What’s Ankara Waiting For ?

Baghdad is becoming like another Beirut!

Although US officials called the attacks ‘desperate’ and vowed to continue their mission in the war-devastated country, they made clear the failure of all America’s plans for Iraqi reconstruction. Domestic demonstrations against Bush’s Iraq policy will likely cast a long shadow over next year’s presidential elections.

The Bush administration has lost its grip on Iraq’s Governing Council concerning the Turkish troop deployment issue. Thanks to recent developments, our soldiers are now less likely to go to that Iraqi hell. Otherwise, in the days to come the families of our soldiers would face many sleepless nights, waiting for news from Iraq. Unfortunately, now many Iraqi and American families are in grieving. The scale of casualties in the postwar period has reached the hundreds. The chaos the US created in the region has ruined many lives. Nobody knows when all this will end. The Iraqi opposition is nothing but the resistance of a nation which has lost everything.

US officials dumbfounded by the latest developments in Iraq are making contradictory statements on Turkey. Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, recently claimed that the country’s sensitivities on Turkish troops stemmed from 400 years of ‘colonialist’ Ottoman Empire rule. If the Iraqis still feel this way about the Ottoman Empire after almost a century later, I wonder how many years it will take them to forget the current occupation? History will never forget the colonialists of the 21st century who bombed and destroyed a country for weeks, using falsified horror stories about alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Turkey refused to take part in this shameless war. But now, Ankara must take another correct step. Bremer recently stated that Turkey must solve its problems on the troop deployment issue by negotiating directly with Iraq’s Governing Council. The only proper response to this demeaning statement is sending the issue back to our Parliament. It seems that not only Iraqi Kurds and Arabs, but also Washington opposes Turkish troop deployment! So, what’s Ankara waiting for to declare that our soldiers won’t go there after all?”