The latest developments suggest that Bush administration is subscribing to the Baker-Hamilton Plan without a clear reference to it. And it is also building on an initiative whose copyrights are held by Ankara

March and April seem to witness an unprecedented flurry of diplomatic activity for addressing the ills of the Middle East. The United States will sit at the negotiation table in Baghdad with Iran and Syria, most probably, in 10 days. The first meeting at the ambassadorial level, if all goes well, will be followed by Condoleezza Rice sitting down at the same table with her Iranian and Syrian counterparts at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.

  This, in fact, means the implementation of the Baker-Hamilton Plan's most crucial proposition by the Bush administration. The blueprint of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which is popularly called the Baker-Hamilton Plan, had been shelved and its recommendations were largely ignored by George W. Bush, who in turn declared his own Baghdad Security Plan. The Baker-Hamilton Plan had been treated as dead-on-arrival. However, the latest developments suggest that the Bush administration is subscribing to the Baker-Hamilton Plan without a clear reference to it. It seems President Bush intends to couple his new Iraq strategy, “the surge,” with that of implementing the most crucial recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Plan. 

Gül's formula worked:

  The preparations for the Baghdad meeting are, in other words, resuming the “Iraq's Neighbors Conference,” whose copyright is in Turkey's foreign ministry. Turkish diplomacy has been active for some time trying to inject new blood to that initiative of a regional conference for Iraq's stability. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül had presented a new ingenious formula as adding the participation of the permanent members of the UN Security Council for such a regional conference, while he was in Washington for talks with Rice, two weeks ago. The Turkish initiative its seems has worked but modified and hijacked by Washington.

  The Americans, ostensibly, took the opportunity as silently accommodating themselves for implementing the Baker-Hamilton Plan without referring to it, and also as a pragmatic tool for enhancing the Baghdad government of Premier Nouri al-Maliki. That is the Baghdad government that issued the invitations for participating the preparatory meeting to be held in Iraq's capital. From now on, the whole initiative looks as if it is a joint U.S.-Iraqi venture.

The following lines of The Washington Post report attest to the new picture:

  “Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has long advocated a regional conference, though originally it was meant to include only Iraq's neighbors. The administration decided in recent weeks to attend the conference, but in an effort to avoid the spotlight it ensured that it will be joined at the table in March by other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, U.S. officials said. The foreign ministers' meeting in April will be further expanded to include representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.”

Talabani not welcome in Ankara:

  Turkey, whose focus is primarily on the security threat emanating towards itself from northern Iraq by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), is engaged in acrimonious debate with the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani on the PKK issue and Kirkuk. Interestingly enough, Ankara is the only capital that refused to receive and even to acknowledge the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, undeservedly, and put itself as if sidelined. 

  The diatribe that came to the fore by the polemical statements of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Abullah Gül on one side, and the Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt on the other side, may have significance in shaping up the Turkish public opinion on the PKK file and whether to engage with the Iraqi Kurdish leadership; but definitely has not been conducive for the fortunes of the Turkish foreign policy.

  What we will be watching on Iraq soon, is how a Turkish initiative is hijacked by U.S. diplomacy to enhance the Baghdad government, at the top of which Jalal Talabani sits. The only regional capital he could not be received is Ankara. But in the same city are the inventors of the regional initiative for resolving the Iraqi crisis.

Cengiz ÇANDAR