US Turkish relations: Radiant Future or Dark Days Ahead?

By PHK

Or more likely in between?

Should the U.S. “cheer the Islamist victory” in Turkey’s July 22 parliamentary elections as Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Steven A. Cook suggested on July 26 in the Boston Globe or should the administration view the results through the prism of Soner Cagaptay in the July 31 Wall Street Journal - as a dark day for Turkey and its future relations with the U.S. and Israel?

It seems to me that one of the very few intelligent things the Bush administration has done over the past six plus years in office was W’s recent post-election call to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to congratulate him on AKP (Justice and Development Party)’s parliamentary victory and, apparently, to discuss with him a possible future visit to Washington.

Roll Out the Red Carpet, W

For any number of reasons, the US should put out the welcome mat even if nothing more than that the food at the Turkish Embassy is bound to be far superior from that at the White House or many other embassies about town.

W’s congratulatory phone call seems to have been missed in the post-election reporting here but then what else isn’t new. It certainly wasn’t missed in Turkey. I found the W-Erdogan telephone call story in the Turkish Daily News via a link from the non-subscription non-firewalled part of Jane's Defense Weekly. Regardless, this phone call must have caused conniptions in a Cheney-neocon war camp that still views this mildly Islamist Turkish political party with a bent towards market economy and EU entry as the arch enemy personified.

Meanwhile the most insightful western reports I read in the lead-up to the elections were in the Financial Times. The best of them was Vincent Boland’s, “Crescent Rising: Why modern Turks are less willing to jettison tradition.” It appeared in the print edition on July 17. Once upon a time I relied heavily on Hugh Pope’s reporting for the Wall Street Journal, but since Pope dropped out of sight last fall, the Journal’s coverage of this complex and important country has deteriorated – witness Cagaptay’s op-ed, written primarily in support of an Israeli right-wing, hard-line military perspective. No surprises here when the bio reads that Cagaptay is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Cagaptay’s major beef centers on Turkey’s reduction, although not cancellation, of lucrative joint defense contracts with the Israelis beginning with a slowdown in 2003, the year following AKP’s first electoral victory. The rest of his anti-AKP charges rest on far too many half-truths that present an incomplete picture.

Primary examples: his characterizations of AKP’s whipping up anti-American sentiment for domestic political
purposes and his windowdressing report of AKP’s lack of interest in coming, yet again, to the rescue of Syriac Christians driven from their homes in southern Turkey by the PKK - Kurdish extreme left wing separatists. I don’t question the veracity of the latter report although I haven't seen it reported elsewhere – but couldn't there be more to the story than that? One has to wonder, for instance, that if the Turkish military can’t secure the Syriac villages once and for all whether it makes sense to allow people to return to their homes until it can – religious affiliation not withstanding.

A second major point in Cagaptay’s anti-AKP article is that Turkey under the AKP has not only reduced its military cooperation with Israel but, therefore, ipso facto that’s bad for the US. If only the Generals were back in charge, he seems to lament – all would be right with the world and US-Turkish-Israeli military interests and defense contracts would blossom once again.

"It Ain’t Necessarily So"

Cook, in contrast, points out that AKP’s major rivals – the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the National Movement Party (MNP) who supported the Turkish military’s intervention into politics last April to prevent AKP’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül whose wife wears a headscarf – from becoming Turkey’s next president and to weaken AKP’s election chances – have also heavily “trafficked in anti-American rhetoric.”

But the Generals are not in the driver’s seat. The military and its political supporters played their election cards poorly. This began with the April “electronic coup” and a menacing anti-AKP, anti-Gül post on the military’s website. It didn’t get much better after that although it was enough to force Gül to withdraw his candidacy and the AKP to schedule the July 22 elections. Yet according to a Ilnur Cevik in the August 4 The New Anatolian, the CHP leadership, a major supporter of the military-based secular state, still hasn’t figured out what really went wrong.

AKP was organized at the grass-roots level – in the rural areas and in Anatolia - as well as Istanbul and Ankara, the chief commercial and governmental cities. In contrast, the opposition parties were not. This includes the once formidable party on the left. In the end, the opposition’s “fear and smear” tactics backfired. This included anti-American rhetoric and finger pointing.

Although the military’s influence on Turkish politics and society is considerable and will likely remain so, the army leadership no longer has to play the “savior of the nation role” it did in earlier years – hauling a politically paralyzed country back from the brink of anarchy time after time. Why? This time there was no abyss.

Instead, the General Staff’s power has diminished as a result of AKP’s leadership of the most stable government in years and AKP’s own interest in pursuing a pro-market, pro-EU policy. This latter has meant bringing the country more in line with Europe’s human rights laws – although far more needs to be done - as Cook also pointed out and as the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in late January and the roiling headscarf debate demonstrate.

Power shift

The new political developments also signal a major power shift – or perhaps more accurately – the entry of a more conservative entrepreneurial class centered in Anatolia, not Istanbul and Ankara, into Turkish politics. This new bourgois class has been the driving force in Turkish innovation in private industry as Boland in the FT perceptively points out not the “dominant conglomerates of the wealthy Turkish Istanbul families.”

The WSJ article in taking out of context the most recent Pew opinion poll on anti-Americanism in Turkey has also done Turkish-American relations no favors. I don’t quibble with the bargain basement nine percent favorability reported, but I do with Cagaptay’s one sided interpretation of the meaning.

In my view, Cook is again far more in touch with reality: the anti-Americanism expressed in that poll is, I think, directly related to the Turkish population’s unfavorable perceptions of Bush administration foreign policies especially the invasion and occupation of neighboring Iraq. This combines with the Turkish view that W’s administration has been unwilling, as opposed to unable, to clamp down on the PKK which uses Iraq’s mountainous Kurdistan as a redoubt from which to continue its lengthy separatist war against Turkey’s southern provinces.

Yet, this anti-American sentiment goes well beyond the 46.7% of the voters who gave Erdogan a resounding victory in this multiparty system. It was fomented as much, as pointed out earlier, by the military’s political supporters as well as AKP – a reality Cagaptay blissfully ignores.

Better late than never

Hopefully, W’s telephone call to Erdogan signals, at the very least, a much needed US policy change based on political realism and U.S. national interests.

When all's said and done, U.S. interests may, or may not, coincide with those of Likud, AIPAC and various private U.S. defense contractors. That’s how it should be.

Turkey is, after all, an important country that literally straddles Europe and the Middle East. The bridge between both our countries needs restoration before it crumbles into the metaphorical equivalent of what happened in Minneapolis last week. W’s call last week may help.

At the very least, the US needs Turkish support, not hindrance, in extricating US troops from the Iraq quagmire. To make that happen Turkey needs a stable government to lend a helping hand.

From what I’ve read, AKP won the parliamentary elections fair and square because its leaders accomplished what the country needed most: political stability, economic growth and a push towards eventual EU membership. At least that’s how The Economist and others have reported it although the August 4 Economist questions the current health of Turkey's current-accounts deficit for future economic growth. Erdogan ran on
his record over the past four years and it was a good one. Turkey has abided by IMF loan repayment guidelines and its economy has been prospering. Business is booming – not just in Istanbul – but also in inland cities such as Kayseri and along the Aegean and Turquoise Coasts.

Educational opportunities have also been expanded to the hinterlands: new colleges and universities are sprouting up throughout the country so fewer rural students need to travel far from home or live in religiously
funded and controlled dormitories in poorer sections of Istanbul to obtain a higher education. Private tertiary schools including commercial colleges founded by the wealthiest are also on the increase. Turkey has a young population and their needs need meeting.

What people today often forget is that the party of Ataturk never represented a free and open economy. Quite the opposite: far too many industries remained inefficient, uncompetitive, Istanbul centered and under government control.

AKP, in contrast, has been far more receptive in dispensing or privatizing state industries as well as opening to foreign investment in various sectors. This includes once-ailing banks. Who would have thought, for instance, that the Turks would have let the state-controlled National Bank of Greece buy controlling interest in Finansbank, Turkey’s eighth largest; or that the government of Greece would have wanted to do so. But that’s what happened last year according to William Chislett in a special to The New Anatolian in September. General Electric bought 25 percent of Garanti Bank, Turkey’s third largest privately held bank, in 2005. And French capitalists and bankers – despite Nicolas Sarkhozy’s anti-Turkish rhetoric - are in there too.

The bottom line

Change U.S. policies, change our fearless leader and expect better relations with the Turkish government and improvement in Turkish anti-American poll numbers. But even without the second, W’s telephone call signaling support for Turkey’s most popular democratically elected leader since the late modernizer Turgut Ozal in the 1980s may begin to set things straight: that is, if Cheney, his entourage and their cronies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute and Lockheed-Martin and elsewhere can be restrained from mucking this one up too.

Photo and map credits: 1) Istanbul, Topkapi, Baghdad Kiosk Ceramic, by PHKushlis Oct. 2006; 2) Turkish Embassy, Washington, DC by PHKushlis May 2007; 3) Map of Turkey, Perry-Castaneda Map Collection; 4) European Side of the Bosphorous Bridge, by PHKushlis Oct. 2006; 5) Kusadasi Harbor by PHKushlis Sept. 2006; 6) Finike, Internet Cafe by PHKushlis Sept. 2006.

Comments

[Ekrem]

Since November 2007 meeting between Erdogan and Bush relations have improved dramatically.