Last week, Carpetbagger marveled at the White House’s strong-arm, bullying tactics at the United Nations as the administration tried — in vain — to build support for its war in Iraq. At the time, I concluded that “diplomacy isn’t their strong point.” Today, I offer additional evidence to bolster the point.
As everyone has reported, the Turkish vote against allowing U.S. troops to use their country to launch an attack was a dramatic setback for the Bush administration’s war plans. Turkey’s Parliament may yet vote again, and may even come to a different result, but the rejection by lawmakers in Turkey — one of our closest Middle East allies — was a critical stumbling block.
The analysis has been that the Turks’ vote was easy to understand; survey data in the country reflects that 90% of the population is opposed to a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But an article in the LA Times today explains that our laughably poor attempts at diplomacy may have contributed to the lack of political will in Turkey. Indeed, our diplomatic efforts — or lack, thereof — may have played at least as large a role as the poll numbers.
First, Dick Cheney demanded that the Turks vote on a measure endorsing U.S. troops being stationed in their country just before the Muslim holiday of Bayram. In an overwhelmingly Islamic country, Cheney’s lobbying wasn’t appreciated. These efforts, compounded by tense negotiations over what Turkey could expect in return for allowing 62,000 troops to move through their country, led to harsh feelings and distrust.
As the LA Times reported, “‘We don’t like the way we were pushed around by the Americans,’ said Emin Sirin, one of dozens of lawmakers from the ruling Justice and Development Party who defied its leaders and voted against the U.S. deployment. ‘The Americans kept giving ultimatums and deadlines, asking Turkey to jump into a barrel of fire,’ he said. ‘They seemed to think we could be bought off, but we had real security concerns about what Iraq would look like after Saddam. They never addressed those concerns.'”
Keep in mind, U.S. negotiators had struck a deal with Turkey’s prime minister, Abdullah Gul, who heads an Islamic political party that is very popular in Turkey. The plan had also been endorsed by Recep Rayyip Erdogan, the party’s leader in Parliament. But the leaders couldn’t keep the party together, and lawmakers voted against the plan. (For a U.S. equivalent, imagine a measure endorsed by Bush and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert that was rejected by Republican members of Congress.)
Making a bad situation worse, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo explains that the negotiations with the Turks led to yet another diplomatic debacle, this one with the Kurds.
As part of our “deal” with Turkey’s leaders, the U.S. was willing to sell out the Kurds — again — in Northern Iraq. The administration effectively used the Kurds as a bargaining chip before the deal was done.
As Marshall notes, since the deal fell apart in Turkey’s Parliament, at least for the time being, we’re left with nothing.
“We publicly sold out the Kurds to get this deal,” Marshall writes. “We really should have made sure we had a deal before we tipped our hands to the Kurds about the price we were willing to pay for it. Now we have no deal and no Kurds. I don’t think we should have sold out the Kurds regardless. But if we were going to do so we should have been clearer with ourselves about who we were in bed with, the Turks or the Kurds.”
Could the Bush administration be screwing this up much worse? Remember dear readers, these are the folks whose strength is supposed to be foreign policy.