US welcomes Turkey vote on troops

We will, of course, look forward to a vote with the Turkish parliament," said Fleischer.
In Turkey, deputy prime minister Abdullatif Sener, emerging from a seven-hour cabinet meeting, told reporters that a motion on the deployment would be sent to parliament later today, even though Turkish-US talks on conditions for the deal were still ongoing.
The decision was taken even though "an important number of ministers found unsatisfactory the point" reached in the talks with the United States over financial aid and military cooperation in the event of a possible war against Iraq, Sener told reporters.
"We do not want our strategic partnership with the US to be clouded," the head of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said for his part.
Faced with a staunchly anti-war public opinion, the sole Muslim member of NATO has been holding out for days against strong pressure from Washington to allow its territory be used as a launching pad for a US invasion of Iraq from the north.
In return for its support, Turkey is seeking several billion dollars in aid to compensate for damages a war might inflict on its already hard-hit economy, along with a written pledge that the Kurds in northern Iraq will not be allowed to break away from Baghdad.