Analysis: Turkey's Jewish friend - II

SKOPJE, Macedonia, March 4 (UPI) -- In his travelogue, "Eastward to Tartary," published in 2001, Robert Kaplan notes: "Turkey's more friendly position toward Israel was the result of several factors. (Turkey) became tired of diplomatic initiatives that failed to induce the Arabs to end their support of the Kurdish Workers' party, which was responsible for the insurgency in southeastern Turkey. The Turks felt, too, that the Jews could help them with their Greek problem (via the Jewish lobby) ... (The Turks realized) they might never gain full admittance to the European Union. Thus, they required another alliance."

This confluence of interests and predicaments does not render Israel the darling of the Turkish street, though. Turks, addicted to conspiracy theories, fully believe that the second Iraq war is being instigated by the Israelis. They also decry the way Israel manhandles the Palestinian uprising. Flag-burning demonstrations are common occurrences in Ankara and Istanbul. Suleyman Demirel, Turkey's former president, nearly paid with his life for the entente cordiale when a deranged pharmacist tried to assassinate him in 1996.

Turkey's power behind the throne and future prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called Israel's Ariel Sharon a terrorist. The previous prime minister called Israel's behavior in the occupied territories "genocide" -- hastening to reverse himself when faced with the possible consequences of his Freudian slip.

Indeed, the looming conflict in Iraq may well be the watershed of the Turkish-Israeli love fest. Turkey is growing increasingly religious and more pro-Arab by the year. The further the United States -- Israel's sponsor and unwavering ally -- pushes into the region, the less aligned are its interests with Turkey's.

Consider the Kurdish question. Turkey is committed to preventing, if need be by force of arms, the emergence of an independent Kurdish polity in Iraq. It would also wish to secure oil-rich northern Iraq as a Turkish protectorate. But the Kurds -- America's long-standing and long-suffering collaborators -- are the United States' "Northern Alliance" in Iraq. It cannot abandon them for both military and moral considerations.

But even in the absence of such blatant conflicts of interests, Turkey's shift is inevitable, a matter of geography as destiny.

Turkey continues to ignore the Arab world at its peril. Regional conflicts fail to respect international borders -- as the country is discovering, faced with the damaging Iraqi spillover. Until 1998, Syria, another restive neighbor, actively aided and abetted the rebellious Kurds. It may yet resume its meddling if Israel, its bitter enemy, is neutered through a peace accord. The dispute over precious water sources is embedded in Turkish-Syrian topography and is, therefore, permanent.

It may have been in recognition of these facts that Abdullah Gul, Turkey's prime minister, embarked on a tour of Arab capitals in January. Simultaneously, the Turkish trade minister, Korsad Touzman, led a delegation of 150 businessmen in a two day visit to Baghdad to discuss trade issues. Turkey claims to have sustained damages in excess of $30 billion in the 1991 Gulf War -- a measure of its regional integration.

Turkey has also recently begun considering the sale of water in the framework of the "Manavgat Project for Peace" to Egypt, Jordan and even Libya. Turkey's foreign minister, Bashar Yakis, is a Turkish diplomat who knows Arabic and had served in Damascus, Riyadh and Cairo.

Turkey's Occidental orientation has proven to be counterproductive. As the European Union grows more fractured and indecisive and the United States more overweening and unilaterally belligerent, Turkey will have to give up its fantasies -- bred by the country's post-Ottoman founding father, Kemal Ataturk -- of becoming an inalienable part of Western civilization.

Both Turkey and Israel will, in due time, be forced to accept -- however reluctantly -- that they are barely mid-sized, mostly Asiatic, regional powers and that their future -- geopolitical and military, if not economic -- lies in the Middle East, not in the Midwest. Turkey could then serve as a goodwill mediator between erstwhile enemies and Israel as a regional engine of growth. Until they do, both countries are major founts of regional instability, often deliberately and gleefully so.

Israeli engineering firms, for instance, are heavily involved in the design and implementation of the regionally controversial Southeast Anatolian Project, intended to block Turkish water from reaching Syria and Iraq. Additionally, protestations to the contrary aside, the thrust of Israel's burgeoning military cooperation with Turkey is, plausibly, anti-Arab.

Turkish security officials confirmed to the English-language daily, Turkish Daily News, in March last year, that Turkey worked with Israel to counter the Hezbollah in Lebanon. As early as 1998, Turkey threatened war with Syria, and mobilized troops to back up its warnings, explicitly relying on the always-present Israeli "second front". The Egyptian government's mouthpiece, the daily al-Ahram, called this emerging de-facto alliance "the true axis of evil".

Israel's massive army, its nuclear weapons, its policies in the West Bank and Gaza, its influence on right-wing American decision-makers and legislators, all provoke the very same threats they are intended to forestall, including terrorism, the coalescence of hostile axes and alliances and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by regional thugs.

Turkey's disdain for everything Arab, its diversion of the Tigris, Asi and Euphrates rivers, its arms race, its suppression of the Kurds and its military-tainted democracy have led it, more than once, to the verge of open warfare. Such a conflict may not be containable. In 1995, Syria granted Greece the right to use its air bases and air space, thus explicitly dragging NATO and the European Union into the fray.

It is, therefore, the interest of the West to disabuse Turkey of its grandiosity and to convince Israel to choose peace. As Sept. 11, 2001, and its aftermath have painfully demonstrated, no conflict in the Middle East is merely regional.

(Part 1 was published Tuesday. Send your comments to: svaknin@upi.com.)