Whoa. Turkey has appar­ently reversed course and will now allow its ter­ri­tory to be used by U.S. troops.
There are no details on how all this will go down yet, but the Turk­ish lira slid to a new low against the dol­lar, sug­gest­ing at least one rea­son for Turkey’s sud­den con­ver­sion.
Mater­iél and equip­ment has been tran­sit­ing the coun­try for weeks, but no troops other than a token con­tin­gent of “base inspec­tors.” Most of the boats that were always described as “idling off the Turk­ish coast” have split for the Suez Canal and Kuwait. What good is this rever­sal?
Well, as reported before, hang­ing back until it was too late to offer much help (except maybe over­flight rights) was prob­a­bly Turkey’s plan along. But now that Erdo­gan is Prime Min­is­ter, he’s going to do all he can to prove his inten­tions to Wash­ing­ton. Per­haps he’s rea­son­ing that if Turkey’s help is too lit­tle, too late that can hardly be blamed on him, can it?
Mean­while, far­ther south, aver­age Iraqis are appar­ently arm­ing them­selves in prepa­ra­tion of the chaos that will surely fol­low the onset of hos­til­i­ties, um, Wednes­day? It’s appar­ently an old cul­tural tra­di­tion of Iraqis, but this time — sur­prise! — it’s been encour­aged by the Ba’ath régime.
But the real dan­ger is not that Iraqis will start fir­ing on Amer­i­can troops but on each other. “No one knows at whom these weapons will be pointed and after a U.S. strike we might see a new Iraq, in the Lebanese or Alger­ian style,” an Arab diplo­mat said.