Turkey – Page 3 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Israel’s flotilla violence changing everything, Part 2

A.
The fact that PM Netanyahu has decided that fallout from the IDF’s gratuitously violent flotilla assault requires him to cancel his planned meeting in Washington Wednesday and return to Israel is extremely important. The Wednesday meeting was supposed to be a rapacious (date-raping) consummation of his new “love affair” with Obama. So it was important.
But clearly, trying to get a handle on what’s been happening back home regarding the flotilla assault is more important. Ynet is already reporting that because the IDF general staff and the political leadership both recognize that the assault was a massive net negative for Israel, they are already blaming each other.
Good. Let them try to start to sort it out. Preferably by recognizing that the entire policy of imposing a lengthy tight siege is just plain wrong— under international law, under Jewish ethics, under any notion of respect of human rights!
Let them lift the siege of Gaza. Period.
B.
By underlining the continuing tragedy (and crime) of Israel’s siege of Gaza, the IDF completely bulldozed any pretense that Israel’s sputtering “proximity talks” with the PLO had any hope, relevance, or meaning at all. Over there in Ramallah the PA/PLO leadership reportedly agreed to a six-point plan as follows:

Of course, at one level this is still merely political theater, as with everything “Fateh” does. But significantly, Fateh/PLO pol Mohamed Dahlan was the one who reported these results out of an meeting held by the Central Committee of Fateh, the movement that dominates both the PLO and the Ramallah-based PA.
Dahlan, of course, is the guy who was the lynchpin of Condi Rice’s plan to dislodge Hamas’s democratically leadership of the PA legislature by force, back in 2006-07.
How credible should we take his new appearance as one seeking to lead the effort to coordinate or perhaps even reconcile with Hamas? Perhaps not terribly credibly. But if he is the one individual whom the rest of the Fateh CC sends out to make the announcement about the six points, then it strikes me they think that Fateh is in big, big trouble.
C.
Further afield, all of NATO except for the U.S. has now come out with some acknowledgment that Turkey, a vital fellow NATO member has had its civilian ship wantonly attacked by Israel on the high seas.
What is NATO good for?
Why would any other NATO member ignore this grievous attack against Turkish shipping– especially given that (a) Turkey is a substantial country, well respected in the world and currently a member of the U.N. Security Council; (b) Turkey is NATO’s only majority-Muslim member nation; and (c) NATO is currently waging a difficult war in a distant Muslim country, Afghanistan?
D.
Issandr el- Amrani has had good reporting about the popular outrage expressed against th Israeli assault in Egypt. Egypt, which is a key U.S. military ally in the Arab and Muslim worlds, is currently entering a very sensitive succession crisis. Watch Issandr’s blog for updates.

Davutoğlu replies to Hillary (and Barack)

Turkish FM Ahmet Davutoğlu today made clear his resentment about the tepid reaction most western governments had toward the deal his government and Brazil concluded with Iran yesterday on a swap of low-enriched nuclear materials, and Washington’s continued push to win a tough anti-Iran sanctions resolution from the Security Council.
Hurriyet Daily News reported today that:

HT to China Hand, who had an excellent round-up about the whole issue on his blog yesterday.
The Hurriyet account continued:

the quantity mentioned in this letter was exactly 1,200 kilograms

The account also notes that Davutoğlu “said the deal could not have happened had it not been for Obama’s multilateral engagement policies.”
But I do think Obama should have been paying a bit more attention to what the Turks and Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva were doing in this whole affair.
Interesting that Obama “recently” sent a letter to Turkish PM Erdoğan regarding the negotiations– but that then, over the weekend as the negotiations proceeded to their end-game, according to spokesman Robert Gibbs he made no effort at all to reach out to the two fellow heads of government who were conducting them with Iran.
This was especially disturbing, since both Turkey and Brazil are fellow members of the Security Council, along with the U.S. It is highly unlikely that novice diplomatist Hillary Clinton will be able to get much of what she wants in the world body if she continues to fundamentally disrespect the diplomatic heavy lifting undertaken by Erdoğan and Lula.
By contrast with Sec. Clinton, Davutoğlu is a person with rich credentials as both a theorist and a practicioner of the art of diplomacy. The fact that even he brought himself to express a bit of (thinly veiled) frustration with the stance of Washington indicates to me that the frustration elsewhere in the Turkish government must be running even more strongly.

Obama cool toward ‘mid-size states’ deal

Pres. Obama’s spokesperson Robert Gibbs was yesterday extremely cool toward the agreement that Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil’s Prez Luiz Ignacio Lula Da Silva reached with Iran concerning a swap of low-enriched uranium for medically suitable fuel rods.
By the way, I should have noted explicitly in the post I wrote on this yesterday that Turkey and Brazil are both currently members of the U.N. Security Council. Which obviously makes the active engagement of their leaders in this diplomacy much more important and immediately operational than it would have been otherwise.
Here in the U.S., some of the MSM commentary has been along the lines of, “Gosh, how worrying that this latest deal might lessen our chances of getting the U.N. to support tougher sanctions against Iran!”
Well, yes, they are right to the extent that it does that. But why on earth be worried about that prospect? … Unless, that is, your main aim is the sanctions themselves– often seen over the past 17 years, qua Martin Indyk, as an important way of weakening the regime prior to its overthrow– rather than resolving the questions and uncertainties around Iran’s avowedly civilian nuclear program?
(Of course, the kinds of sanctions imposed by the U.S.– and Israel– on their opponents– have usually has the reverse effect, of strengthening regimes those states don’t favor. But the primal urge to punish, punish, punish is so strong in these countries that simple rationality sometimes doesn’t even get a look-in.)
U.S. commentators who’ve been railing against the mid-size states deal also fail to take into account the fact that in today’s world, Brazil and Turkey are both democratic states that enjoy real power, in a number of different ways. Both are relative economic power-houses, whose current, well-regarded governments have done a lot to ensure that the economic growth of recent years has been paired with some good (and innovative) attention to social justice issues within their own societies. Both enjoy wide respect from their neighbors. Both have numerous economic, political, and military ties to ‘western’ nations.
In addition, Turkey– as I’ve noted here numerous times before– is a key member of NATO in that it is NATO’s only majority-Muslim member state at a time when NATO’s fate as an alliance really hangs on the success (or quite possible failure) of the lengthy expeditionary mission it has been undertaking in Afghanistan. Which, hullo, is a Muslim country many of whose people have a deep distrust of westerners, including Christians and perhaps especially the sporadic efforts of western Christian evangelizers.
Does Obama really want to maintain a stance of publicly belittling and disrespecting the diplomatic engagement and real diplomatic achievement of Turkey’s prime minister (and of Brazil’s president)? I can’t believe he does.
Reaction from other P-5 powers includes this from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman:

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev gave the deal a seemingly more measured welcome. Moscow Times reported that he “cautiously welcomed a uranium swap deal between Iran and Turkey, but warned that it may fail to fully satisfy the international community.”
As for the European “powers”– Britain and France who, as nuclear-weapons-waving states, by an amazing coincidence get a veto on the security Council; and Germany, which by some sleight of hand got folded onto that strange, ad-hoc, Iran-focused body called the “P5+1”– right now they are all fairly busy with other things like, um, Europe’s own continuing financial crisis and the Brits’ attempts to establish a workable direction for the new coalition government in London.
And besides, I really don’t intend to puff Europe up by giving it any kind of equal billing with the other governments mentioned here. Three seats out of six in a global body, just for Europe? Didn’t anyone think at the time that that was just a tad nineteenth century?*
Well, back here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., I was interested to see this exchange in Robert Gibbs’s press conference yesterday:

Boy, that looks like a very serious mis-step, right there.
I was also interested to see, in that press conference, the degree to which some of the questioners really did seem more concerned about the fate of the sanctions efforts per se rather than getting the nuclear issue with Iran actually resolved. There’s the MSM for you!
—
* Population figures for these states:
China………….. 1,330 million
U.S………………… 304 million
Brazil…………….. 196 million
Russia……………. 141 million
Germany………….. 82 million
Turkey……………. 72 million
Iran………………… 66 million
France…………….. 61 million
Britain…………….. 61 million

Midsize, non-nuclear powers enter world stage

Treading where the U.S. and its European allies have failed to make any significant headway, the leaders of Turkey and Brazil have now engaged personally in dealing with the globally important Iran/nuclear issue– and they seem to be making real progress in de-escalating the tensions around it.
In Tehran today, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters his government has agreed to ship about half of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for the further enriched kind of fuel required to run a medical reactor.
The deal comes as the culmination of personal visits undertaken to Iran by Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva.
If this deal goes through, Erdogan and Lula’s diplomatic breakthrough will have a large impact not only on resolution of the globally vital Iran/nuclear issue itself but also on the whole face and structure of world politics.
The U.S., Britain, France, and Germany have all been pushing– within the ‘P5+1′ forum established specifically a couple of years ago to add Germany’s economic (and pro-U.S.) heft to the UN’s traditional P5 leadership– to impose a U.S.-designed solution on Iran, primarily by ratcheting up hostile economic actions against Iran backed up by a threat of military action.
Within the P5+1, the other two members of the P5, China and Russia, have adopted a fairly passive stance on the issue, showing neither any great support for the western countries’ line nor any readiness to actively resist it.
Enter the leaders of Turkey and Brazil– two significantly rising, mid-size countries whose current governments are generally pro-western but have also shown their willingness to challenge Washington where they judge their own core interests outweigh those of the U.S.
In contrast to the P5’s membership group, which coincides exactly with the group of five nations “allowed” to have nuclear weapons– for a while anyway– under the terms of the worldwide Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Turkey and Brazil are determinedly non-nuclear states. Both have good relations, including military relations, with the U.S. But perhaps most importantly, the current governments of these two states enjoy a wide and indisputable democratic mandate from their own citizenries– as well as considerable soft-power (diplomatic and economic) heft within the regions of which they are a part.
Therefore, though some European diplomats have apparently been a little huffy about the deal Erdogan and Lula achieved in Tehran, it would seem very counter-productive for the western governments to try to do anything active to try to undermine it.
That does not mean they won’t try, of course. All the western governments have been subjected to great pressure by Israel to continue ratcheting up the pressure on Iran; and it seems doubtful that either that pressure or those governments’ susceptibility to it will end overnight.
This is a great– and potentially very hopeful– story, in so many different respects. Watch this space.

More on Turkey: Özel, Rosenberg

Related to what I blogged here earlier about the (re-)emergence of Turkish (mainly soft) power in the Middle East in recent years, I just want to note:

this blog post today from the experienced Turkish analyst and secularist democracy advocate Soli Özel, writing about the unraveling of the political power inside Turkey of its once all-powerful military; and
this Huffpo piece by M.J. Rosenberg on how the pro-Israel lobby helped get a congressional committee to pass the resolution designating what the Ottoman authorities did to the Armenians in 1915 as a genocide.

Özel writes,

In the end, nothing much happened—a different story from other times, when the military called all the shots.

He runs through the key developments in the ever-continuing revelation of additional coup plots over recent years, and concludes thus:

His whole post there is definitely well worth reading. (And it has considerable relevance for the political dynamics throughout the Middle East, given the fact that the Turkish military were the lynchpin of the Israeli-Turkish relationship that got built in the 1990s; Turkey’s civilian political forces– far less so!)
For his part, Rosenberg draws attention to this piece published recently by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which reported that,

Recalling the vehemence of the anti-Turkish actions taken by Netanyahu and various Israeli officials ever since Turkey’s civilian government dared to criticize Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza, Rosenberg writes,

Indeed, he’s right. At a time when NATO is deeply entangled in fighting in Afghanistan, and NATO’s only majority-Muslim member-state Turkey is generously contributing to that effort, the idea that a few Israel-influenced lawmakers in Washington might take actions that are almost certainly designed to rile Ankara is beyond belief.
What benefit do U.S. lawmakers, the people they represent– or come to that, the Armenians in Armenia, California, or anywhere else– actually gain by having the U.S. Congress pass this resolution? None, at all, except perhaps a momentary feeling of self-congratulation.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Armenia and Turkey, the two governments have been working hard together to find a way to address the misdeeds of the ancient past while also building a good working relationship going forward together. That, in line with the strategic approach of the country’s government and its brilliant foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, that Turkey should have “zero problems with the neighbors.” Thus, last October, the two countries signed a historic agreement to open their borders and to establish, too, a joint historical commission to examine the records of what happened in 1915.
Even Hillary Clinton went to the signing ceremony for the agreement, which was held in Zurich. (She jumped in at the last moment and was given a cameo role by the two governments, who wanted to secure her buy-in to it by letting her solve some of the agreement’s last details. Smart thinking there– especially in view of the strong opposition to the agreement that had been voiced inside much of the US’s well-organized Armenian community.)
And finally, some breaking news here, from the Turkish daily Today’s Zaman:

Watch this space.

Turkish IHH foundation plans new siege-busting project for Gaza

Turkey’s IHH humanitarian-aid foundation has now announced a plan to help lead a 20-ship siege-busting project for Gaza, to take place most likely in April. The project is called Noah’s Ark, and will set sail from a port in Turkey.
IHH President Bülent Yıldırım said,

We are planning to go to Gaza with a fleet of 20 ships to be set up in an international organization probably in April 2010… The cargo ships will carry Israeli-embargoed building materials, generators, medication, medical equipment and educational materials. The passenger ships to accompany the cargo ships will carry journalists, human rights advocates, activists and lawmakers from various countries.”

IHH is planning to contribute five ships to the flotilla. I believe contacts are underway with other organizations to contribute the other ships.
This is a great project. Turkey’s moderate-Islamist (A.K. Party) government and many Turkish people and NGOs have all played a great role in supporting the people of Gaza through their many recent woes.

My grandfather goes looking for his own grave (and other Maltese mysteries)

Ninety-five or so years ago a teenager in New Zealand, hearing news of the– perhaps still “heroic”– early phases of the British involvement in the Great War, was desperate to enlist, but too young to do so. So he borrowed his elder brother’s birth certificate and went to enlist in the Otago Rifles.
(What on earth were his parents thinking?)
I believe his name was Cyril Howard Marlow. His brother’s name was George Stanley Marlow, so that was the name Cyril adopted upon enlistment.
The family have, as yet, no records of the early months of his service. But I think that by August he was in Gallipoli, and perhaps had been there for some months already.
Conditions of service for all the New Zealanders who fought in World War I were extremely harsh, and they were achingly far from home. (There was even a Maori Battalion. Can you imagine the kinds of assignments they got, and how those Maoris serving a distant British king felt about it all?)
Gallipoli is a 20-mile-long peninsula that forms the northern shore of the vital Dardanelles Strait, that links the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara. The British imperial war command wanted to take the peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Australians and New Zealanders formed a significant part of the invasion force that landed in April 1915. Things did not go well for any of the invaders… By August 1915 they were badly bogged down; and that month saw some notable setbacks for them, as the nimble Ottoman defenders commanded by the 34-year-old Lt.-Col. Mustafa Kemal found ways to trap them and push them back.
(I’ve blogged previously about the importance the Gallipoli battles paradoxically came to have in the formation of Australian and N.Z. national identity, including here.)
So, back to Cyril Howard Marlow… What we do know about the lad is that, most likely, he was wounded at Gallipoli and evacuated on one of the stream of hospital ships that carried the casualties from there to military hospitals the British rapidly organized on the island of Malta.
On September 12, 1915, he died in one of those hospitals. He was buried under the name he’d used to enlist with, that of George Stanley Marlow, in the military cemetery at Pieta (Our Lady of Sorrows), a small town just outside the Maltese capital, Valetta.
Today, I went to visit his grave. The meticulous record-keeping of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) enabled me to find it fairly easily.
George Stanley Marlow was my grandfather. He lived in London by the time Cyril Howard died. Seven months after Cyril’s death, George’s wife gave birth to their first child, who was my mother.
Later, the couple had another daughter, and then a much longed-for son. The son was named Howard Norman, in memory of his paternal uncle, deceased at Gallipoli, and his maternal uncle Norman Williams, who also perished in World War I.
Howard Norman Marlow enlisted as an aviator in World war II and was killed in North Africa.
The cemetery in which Cyril Howard Marlow lies is a testament to the tragedy and criminality of war. The grave he is buried in– like all those in the WW-I section of the cemetery– contains the bodies of three deceased servicemen. The CWGC says on its website that this because of the difficulty of digging numerous, appropriately deep graves during the conditions of war. That’s as may be. But what also became evident from the walk I took around the cemetery was that in the weeks between late August 1915 and the middle of October, the Commonwealth soldiers were being buried there at an extremely fast rate. In fact, just about all of the graves I saw in the section of the cemetery, which contains the crammed-together remains of more than 1,300 soldiers– most of them Brits but with a strong representation of “ANZACs”– had dates of death listed in just that short, seven-week period of late summer 1915.
If those were the ones who survived long enough to die on Malta, imagine how many more died in the hospital ships along the way and had to be buried at sea. Imagine how many more died on the field of battle itself.
So I guess that Cyril Howard was “lucky” to survive as long as he did and to end up buried in a sweet, peaceful cemetery in Pieta, Malta, in a place where his great-niece can come visit his grave.
One of my sisters tells me that my grandfather came to Malta once, to visit his little brother’s grave. That must have been an odd sensation– seeing your own name on a gravestone.
But he died in 1956 or so, when I was still a little girl, so I can’t ask him about it.
… And then, of course, I can’t help but contrast my own ability to go pay my respects at the grave of this ancestor, and the way the CWGC carefully tends the graves of the British dead around the world, with the way the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles has been trying to tear up the extremely ancient Ma’moun Allah (“Mamilla”) cemetery in West Jerusalem.
I am really delighted to see that various U.S. civil rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, have been taking up the campaign to stop the Wiesenthal Center in its tracks there. Their project, which is to build a so-called “Museum of Tolerance” right on the site of that ancient cemetery, is an outrage.

A Grave View of US-Iran Relations

In some countries, mine included, today is remembered as “Veterans’ Day” or “Armistice Day.” Juan Cole sensibly wrote earlier today that “The most patriotic way to honor future veterans of foreign wars is not to create any unnecessarily.”
Fellow “Wahoo” and good friend Barin Kayaoglu, writing in the Turkish Weekly, goes a step deeper in considering the state of US-Iran nuclear negotiations.
Barin neatly anticipates the standard arguments from partisans on both sides, accusations of intransigence vs. bullying, terrorism vs. imperialism, then arguments over what to do, of all the reasons to be hard-headed, to fight the “necessary war.”
Barin trumps such verbal combat by considering the stakes from a very different vantage point, that of the grave. He takes us to the two sprawling national cemeteries of America and Iran, Arlington and Behesht-e Zahra. I’ve been to both; somber places where the two nations, where families, mourn their losses, the lives cut short. Barin concludes:

“The graves of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters at these places are somber reminders of the real price of war.
So before Iranian and American policy-makers make up their mind about the next step, it would be humane for them to spend some time at Behesht-e Zahra and Arlington. Nothing can bring back the dead. But there is no good reason to start another Middle East war that would create new ones.”

Well said Barin. Amen.

Turkey’s intriguing diplomacy

Turkey’s adroit and visionary foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and the government he’s a part of, have taken two intriguing moves in recent days:

spelled out to CNN

concluded

Regarding the air exercise cancelation, there are a few interesting points:
First, the US, Dutch, and Italian governments got so snitty with the Turkish decision that they decided to cancel their participation in the air exercises, too– thus expressing their “solidarity” with Israel. So Turkey– a full member of NATO– lost out on some training that would probably have been valuable for it, and for NATO.
(Israel, of course, is not a member of NATO. You’d think the US, Netherlands, and Italy might have placed their responsibility to NATO higher than their sentimental attachment to Israel?)
Second, the idea of having Israeli planes practicing air maneuvers etc in a portion of Turkey that’s very close to Iran and could provide one of the transit routes in an Israeli air attack on Iran seems like an unusually strong pander to Israeli militarism, anyway.
Third, the decision seemed to show that the long-running tussle for power between the twice-elected civilian government run by Turkey’s moderately Islamist AK Party and the “secularist-fundamentalists” of Turkey’s military has been resolved, for now, in favor of the civilians. That is good news– for just about everyone except the small coterie of Turkish generals who still long for the repressive policies and unbridled ethnonationalism of the old Kemalist military elite.
Fourth and last, let’s note how principled and effective this Turkish government has been in its approach to the whole Gaza crisis. Turkey, which has fairly longstanding and until recently warm relations with Israel, has long offered to act as an intermediary in the negotiations Israel still desperately needs to have in order to consolidate the still-tenuous ceasefire with Gaza, and to end Israel’s lengthy, quite illegal, and very harmful siege of Gaza. But Israel has always refused this mediation.
Turkey’s government seems more concerned to do something to end the horrific situation of Gazas 1.5 million people than nearly all the Arab governments, combined!
Last year, the Olmert government in Israel did agree to Davutoglu’s offer to arrange, host, and mediate proximity talks with Syria on a possible final peace agreement. Indeed, one of the reasons Davutoglu and his boss, p.m. Rejep Tayyip Erdogan, are so angry with Israel over Gaza these days is because just around Christmas last year, Olmert seemed to promise the Turks that he was “on the brink of a breakthrough” in the talks with Syria.
But then, two days later, Olmert sent waves of bombers from his air force off to start the lengthy series of raids against Gaza that constituted the very punishing first step of the Gaza war… So the Turks, not surprisingly, figured they had been used as patsies in an attempt to distract world attention from what Olmert was, obviously, all the time preparing to do against Gaza. (That feeling was what lay behind the anger Erdogan expressed towards Israeli president Shimon Peres, in Davos, in January.)

Turkish FM mediating between Iraq and Syria

As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have always been worried about the prospect that as the US military decreases its presence in Iraq, many of the country’s neighbors would rush in to fill the resulting security vacuum and the contest between them could escalate in many unpredictable ways. That was why I strongly urged– from long before the Iraq Study Group endorsed this necessary recommendation– that as the US withdraws either Washington or, preferably, the UN should convene a high-level meeting of Iraq, the US, and all Iraq’s neighbors to work out a code of conduct for the behaviors of all parties with regard to Iraq; and preferably also establish a UN-based monitoring and incident-resolution mechanism to follow up on compliance with those agreements.
The US government hasn’t done that, though the troop withdrawal is already well underway and some serious tensions have already been emerging. And neither has the UN done much to put into place such a plan.
I guess for both the US and the UN, the ‘sensitivity’ of including Iran in any such arrangement seems like a real obstacle. (I wish, obviously that the UN had a lot more independence from US tutelage at this point.)
But now, Turkey seems to be stepping into the conflict-reduction role in a significant way. Today, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is scheduled to pay consecutive visits to Iraq and Syria to try to resolve the conflict that’s erupted since the Iraqi government accused Syria of harboring the opposition leaders who, Baghdad alleges, orchestrated the bombings of various Iraqi ministries on August 19 that killed 95 and wounded more than 600, many of them ministry employees.
Davutoğlu became foreign minister only a couple of months ago. But before that, as a much respected foreign-policy intellectual, he was a special adviser to Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan. In that role, he spearheaded a fascinating– though ultimately unsuccessful– series of “proximity talks” between Syria and Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel.
The idea that Turkey may be in a position to help Iraq and its six neighbors keep tensions among them to a minimum as US power recedes may seem counter-intuitive, since for a couple of generations many Iraqis, Syrians, and other Arabs retained a degree of remembered resentment against Turkey over the oppressive role the Ottoman Empire played against ethnic-Arab nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, I was surprised during my last few visits to Syria to discover the degree to which Syrians in and close to government– and Syrians in general– seem to have “gotten over” those sensitivities.
Indeed, many Syrians I’ve spoken to in the past couple of years speak of Turkey as something of a current role model for them. Many Syrians look at the success that Turkey has had in dealing with challenges like economic development, finding an internal balance between the forces of secularism and Islamism, finding an external balance between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the challenges posed by Kurds and other national minorities– and they wish they could emulate them.
The same is true, I think, of many other Arabs.
This doesn’t mean that, among Iraq and all of its neighbors, there are NO remaining sensitivities regarding Turkey’s role in the region. But it does mean there is considerably more scope for a leading Turkish role in reducing the kinds of tensions I’m worried about in the whole peri-Iraq theater than many people (self included) would have thought possible even five or ten years ago.
By the way, the watchword of the academic work Davutoğlu has done on Turkey’s foreign policy is that it should be aimed not just at “zero problems with the neighbors”, but also at intense engagement with the neighbors. (And yes, that includes Armenia, where the Erdogan government has taken some notable steps towards reducing earlier tensions.)
You can read two of my recent evaluations of Turkey’s new regional role here and here.
Turkey now has good relations with Iraq and all of its neighbors– including Iran– as well as with the US, which will continue to be a power in the region even as it departs. Turkey is, of course, a full member of NATO and retains numerous other very good links with the west.
I do wish, though, the Ban Ki-Moon and the weight of UN legitimacy was also a lot more involved in this peri-Iraq tension reduction effort.