on Iraq and the U.S. during his first press conference last week. Here is my humble answer.For a while now, there has been an increasing number of significant signs of a divergence of interests between Ankara and Washington on the Middle East in general and the future of Iraq in particular. In turn, those responsible for the conduct of bilateral ties in both countries have been simply engaged in pretence. The level of communication, as we put it in Turkish, has resembled a kind of “vain conversation between a deaf person and a blind person.” There was an urgent need for somebody to emerge from this crowd and yell, “The emperor is naked!” This is just what Gen. Büyükanıt did.

The PKK threat:

As you will recall, Büyükanıt, in the said press conference, pointed out from the military point of view the need for an operation in northern Iraq for the success of Turkey's war on terror, simply because the northern Iraqi Kurdish leaders have been extending logistical support to the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Without explicitly naming it, he then accused Washington of “spoiling” the head of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, highlighting Barzani's provocative statements threatening to stir unrest in Turkey's southeast if Ankara “interferes” in the process of determining the status of Kirkuk. He finally expressed his pessimism about Iraq's territorial unity, underlining that he doesn't expect a solution “in the short or even medium term.”The question of crucial importance we should focus on henceforth should be what may have compelled Büyükanıt to make such a statement targeting particularly the U.S. administration.

  The American authorities' previous statements actually speak for themselves.“Unfortunately, the PKK threat is a reality and the Turks justly take it very seriously,” rightly underscored Special Envoy Joseph Ralston in the hearing of the Subcommittee on Europe in the U.S. House of Representatives last month. The Turks in general, however, simply believe that Washington's approach to such a sensitive issue, which they indeed take so seriously, is unfortunately far from being either satisfactory or even serious. The U.S. administration gives the impression that it has never had a solution but admires the problem. More importantly, there seems to be a lack of cooperation, even communication between the various branches of the U.S. government. In such a milieu, “patience” is the mantra American authorities keep repeating. I really wonder, for instance, what Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Stephen Hadley might have said to Gen. Büyükanıt when he met him during his visit to Washington in February regarding the Turks' indeed adorable patience. To remain patient, however, seems to be no longer possible. For the last four years, in spite of all the risks it has faced as a result, Turkey, as the U.S.' trustworthy ally for many years, has done its best to accommodate Washington's concerns and priorities. In a way, Ankara chose to adopt a wait-and-see policy. The current situation and mess in Iraq, nevertheless, has directly started to threaten Turkey's vital security interests. A short while ago, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, in response to the PKK havens in northern Iraq, was reported to have said, “The solution will hopefully be one that contributes to stability in Iraq, not detracts from it.”  

The emperor's birthday suit:

For the sake of Iraq's highly questionable stability, however, Turkey cannot and should never risk its own stability. In this respect more importantly, Barzani's stance isn't promising either. In the same interview on Al-Arabiya TV, when asked whether they would help the Kurds of Iran and Turkey, he simply said, “It is impossible to support them with weapons, but we are ready to help them with all other means.” With this mentality and misleading overconfidence, the tripartite cooperation that the American authorities stress on every occasion will never bear any outcome.

What the U.S. administration needs to do immediately, I humbly believe, is to make a clear-cut choice. The Turkish authorities know precisely that the biggest handicap it has been facing for a while is how to merge the short-term realities of Iraq with the long-term realities of the Middle East. The current situation, however, compels them to ask Washington whether the short-term Iraqi necessities revolving around the Iraqi Kurds is worth risking Turkey's wider role in an area stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. As Fried said, if “The agenda with Turkey includes almost every issue in the Middle East and the Greater Middle East,” and if “Secretary Rice has an ambitious agenda with Turkey over the next two years,” then further alienation of Turkey is first and foremost not in the U.S. interests. And Defense Secretary Robert Gates should not see the depth of rising discontent among all segments of Turkish society simply as part of “measures and rhetoric that needlessly and destructively antagonize each other,” as he complained just a couple of weeks ago in a meeting in Washington. Yes, the emperor is indeed in his birthday suit …