Kurdish state or seize the oil fields near Kirkuk, which could give the Kurds an economic basis for independence and perhaps encourage secessionist moves among Turkish Kurds.
The Turks want to be in a position to intervene in northern Iraq without U.S. interference," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. military analyst on Iraq. "That is why we need to be there. If U.S. forces were in the north, they can serve effectively as a peacekeeping force."

Mr. Wolfowitz also argued that the presence of American forces in northern Iraq could have an important stabilizing role and urged Turkish restraint.

"What we have been saying to our Turkish counterparts is this: Maximum U.S. participation is a good thing for Turkey," Mr. Wolfowitz told the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. "I believe that rather than acting alone to protect its interests in northern Iraq, it would be much better for Turkey to act within a coalition."

Still, Turkish public opinion is clearly not on Washington’s side. According to a recent public opinion survey by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Turks polled oppose allowing the United States to use Turkish bases to wage war on Iraq. The percentage of Turks with a favorable view of the United States also dropped from 52 percent to 30 percent over the last year, the survey found. The poll’s margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.

"Most people in Turkey would not favor a military attack on Iraq," said a Turkish official. "Iraq is a neighbor and a Muslim country. Turkey has a new government, and there is hope for this government and for the economy. Most people don’t want a war to take place."

Mr. Wolfowitz conveyed Mr. Bush’s invitation to Mr. Erdogan at a Tuesday night dinner in Ankara. At first glance, Mr. Erdogan might seem an unlikely ally. The 48-year-old politician grew up in Kasimpasa, a poor neighborhood in Istanbul. He went to a religious school and got his start in politics by organizing an Islamic youth group. He later was elected mayor of Istanbul. As mayor, he was praised for running an efficient government, but he also banned alcohol from city restaurants, stirring fears that he was challenging Turkey’s secular state.

In 1997, he recited a poem that began, "The mosques are our barracks; the minarets are our bayonets." He was charged with inciting religious hatred and went to jail for four years, a period that his supporters say led to his transformation into a more pragmatic leader.

But the effect of Mr. Erdogan’s sentence lingers, and he is still barred from serving in government, a prohibition his supporters are striving to overcome so that he can secure a place in Parliament and eventually become the head of state. Mr. Bush is giving a boost to Mr. Erdogan’s ambitions by inviting him to the White House, which would raise his stature at home.

That is not the only way the Bush administration is trying to help Mr. Erdogan. Since his party’s triumph at the polls, he has sought to dispel fears that he has a secret Islamic agenda, casting himself as a modernizer and a pragmatist. His primary foreign policy goal is to speed Turkey’s entry into the European Union.

He made a whirlwind tour of European capitals to make his case that a date of next year should be set for talks on Turkey’s union candidacy. He has rejected a European proposal that talks on eventual membership not begin until 2005, insisting that talks start next year.

The Bush administration has strenuously backed his appeals, prompting François Heisbourg, the chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, to quip that American officials known for their penchant for unilateral action have taken a curiously strong interest in the development of European multilateral institutions.

Bush administration officials, however, have cast Turkey’s bid for European Union membership as a historic opportunity to bring Turkey into the West and, as a result, demonstrate that Western nations are not at odds with the Muslim world. They say they are convinced that Mr. Erdogan has undergone a genuine evolution from his early days and is a true moderate.

"Is Erdogan going to Libya, Iraq or Syria?" a senior administration official said. "No. His first trips were to European capitals. He appears to have made his strategic choice. Rather than dig into the past he is looking to the future."

During his brief trip to Washington, Mr. Erdogan is expected to meet with Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

Administration officials insist that much of the discussion will dwell on the search for a Cyprus settlement as well as Turkey’s quest to join the European Union. But they acknowledge that Iraq is also a main item on the agenda. The Pentagon, for its part, is clearly hoping that Mr. Erdogan’s visit will facilitate the deployment of American forces in Turkey.

The Pentagon, in particular, is eager to begin preparing for a northern front. It has already made plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade airfields as well as ports along Turkey’s southern coast so that they could be used to ship American war matériel to Turkey for a ground offensive