Wow. I posted the pro­posed Kur­dish and Iraqi con­sti­tu­tions last night—and my thoughts that the Kurds are ask­ing for trouble—and wouldn’t you know it? Today, the Guardian runs this. It’s more of that growl­ing that I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post, but what’s most alarm­ing about this is Turkey’s charges that the United States is direct­ing the Kurds: “It is beyond encour­age­ment, (Wash­ing­ton) is direct­ing them,” Prime Min­is­ter Bulent Ece­vit told the Turk­ish paper Mil­liyet. “We will talk to the United States.“
If the United States is direct­ing the PUK and the KDP, that would amount to a stun­ning rever­sal against Turkey, one of our most loyal allies in the region. I don’t think that we are, frankly, and these com­ments are likely play­ing to Ecevit’s nation­al­ist base of sup­port, which often views the U.S. with sus­pi­cion. (They still har­bor resent­ments over Cyprus form 1964 and 1974.)
The United States needs Turkey more than it needs the Kurds, sadly, as the Kurds have only about 80,000 lightly armed pesh­mer­gas while the Turks have tanks and F-​16s (bought from the United States, of course.) They’re also a NATO ally and Incir­lik is a nec­es­sary base for run­ning sor­ties in the north­ern no-​fly zone.
But beyond that Turkey is valu­able to the United States in that it pro­vides a “good exam­ple” of democ­racy and Islam, serv­ing as an effec­tive ide­o­log­i­cal coun­ter­weight to Iran. It also has close ties to the Turkish-​speaking peo­ples of cen­tral Asia and their energy reserves.
This is why the United States has been such a pro­po­nent of Turkey’s ascen­sion to the Euro­pean Union. America’s sup­port is a com­plex web of self-​interest (keep­ing a strong, demo­c­ra­tic Mus­lim nation tied to the West) and pay-​back (see mil­i­tary alliance above.) It’s also why the Kurds of south­east Turkey both admire and resent the United States. They admire it for its stance on the Turkey-​EU issue, and they see mem­ber­ship as the key to eco­nomic recov­ery in that depressed region. They resent Amer­ica because it was very very sup­port­ive of Turkey’s war against the PKK’s ter­ror cam­paign (which Turkey remem­bered when Sept. 11, 2001 hap­pened.)
So, again, I’m not sure what would hap­pen if Iraq’s Kurds attain some form of inde­pen­dence. That would almost cer­tainly drive the Turks to war in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, and what then would the Amer­i­cans do? This may turn out to be a big­ger ques­tion than who rules the day after Saddam…