Turkey’s importance for Iraq’s reconstruction
A new wind will blow in the Turkish economy if we get a say in Iraq’s reconstruction and a share of bids for repairing damaged buildings and building new ones. We should send soldiers to Iraq in order to check the PKK/KADEK terrorist threat on our southern border. This is also vitally important for Turkey. We can ignore the opposition of tribes and groups in Iraq. We can bring them around, because we’ll go there to dress the Iraqi people’s wounds and address their social ills.’ The opposing view went like this: ‘The US is an occupying power in Iraq. Therefore the Iraqi people oppose it, and this opposition is taking the concrete form of armed attacks. US soldiers are getting more and more bogged down in Iraq with each passing day and now they want to use Turkish soldiers as a shield. Putting our troops into such a situation and supporting the occupier would cause new problems in Iraq and invite criticisms from European Union circles. Such a bad idea should be forgotten.’
On Oct. 7, the motion on deployment was accepted and later published in the Official Gazette. The five-page motion stressed the importance of sending soldiers to Iraq. Following its passage, the AKP government and its supporters were pleased because this time we didn’t let down our strategic ally (!), and we got a $8.5 billion loan in the process.
However, these hopes started to turn to pessimism when we realized that the US’ enthusiasm for its strategic ally (!) was waning under pressure from certain groups in Iraq – that is, Turkey was no longer a must for Iraq. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan spoke to the press this weekend on the Iraq issue. ‘Iraq is our neighbor,’ he said. ‘We won’t take part in anything that could make things worse there. The demands of the Iraqi people are very important for us. We aren’t longing to send soldiers to Iraq. There was a request from the United States, and we’re evaluating it.’ This statement sums up the situation. Now one can ask what happened to the judgment that sending soldiers to Iraq was vitally important.”
