VIEWS FROM TURKEY: REASONS FOR THE UNITED STATES WAR AGAINST IRAQ

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand Turkish views toward the U.S. war against Iraq which commented on 19 March 2003, it is necessary to consider the views of three important segments of Turkey's society-the government, the military and the public, all of which had differing views as to the reasons for the war and what Turkey's response should be.1 An additional complicating factor in the evolving of the rush to war was that Turkey's government changed hands on 3 November 2002 as Washington was ratcheting up its prowar propaganda. The new government headed by the Justice and Development Party-JDP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AKP) was decidedly more ambivalent regarding the war than the three party coalition government that it replaced.2

U.S. OFFICIALS IN TURKEY: PLANNING FOR THE WAR

The U.S. plans for the war against Iraq were already well advanced by mid- summer 2002. On 14 July U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main advocates behind the U.S.' war against terrorism, a fervid supporter of Israel, and a strong advocate of war against Iraq, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey in the mid-1990s, and also a strong supporter of Israel and of the Turkey-Israel alliance that he help nourish in the 1990s, visited Turkey. During their one day visit, the two U.S. representatives reportedly told Turkish officials that when the U.S. attacked Iraq its forces would also occupy Mosul and Kirkuk, both city and province, because its oil sources and Turkoman population was of vital concern to Turkey. By doing so thee Americans hoped to eliminate competition between the Kurds and Turks in the two regions. Wolfowitz and Grossman also requested that Turkey allow some 80,000 U.S. troops to transit Turkey and permit U.S. engineers to make site inspections of six Turkish air bases and three harbors in order to calculate how many improvements had to be made to accommodate the expected American forces and war materiel. According to different sources, Wolfowitz also indicated that the U.S. would offer Turkey an economic package worth between $14-526 billion, although most reports suggested the lower figure. Wolfowitz and Grossman also indicated that that the U.S. would consider erasing $3.5 billion of Turkey's $5 to $6 billion weapons debt.3 The July visit of Wolfowitz and Grossman to Turkey is indicative of how advanced the U.S. plans to attack Iraq were by the summer of 2002 and, probably, as early as the beginning of 2002. It only became clear in 2004 to the American public and many others that the U.S. was planning to attack Iraq at this early date, as a result of a spate of works critical of the Bush administration's reasons for doing do.4

On 3 and 4 December 2002, Wolfowitz and Grossman were back in Turkey, joined by the powerful U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Robert Pearson, trying to secure definite commitments from the Turks on matters discussed in July. Since July, however, an earthquake had erupted in Turkey's politics. In the 2 November general and parliamentary elections, the JDP had unexpectedly received 34 percent of the popular vote becoming the first majority party to govern Turkey in 15 years. The JDP was eager to establish its legitimacy with the U.S. and Wolfowitz announced to the Turkish press that he was "greatly encouraged" by his talks with the leader of the JDP, Recep Tayyib Erdogan. He announced that the JDP leader was amenable to most of the U.S. demands and invited him to Washington on 10 December for a meeting with President George W. Bush, already deeply involved in planning the war. Wolfowitz assured Erdogan that Washington would be unstinting in its pressure on the EU to provide Turkey a 2003 date to begin accession talks to the EU at their meeting in Copenhagen on 12 December. Erdogan spent only two days in Washington; besides a major policy talk at the Center of International and Strategic Studies. The JDP also met, notably, only with an influential group of American Jews.5 It was clear, however, that just two weeks after Erdogan's Washington visit that things were not flowing smoothly between Washington and Ankara. On 30 December, Prime Minister Abdullah Gül (Erdogan was unable to serve as prime minister at that time because he was not a member of parliament) in an interview with editors of Turkey's leading daily newspapers and broadcast media said that, regardless of U.S. plans and objectives, Turkey, too, "had its own scenarios" concerning the disposition of Iraq and the oil and gas fields in northern Iraq, especially the fields in the Kirkuk province (muhafaza).

U.S. INCENTIVES TO TURKEY TO JOIN THE WAR

In the negotiations between U.S. and Turkish officials that continued right up to the start of the war on 19 March regarding the conditions under which Turkey would participate in the war, Washington stressed the financial benefits it was willing to bestow on Ankara. U.S. Ambassador Robert Pearson proclaimed on more than one occasion that $17 billion of the $31 billion promised and provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) to Turkey had come from strictly U.S. sources. The U.S. also paid $228 million to Turkey's International security Armed Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan from June 2002 to February 2003, paid Turkey's quarterly IMF tranches of $200 million and also provided $300 million, through the Overseas Petroleum Investment Corporation (OPIC), to purchase insurance on the Baku-Tbilisi- Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline to protect it from sabotage. Pearson also stated that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had allocated a $372 million credit to support the export of Turkey's agriculture projects.6 In early January 2003, Washington announced that the U.S. Export-Import Bank (USEIB) had cleared the way for a $314 million loan to enable Turkey to buy 14 helicopters. One 19 January, Johannes Lind, Deputy Director of the World Bank, announced that the bank would soon release a $900 million tranche for Turkey. During the last six months of 2002 Turkey had received directly some three or four billion dollars in funds, much it from the U.S. or generated from U.S. sources. These monies were in addition to the $ 14 billion economic, trade and credit package that the two countries were also negotiating. Because of U.S. largesse and Turkey's dependency on such funds, it seemed clear that Turkey would join and support the U.S. war against Iraq. The only question was: how much and to what extent?7