Stardate 20030116.1514

(On Screen): The new government of Turkey is in an anomalous position, and if the situation in Iraq comes to a boil the Turkish government will definitely feel pain no matter what happens.

The new government is basically Islamic. Its ideology tells it to oppose the US and to ally with other Islamic nations. On the other hand, realpolitik makes blatantly obvious that doing something like that would be political suicide; Islamicism has definitely reached its high water mark and is about to recede, and joining with other Islamic nations against the US would only guarantee being washed away. The military and political alliance between the US and Turkey has served it very well for decades, and to oppose the US now would scrap that completely, not to mention seriously damaging Turkey's chances for joining the EU. (Those chances seem low for the moment, but if Turkey takes a strongly Islamic turn, they'll drop to zero.)

But if the new Islamic-oriented government actually does come out strongly in favor of the US, it faces internal disruption and a host of other political problems.

They're basically hoping that the problem will somehow go away; that would be the best deal for them. If there's no shooting war, then they don't have to choose sides. In a shooting war, geography and historical alliances dictates that Turkey can't stay neutral. So they're trying to organize a regional peace summit in hopes of preventing war, for all the good it will do them.

This is an example of a problem that a lot of the governments in that area are facing. If they come out publicly on our side too soon, then they make themselves a target for international condemnation and for internal protests. But outright opposing us would be blatantly stupid, and though they may be corrupt and cruel they're not fools. So what they've mostly been doing is to publicly dither while privately cooperating with us. Once the writing is on the wall and events start to move rapidly, they can show themselves to be our allies. In the mean time it's safer for them to hide their true intentions.

I think that the situation in Turkey is not quite like that; the government there is, I think, truly conflicted. But in the long run practicality will win out, and when it really becomes important they'll cooperate, at least mostly.

I don't think they'll consent to large scale public staging of American ground forces in Turkey for invasion, but they'll let us use their airbases and will cooperate with us. They have too much to lose if they don't.

Simply making the US angry is enough of a problem, but even worse is that if Turkey actually impedes us, and we fight and win anyway (which is how the smart money would bet) then there would no longer be any reason for the US to oppose the creation of an independent Kurdistan out of the northern part of former Iraq. And that is the nightmare scenario for Turkey, for it would instantly become a base of operations for military predation into southern Turkey. Before the Turkish election, the government there cooperated with us and their price was that Iraq remain one nation afterwards and that the Kurds not get a homeland. The new government of Turkey, for all its Islamic leanings, ultimately needs that same deal, and ultimately can only get it the same way.