Current opinion

Watching Washington

by Bernard KENNEDY

The Turkish public would have preferred the US presidential election to go the other way. While top officials in Ankara did not necessarily share these sympathies, public perceptions of the situation in Iraq are likely to go on complicating the formation of workable policies.

The Turkish public would have preferred John Kerry to have won last month's US presidential election. This was the overwhelming conclusion of opinion polls and casual observation alike. What the polls did not ask was why.

Turks had reasons of their own for wanting President Bush out. Mostly Muslim, they are particularly sensitive to the threat of a 'War of Civilisations' (or "crusade"). Moreover, Iraq and other potential targets of US military might are just next door - real, familiar people, rather than blobs on a strategic map. For all Turkey's Western orientation, its social realities are in many ways closer to those of the South than the North.

If questioned, however, many would also have explained their desire for change in the White House with arguments equally familiar in Western Europe. That the US under Bush had responded with excessive and misplaced violence to the September 11 massacre. That far from making the world a safer place it was provoking extremism and terrorism. That it had disgraced itself in Guantanamao and Abu Ghraib. That its first-strike doctrine and unilateralism were unethical as well as a threat to the influence of other major capitals. That its real aim was to dominate the world's oil supplies while nourishing the American arms industry. And so on.

Not that Kerry was expected to act otherwise. Abroad as well as at home, US presidentials are referenda on the incumbent. The hope was not that Kerry would win but that Bush would lose. Immediate foreign policy changes were never on the cards - a fact well-recognised and generally expressed in some such phrase as "It makes no difference who wins ". But if the US public refused to approve its administration's bad behaviour, then belief in "justice" and "common sense" would be restored. And perhaps in the months and years ahead Washington might at least refrain from more of the same, lower its bottom line, and listen as well as talk.

Religious factor

This widespread Bush-aversion was broadly encouraged  by media commentators, but was not totally shared in narrow ruling circles. Ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) aides were concerned that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan might be unable to set up the same kind of cordial personal relationship with Kerry as he had succeeded in setting up with Bush. Militant Islamists may dread (or, alternatively, relish) the heightened influence of the Christian right in US politics. But for the AKP, a blurring of the distinction, in dominant international ideology, between religion and state (if not between religions and states) would be beneficial.

If, in the West, state laws come to accommodate religious precepts - and popes, patriarchs or preachers come to substitute for public officials, politicians and community leaders (not least on diplomatic occasions) - then Turkey's semi-Islamist administration is all the more easily normalised. At a time when Western Europe shows signs of rediscovering secularism (in the face of Islamist militancy, of course), the US offers a more attractive, more comprehensible model to the AKP leadership. Like Bush, Erdogan has his millions of 'honest folk" backers, who partake of his identity and admire his zeal, and who do not worry about much else.

Hawks for ever

In circulation at the highest echelons of the civilian and military bureaucracies, meanwhile, were a number of variations of the devil-you-know and climate-of-fear themes. One line of argument - not obviously borne out by history so far - was that a president in his second term, and hence more responsible to history than to the electorate, would make a more conciliatory and reliable leader and partner. To this must be added the atavistic assumption that interventionist US administrations are intrinsically more supportive of Turkey - whether in the context of European integration, at the IMF, or with respect to Cyprus and the matrix of Armenian issues. Dating back to the Cold War, this assumption rests compellingly on the understanding that Turkey's importance to the US is largely military in nature, reflecting its role in NATO and its proximity to "enemy" territory.

The hawkishness-is-good-for-Turkey hypothesis is re-invented in the run-up to every US presidential election. The Cold War may be over; there may be no doves in sight, and Turkey-US relations may have blossomed into a strategic partnership (at least rhetorically) under the Democrat Clinton administration. Nevertheless, the hypothesis has yet to be disproved in the perceptions of the foreign policy establishment. If the Turkish press devoted few column centimetres to it this year, this is probably only a testimony to the general antipathy inspired by Bush's policies.

The Iraq you know

Last but not least, policy-makers in Ankara privately take the view that while the Iraq situation is not good, it could be worse. The clock cannot be turned back, they note; the overthrow of the Saddam regime and the US occupation are matters of fact. In these circumstances, US policing and a gradual democratisation and legitimisation of the pro-US Iraqi government remain the best hope for law, order and economic opportunity. This requires a sustained US commitment to assign a large part of its military and economic capabilities to Iraq for the foreseeable future. The fewer compromises the US is prepared to make in order eventually to extract its troops, the better the prospects for the establishment of a strong and friendly neighbour in the near future. If the US presence requires co-operation with the Kurds of northern Iraq, then this is a penalty which Turkey has no choice but to pay, given alternative scenarios ranging from the establishment of a radical Shi-ite state to Arabs (and Turcomans?) taking bloody revenge on the Kurds, creating another massive refugee crisis in the Turkish Southeast and potentially cementing the case for an independent Kurdish state.

Limited leverage

With Kerry confined to history, Ankara clings to this logic, out of necessity if not out of conviction. By supporting Washington, top officials may also hope to exercise some influence over the future of Iraq. However, even if the US is interested in such bargains, the level and nature of the support that Ankara is willing or politically able to offer in return for its long shopping list - territorial integrity, no Kurdish state or autonomy, no Kurdification of Kirkuk, the disarming of the PKK - is limited. In terms of providing logistical support, the parliamentary vote of March 1, 2003, was a turning point. Turkey may still be of value to the US as a "model Muslim country", but this does not represent a "card" that can be "played".

Meanwhile, public opposition to the US in Iraq may increase further in the months ahead. For one thing, over 60 Turks have now been killed in lawless Iraq since the invasion. Almost as many Turkish lives have been lost as British, and all of them are the lives of non-combatants. Popular discontent is starting to be heard. The government in November warned citizens to avoid travelling to Iraq, but lorry-drivers are in need of the work, and government ministers, exporters and contractors are still eager for slices of the Iraq "cake".

Eyes on Iraqi elections...

Secondly, this year has seen an increase in mine explosions and armed clashes in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey. These are inevitably associated in the public eye with the PKK Kurdish guerillas, now known as KADEK, and with their northern Iraq base. With the arrival of winter, the number of incidents is likely to fall, but another spate of funerals of conscripts in April or May could well spark nationalist recriminations against the AKP government.

Thirdly, the proposed Iraq elections will put the "Kurdish state" issue back on the agenda. A critical question will be whether elections are held in Kirkuk and other "disputed" settlements, and if so what the outcome will be. Aware as they are of the importance of transatlantic relations, neither the AKP leadership nor the Foreign Ministry nor the armed forces are impervious to public misgivings on these issues.

(DIPLOMAT – December 2004 – Ankara)