With Turkey requiring a security council vote before even considering allowing US forces to begin moving troops and equipment in, they appear to have dealt themselves out of events unless the ending of the Gulf War is delayed again. Time appears to have run out.
Frank Gaffney says the Turks are just caught in the middle, we need them over the long term, and they'll come around. Our interests would be badly affected if they were to become part of the problem, instead of one of the USA's key regional allies. So give them time to launch a re-vote.
Christopher Hitchens, in contrast, sees an ugly side to recent Turkish demands and bids them "good riddance!" He proposes cutting off all aid, getting tough on Cyprus, and leaving them to the tender mercies of the EU. Hitch also looks forward to drinking coffee in Baghdad with his Kurdish friends sometime soon.
Who's right? Is either one of them right?
Agree with Gaffney, although 0 Northern Front = $0 Payola this time round. But there is always the future and we simply cannot estrange the Turks so that they unilaterally occupy a huge chunk of Kurdistan.
Second Gaffney. As far as Islamic countries go, Turkey is as good as it gets right now: relatively stable, holding regular free elections, with a fundamentally pro-modern bent in its foreign and domestic policies.
We want Turkey to succeed; in the minds of the Islamic radicals, secular, post-Ataturk Turkey is everything they despise. Were Turkey to join the other side, it would be a wholesale rejection of the modern model by the only Muslim state ever to adopt one.
Turkey is huge. Your average Mideast state is pint-sized by comparison; Saudi Arabia only has 20 million people or so, Israel 6 million, Jordan 3 million, Iraq 24 million, and so on. Turkey weighs in at about 70 million (the only other state of comparable size is Egypt). We cannot afford to lose the population of Turkey to the radicals, something I fear is underappreciated.
Finally, we shouldn't forget that the Turks' recent behavior are the early stages of an experiment in political liberalization: having asked for and gotten the military to step out of politics, we shouldn't ostracize them for doing, in broad brushstrokes, what we wanted them to do. Political freedoms are a new and iffy thing there -- American rejection could hurt them terribly.
Patience is called for.
I am with Hitchens on this one. The Turks just proved themselves to be unreliable allies.
We cannot allow any of their troops in northern Iraq.
And any deal we have with them must be totally Turkish performance up front with any performance on our part afterwards.