, The Turkish Parliament voted by a large margin Tuesday to approve the dispatch of peacekeepers to Iraq, in a major victory for U.S. efforts to broaden foreign involvement there, but Iraqi officials tempered any White House satisfaction by saying that such a deployment would be unwelcome.
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In a 358-to-183 vote, the Turkish Parliament approved a government plan to send an unspecified number of troops to Iraq for up to a year, news agencies reported from Ankara.
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That decision, highly controversial in Turkey, should nonetheless do much to repair relations with the United States, a major NATO ally. Those ties were badly strained in March when the Parliament blocked U.S. forces from using Turkish bases to invade Iraq, forcing Pentagon officials to hurriedly redraw their war plan. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, welcomed the Turkish decision, though he declined to say how many troops Washington hoped Ankara would provide. “We welcome countries coming in to provide even broader international participation in our efforts in Iraq,” he said, “and we will be working on the specific details with Turkey.”
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In Baghdad, some members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council said that they would oppose any new foreign troop deployment to Iraq. But a spokesman said that no formal decision had been made, and leaders of the council have told reporters that they ultimately would give in if the United States wanted to proceed.
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The vote in Ankara was a lift for the Bush administration, which has faced mounting public and congressional pressure to spread the burden of the occupation, but so far found few allies willing to offer significant new help. A Turkish force would be the first large Muslim contingent for the U.S.-$ led coalition. Washington hopes that this fact will help reduce anti-American frictions in Iraq, and possibly also pave the way for other Muslim countries, including Pakistan or Bangladesh, to send troops. While Turkey has not said how many troops it will send, officials have cited a range of 5,000 to 10,000, enough to significantly ease the strain on the hard-stretched American, British and other coalition forces in place. A 10,000-strong contingent would put the Turks even with, and perhaps even slightly ahead of, the British, now the largest non-American force in Iraq. Five thousand would put them behind the British but ahead of the Italians, now the third force, with 3,000 troops. The U.S. force now numbers 130,000; 33 other countries are contributing a total of about 25,000 troops. The motion approved in Ankara did not stipulate where Turkish troops would serve, a highly contentious matter. Kurds in northern Iraq, bitterly resentful of Turkish crackdowns on their ethnic brethren in Turkey, have resisted any new Turkish military presence in the north, where they have enjoyed large autonomy since 1991.
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Talks among Iraqi, Turkish and U.S. officials are believed to have focused on sending Turkish troops to a Sunni-dominated area of western Iraq, far from Kurdish territory. (Most Turks are Sunni Muslims.) But that would also be away from the area of fiercest resistance to the occupation.
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The welcome news for the Bush administration came with a slosh of cold water from some Iraqi officials, however.
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“The Governing Council's stand is against the presence of troops from neighboring countries without exception, and Turkey is one of these countries,” Nabeil al-Moussawi of the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group headed by the president of the Governing Council, told Reuters. The president, Ahmad Chalabi, and other council members have no real power to block a Turkish contingent, and they have indicated to reporters that they expect to accede to the United States on the matter. Still, opposition by some members of the Council might translate to a less welcoming reception for the Turkish troops. Significantly, the vote came despite a U.S. failure so far to gain UN Security Council backing for draft resolution language seeking to broaden the UN and foreign role in Iraq. The draft had been intended partly to provide political shelter for countries like Turkey to send troops, and partly to encourage greater financial contributions. But countries from which the United States has hoped to get major troop contributions, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, continue to say they would need such a resolution and also want an invitation from Iraq.
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The Turkish vote was a political victory for the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was badly shaken in March when the Parliament rejected a plan to grant use of Turkish bases to more than 60,000 U.S. troops. That rejection deprived U.S. war planners of the northern option they had counted on, forcing them to beef up invasion forces approaching Baghdad from the south.
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Public opinion in Turkey has run strongly against sending troops to Iraq. Ahead of the war, surveys showed up to 90 percent of Turks opposing any involvement in the U.S.-led war. But Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party holds a large majority in Parliament, has worked more systematically this time than it had in March to ensure support for the troop motion. The prime minister argued that the deployment would indirectly help Turkey's own security, by increasing its influence with the United States on difficult matters dealing with how to control Turkish Kurdish guerrillas operating from northern Iraq. There had been increasing hints over the past month that Turkey might overcome the internal resistance to sending troops. In early September, the Bush administration said that it was ready to provide Turkey with up to $8.5 billion in loans, to support economic reform and mitigate the shocks caused by the war. Days later, Chalabi, upon Erdogan's invitation, traveled to Ankara to discuss Kurdish concerns about a possible Turkish deployment. And Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, said that if Ankara decided to offer troops, ways would be found to overcome obstacles.
Source: International Herald Tribune
