Canada Free Press
March 26 2010
Turkey Tilts Toward Iran
By Claudia Rosett Friday, March 26, 2010
– Forbes
ANKARA’Drinking tea with the President of Turkey has charms enough so
that I wish there were no need to report the disturbing talk that went
with it’of Iranian rulers and nuclear bombs.
But the occasion was a policy interview, not a social call. President
Abdullah Gul, with his mustache, swept back hair and a mischievous
glint in his eye, recently received a visiting group of Americans,
including a handful of reporters, of which I was one. He spoke with us
at Turkey’s presidential palace, a splendid place of jasmine-scented
halls, maritime oil paintings and a waiting room furnished with cozy
armchairs, a sofa of palest gold leather and a big flat-screen TV
showing scenes of his recent activities. From there we were seated
around a polished wood table, sipping our tea, while Gul sat at the
head, speaking through an interpreter (though he speaks English). At
the request of our group he focused on two issues: disputes arising
from the Armenian genocide of 1915, and policies for dealing with
Iran’s regime and its nuclear and potentially genocidal ambitions
today.
Despite the hospitality, I came away with the uneasy sense that there
is trouble brewing in Ankara. A secular, Muslim-majority state, long
allied with the West, Turkey in 2002 voted into power an Islamic
party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The AKP’s leaders
have been fashioning a new role for their government’a role embraced
by President Barack Obama’in which Turkey behaves less as a firm ally
of the West than as a multilateral mediator and regional center of
`soft power.’
Our visit may well have been intended as a small piece of that effort.
The interview with President Gul capped a whirlwind of foreign policy
meetings in Ankara late last week arranged by a private Turkish think
tank, the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, or TEPAV. (In
joining this group, I turned down their offer to pay for airfare and
hotels but did accept the chance to enjoy access to a number of
high-level officials.)
>From one government official after another we heard that Turkey’s
current foreign policy, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is
to seek `zero problems’ with its neighbors. But Turkey has some of the
world’s roughest neighbors, including Iran. Aspiring to zero problems
with Iran, while its rulers murder dissidents, threaten democracies
and build the bomb, requires compromises that are inevitably at odds
with an array of Western interests, including the democratic values
that Turkey’s AKP trumpets as being part of its program.
Already Turkey has tilted away from Israel, with which it had solid
ties in the 1990s. Today Turkey’s AKP leaders talk with everyone but
sympathize with the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist organization,
Hamas, as `brothers.’ Since early 2009 they have had a series of
highly visible spats with Israel. Currently Turkey is also berating
the U.S. over congressional calls for Ankara to apologize for the 1915
Armenian genocide. In early March, Turkey recalled its ambassador to
Washington, Namik Tan. He turned up at two of the meetings organized
for our group in Ankara, including the interview with the president.
Tan is a genial man, but his presence was a pointed reminder that
while Turkey is America’s ally’a NATO member, sending troops to
Afghanistan and hosting U.S. forces at Incirlik Air Base’Turkey’s
leaders don’t mind flaunting their disagreements with Washington.
This matters, not least, because Turkey, long a hapless petitioner to
join the European Union, has been campaigning with great success to
join or even preside over some of the world’s other prominent
diplomatic clubs. In 1999 Turkey became a founding member of the Group
of 20 industrialized and emerging economies. Since Erdogan took office
in 2003, his government has been shunting aside Turkey’s secular
military, the second-largest standing armed forces in NATO after the
U.S. Reaching out on other fronts, Erdogan over the past seven years
has made 234 visits to 81 countries on five continents, according to a
Turkish pro-government newspaper, Today’s Zaman. Gul, who served as
Erdogan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister before becoming
president in 2007, maintains a similar globe-trotting schedule. So
does Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, a prime strategist of
Turkey’s current approach, on which he has written a book titled
Strategic Depth.
Diplomatically, it’s paid off. Since 2005 a Turk has headed the
57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference’headquartered in
Saudi Arabia and one of the most powerful lobbying blocs in the U.N.
In 2009, for the first time in almost four decades, Turkey took one of
the 10 rotating seats on the U.N. Security Council. Currently, Turkey
also sits on the governing board of the U.N.`s International Atomic
Energy Agency (where it abstained last fall from a vote to censure
Iran for building a secret uranium enrichment facility near Qom).
With all this, Turkey has become an influential player in diplomatic
efforts to corral Iran’s nuclear bomb program. But with a `zero
problems’ approach to Iran, where does that lead?
Gul says he has no doubts that Iran wants the nuclear bomb: `This is
an Iranian aspiration dating back to the previous regime, the days of
the Shah.’ For Iran’s current regime, says Gul, `I do believe it is
their final aspiration to have a nuclear weapon in the end,’ as a
matter of ‘ `national pride.’ `
He says Turkey is against an Iranian bomb. He believes it would
trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East: `A major competition
will start in the region.’
So far, so good. But how does he propose Iran be stopped? Turkey is
against further sanctions. Gul argues that `It is not possible to
isolate such a major country.’ Turkey is also opposed to any military
action. Instead, Turkey’s government favors trying to talking Iran’s
rulers into giving up on nuclear weapons.
For that, says Gul, the Turks are excellent negotiators, aware of the
nuances of Iran’s multipolar politics. `We’re talking to Iranians with
mutual respect, and most of the time we have very sincere and open
remarks with them.’ He is sure that Iranian religious leaders have
heard blunt realities from him which `they have not heard from anyone
else.’
What kind of advice does Turkey give? When Obama last year extended a
hand to Iran’s rulers, Gul says he advised Iran’s President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad that `This needs to be reciprocated ¦ This is a major
opportunity, and the language of President Obama doesn’t have any
threats within it, and this is an opportunity that should not be
missed.’
That advice failed completely. Iran snubbed Obama, insulted America
and went on threatening Israel, arming and training terrorists and
enriching uranium.
But Gul says not to worry. He is sure that even if Iran gets the bomb,
`they will not use it.’ He says he has warned Iran’s leaders that the
real danger they face, should they acquire nuclear weapons, is that
they `will start acting in an irrational manner, which will create
problems for themselves.’
One might suppose it would also create problems for others, such as
Israel. But Gul says Israel need not worry. However irrational Iran’s
leaders might become, he is sure they will remain rational enough to
refrain from devastating Israel’lest, by doing so, they should harm
the Palestinians or the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (which he says
would then create problems for Iran `with all the Muslims of the Gulf
and the surrounding regions’).
Gul reaches the sweeping conclusion that the real solution to Iran’s
bomb program is `to eliminate nuclear weapons throughout the Middle
East.’ This, he suggests, is the way to `guarantee the security of
Israel.’ But neither he nor any of the other Turkish government
officials we spoke with in Ankara were able to provide a plan for
ensuring that Iran’undeterred by years of European, American, U.N. and
Turkish diplomatic talks’would genuinely abandon its bomb program.
Such is the realpolitik of Turkey today. The real game in Ankara seems
to be not to stop the Iranian bomb but to get along with neighboring,
nuclear-arming Iran. That’s not soft power. It’s appeasement. That may
be understandable, given Obama’s hesitation to set a lead for
definitive action against Iran. But it is a perilous guide, and all
the tea and talk in Turkey, no matter how gracious the setting, will
not make up for the horrors this kind of `zero problems’ policy is
likely to help bring down on the Middle East.
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