By Tao Wenzhao (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-02 07:13

The Turkish government has amassed 100,000 troops along its border with Iraq in recent days, preparing to attack the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters active in northern Iraq, just across the border. The situation adds another variable to the messy situation in the Middle East and tests the United States' ties with Turkey.

The US-Turkey relationship has been anything but ordinary. During the Cold War, the US thwarted Moscow's designs on the Dardanelles Strait, effectively cutting off one of the latter's strategic southward passages. And Turkey was thus ushered into the US' power sphere.

Not long after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949, Turkey joined the Western military bloc in 1952.

Because of its extremely important strategic location - sharing a common border with the Soviet Union and neighboring the Middle East, and standing guard on two major straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea - as an exceptionally important ally and has kept military bases in the country to maintain a heavy military presence there, making it an outpost in the containment of the Soviet Union.

Turkey's geopolitical significance has not faded since the end of the Cold War. More than 70 percent of the logistic provisions destined for US forces in Iraq are transported via Turkey these days. Turkey's cooperation is of unparalleled importance to the US.

Turkey is also important in another way because it is a Muslim nation, with 99 percent of its population professing that faith. It is also the most secular of all the Muslim countries in the world.

In other words, the country's constitutional practices, such as its separation of church and state, legislative elections, multi-party system, laws and legal statutes, women's participation in politics and monogamy, closely resemble those of a Western democracy.

The US has always advertised the spread of democracy and freedom as a key aim of its diplomacy, especially under the Bush administration, which regards encouraging political change as the ultimate goal of its foreign policy.

In this sense, Turkey is an example for other Islamic countries to follow.

The PKK was founded in 1978. It has resorted to guerrilla warfare to advance its cause of separation from Turkey and becoming an independent Kurdish state. Since the second half of 1999, it has retreated into northern Iraq. Because it carried out kidnapping, assassination, bombing and other attacks, the Turkish government has declared it an illegal and terrorist organization. The US also put its name on a list of terror organizations back in 1997.

Not just the Kurds in Turkey, but those in other countries seem to harbor varying degrees of secessionist tendencies, and deep down they are sympathetic to the PKK. The party's branch in Iran, the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), gives the Iranian government headaches just as the PKK does the Turkish administration.

Those countries naturally do not support the PKK, but neither do they back Turkey's cross-border raids on the PKK in northern Iraq.

After the Turkish Parliament approved the government's motion seeking the authority to carry out cross-border attacks on PKK strongholds in Iraq, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd himself, scoffed at the Turkish plan as practically impossible: "We will not hand any Kurdish man to Turkey, even a Kurdish cat".

The Iraqi government also made it clear the country would exercise its right to self-defense if Turkey's armed forces cross the border.

Right now Turkey is busy maneuvering in an attempt to resolve the conflict by diplomatic means on the one hand and seek other countries' support for its cross-border attack on the other.

Those other countries, however, have their own views on the thorny issue. Right now no other country is feeling more awkward than the United States.

On October 10 the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed a resolution that characterizes the mass killings of Armenian people by Turkish (Ottoman) troops in the early 20th century as genocide.

The Turkish government was so angry about this congressional gesture it recalled its ambassador in Washington to protest, while popular resentment of America surged in Turkey.

If this resolution gets House approval, Ankara will no doubt react with greater fury, which may even lead to a refusal to provide logistical support to US forces in Iraq and suspension of the use of its military bases by the US military.

The Turkish Parliament passed a resolution to that effect during the height of the war in Iraq, resulting in delays of US combat reinforcements heading for Iraq via Turkey. The Bush administration knows what's to come only too well, which is why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed regret right after the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed the above-mentioned bill and said she would use whatever influence at her disposal to prevent the House of Representatives from letting it through.

The cross-border raid on the PKK hideouts that Turkey plans to launch is obviously more of a hot potato to handle than the untimely House resolution.

Northern Iraq is the only region in the war-ravaged country that is relatively stable.

If Turkey indeed pours its forces over the border to fight the Kurds in northern Iraq, it will only make the already tumultuous situation in Iraq even worse.

The anti-US militants fighting US forces in Iraq nowadays include both the Sunnis and Shi'ites, but not the Kurds just yet because they have been the beneficiaries in this war so far. If Washington lets Turkey have its way or maybe just pretends it is not watching, the Kurds will surely be angry and that will land US forces in Iraq in deeper trouble than they already are.

The chief commander of US forces in Iraq has said he had not received any orders to attack the PKK because it is not part of the mission. He also let it be known there was no definitive intelligence suggesting cleanup operations in the kind of terrain found in northern Iraq would be effective. True, Turkey tried cross-border attacks on PKK strongholds 24 times in the past 23 years with little results. What can be expected if Turkey just repeats what it did in the past?

The hard part is that Washington cannot simply turn its back on Turkey over this issue.

At this stage, the PKK is already considered a terrorist organization by both the US and Turkey, and the counter-terrorism totem pole is now firmly in the hands of the Bush administration. The US cannot block Turkey's anti-terror efforts without a bulletproof excuse.

Second, Washington simply cannot afford to sacrifice its relations with Turkey at this moment. The US government has been doing some diplomatic maneuvering of its own lately, including Rice's meeting with her British counterpart.

As of now, the US stand on this issue is that:

First, Iraq is not a haven for terrorism, and the PKK must be punished for terrorist attacks it has launched from northern Iraq.

Second, the US and Iraq will join Turkey in clobbering the PKK, including the sharing of intelligence and curtailing PKK activities in Iraq so the Turkish government will be able to tell its people the international community and especially Iraq is not giving the PKK a free rein.

Third, it will ask the Turkish government to practice restraint over the issue of cross-border attacks on the PKK.

There are two critical moments on the horizon. One is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to Washington next Monday, the other is the meeting between Turkish and Iraqi government officials in Ankara to discuss ways to implement the bilateral counter-terrorism agreement the two nations signed recently. Those two diplomatic exercises will determine how the situation develops next.

The author is a researcher with the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

(China Daily 11/02/2007 page11)