Will Turkey Pay for Its Defiance?

What shocked many foreign policy experts was the Turkish government’s unwillingness, or inability, to protect what were thought to be its own strategic interests in northern Iraq. The absence of American forces there, they said, would mean that the 218-mile border between Turkey and Iraq might be chaotic and that neighboring Turks and Kurds might even clash.
Turks have long worried that in the event of war, Iraqi Kurds might seize the northern oil fields to finance an independent state, which Turkey’s Kurds would then yearn to join. Kurdish leaders privately expressed glee about the parliamentary vote, speculating that Turkey’s unwillingness to play an active role in a war would force the United States to rely more heavily on their militias.
Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, said there was "deep disappointment" over Turkey’s decision despite the administration’s "multifaceted relationship with this important country." The Pentagon, he said, had let Turkey and the Kurds know that Washington and its coalition partners did not want clashes between Turks and Kurds — and the potential for that had been reduced by the administration’s repeated commitment to Iraq’s territorial unity.
"There was a coalition of the willing, and one of the willing seems to have dropped out," said Morton I. Abramowitz, a former senior State Department official who is an expert on Turkey.
For its part, the Turkish government appears to have been unnerved by the 15 percent plunge in the Turkish stock market the day after the vote, and it began furiously backtracking. Turkish officials privately assured the United States that they might try to get a second vote after a parliamentary election today that is expected to allow Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party, to form a new government.
That could happen within 10 days, Turkish officials said — roughly the time the American military would need to reroute ships now in Turkish waters to Kuwait.
But some American officials suggested that it would be too late — that preparations for battle would still suffer, and that in any event trust between partners had been jeopardized.
By the end of the week, the chief of the Turkish General Staff, Hilmi Ozkok, who was once the undisputed arbiter of Turkish national security policy but had been silent during the parliamentary debate, said the Turkish military supported reconsidering the measure in the country’s interests, suggesting that he was in favor of Parliament’s voting again.
Turkish officials mustered myriad excuses for the resolution’s failure, including accusations that Kurdish leaders had made inflammatory comments.
Some Turks blamed their inexperience with democratic procedure. The fledgling government badly miscalculated the number of legislators who would abstain, they said. They also blamed divisions within the ruling party.
Most of all, though, they cited an eminently democratic motive: the overwhelming unpopularity of a war against Iraq. And, they said, Muslim states do not make war on other Muslim states.
"It was ultimately democracy in action," said O. Faruk Logoglu, Turkey’s ambassador to Washington. He said the United States could not promote democracy on one hand and on the other punish Turkey because its fledgling democracy had failed to produce the result Washington had wanted.
That last argument, in particular, did not impress some advocates of administration policy in Washington, coming as it did after strenuous bargaining over the amount of aid Turkey might get if it supported the American plan — the amounts discussed were in the tens of billions of dollars.
Mr. Feith said democracy was not the issue. "Democracy," he said "is not the same as infallibility," and the issue was that the Parliament had acted against Turkey’s own interests.
And Muslim states have often gone to war against one another — Egypt with Yemen, Iraq with Iran and later with Kuwait, Lebanon with Lebanon.
Experts on Turkey were also jolted by the desertion of many from the Turkish opposition — the self-described custodians of Turkey’s secular tradition. Of these, only Suleyman Demirel, a former prime minister, strongly urged Parliament to support the measure.
Nor did Turkey’s ultimate defender of secularism, the general staff, do much to encourage the government to take the unpopular, but strategically advantageous, stance.
The senior American official noted that the military had long been suspicious of the ruling party, which has Islamist roots but has in recent years pledged to uphold Turkey’s secular laws and traditions. In any event, said Henri J. Barkey, a former Clinton administration official who now teaches at Lehigh University, "lack of strong guidance from the military was taken as a sign."
Some accused Germany and France, which oppose both war on Iraq and Turkey’s entry into the European Union, of lobbying Turkish leaders to defeat the resolution. Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar, rejected the idea of any conspiracy, but noted that Turkey was so desperate to win acceptance into the European Union that "it seems to have adopted Europe’s anti-Americanism as its own."
But in so doing, Mr. Abramowitz said, the Turks had alienated the executive branch of the American government, which, particularly in the Bush administration, has been far more supportive of Turkey than Congress has been. "There is a chance that if the war goes well, all things will be forgotten, if not forgiven," he said. "But if there are a lot of American casualties, or Iraqi civilian casualties, the American Congress will turn on them."
Still, officials and analysts question the extent to which the United States can distance itself in the long run from such a strategically placed country, one of the few Muslim democracies in the region, and one that still offers the United States air bases and logistical support. "No administration can walk away from Turkey," Mr. Barkey said.
"The Turks," a Defense Department official said, "fought with us in Korea, supported us in Vietnam when much of Europe did not, and paid a high price for its support during the first gulf war. It’s not over in terms of our ability to work with them, even without substantial ground forces coming in from the north."