ISTANBUL, Turkey, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- The looming crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions may look like an intense duel between Washington and Tehran, to be played out on the international stage at the United Nations Security Council as the Bush administration tries to rally consensus for sanctions against Iran. But the crisis is also creating a number of other front-line states. Israel is the most obviously exposed, but Iran's neighbors in Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq and the Gulf are all deeply involved.
Turkey is facing a critical series of decisions in the coming weeks: over its troubled application to join the European Union; on its response to the revival of Kurdish terrorism; and over the status of its long-standing military alliance with Israel. The latest spate of bomb attacks aimed at Turkey's important tourist industry adds to the mood of tension and crisis, even as the government wrestles with parliament over the vexed question of sending peacekeeping troops to Lebanon.
But the biggest question of all is whether the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will back the traditional American ally in demanding tough measures against Iran. It may have to do so, since the grim logic of power suggests that if Iran defies Washington and successfully becomes a nuclear power, Turkey will have to choose whether to follow suit.
The prospect of nuclear-armed Ayatollahs is disturbing in itself, but doubly so when it is considered the trigger of a Middle Eastern arms race, with Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia all forced to weigh their own nuclear options.
For Turkey, this means the government may have to make an existential choice, whether to continue with the pro-Western course on which the nation has been set since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the rise of the secular and modernizing Kemal Attaturk. There is, after all, an alternative, and the current Erdogan government of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) seems increasingly to embody a more Islamic vocation.
The Erdogan government has already launched Turkey on a subtly different course, and done so slowly and carefully and largely avoided upsetting the military, the vigilant custodians of the Attaturk tradition who have three times in the past intervened to seize power, restore order, and then hand the government back to the politicians.
The AKP government's most noticeable shift was the refusal to support the Bush administration's war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the parliament's refusal to grant the U.S. 4th Division the use of Turkish ports and roads to launch its planned invasion of Iraq from the north.
This Turkish decision now appears very much more significant than it did at the time. It may have doomed the American hopes of "liberating" rather than occupying Iraq from the very start. For the purposes of taking Baghdad, the U.S. military did not need the 4th Division, but the delayed arrival of those 15,000 fresh troops to take over security duties meant that the American arrival was born in chaos and anarchy from which Iraq has yet to recover.
There have been other symptoms of change since the supposedly moderate Islamists of the AKP took power four years ago, including the accusation by party officials that the U.S. Marines were guilty of "genocide" in the fighting in Fallujah, and an alarming new spate of anti-Semitism in the media, in a country that prided itself on its protection of Jews from Hitler.
Then there was Prime Minister Erdogan's invitation this year to the Damascus-based head of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, to Ankara, undermining the decades of close military cooperation between Israel and Turkey. Erdogan's Islamic partiality was also on display during the latest Lebanese war, when he accused the Israelis of "trying to wipe out the Palestinians."
There are some troubling personal connections. This summer, it emerged that Erdogan and other AKP luminaries count as a friend and business partner Sheikh Yassin Abdullah Kadi, a Saudi businessman who has been accused (and indeed blacklisted) by the United Nations of being responsible for funds that seem to have found their way into conduits that financed terrorism. Erdogan has defended Kadi, stressing his personal trust for "Yassin Bey" (a Turkish term of honor and respect).
It is important to keep this in perspective. The Turkish economy is increasingly privatized and integrated with the West, and the traditional elites remain committed to NATO and to joining the EU. But the AKP is a new political elite, representing the newly urbanized and educated classes, and it has done a decent job of governing while the various and squabbling opposition parties show little sign of recovering from their defeat and mounting any effective challenge. The AKP could be in power for a considerable period, adding ever more momentum to Turkey's current drift away from the West.
Something fundamental seems to be shifting in Turkey, traditionally a close ally and friend of the United States. But the latest Pew Center survey this summer found that only 12 percent of Turks now have a positive view of America. Similarly, opinion poll support for Turkey to join the European Union has been falling dramatically, from over 65 percent three years ago to below 50 percent today. The Europeans, with their enlargement fatigue after absorbing Central and Eastern Europe, are partly to blame, and so are the Greek Cypriots, who voted down the U.N.-brokered deal that could have settled the thorny issue of divided Cyprus. But the impression is that Turkey is gently but noticeably drifting away from its pro-Western tradition and turning back to the Islamic world.
Still, the prospect of the Shiite Ayatollahs of Tehran brandishing nuclear weapons on Turkey's eastern frontier is not the kind of Islamic solidarity that Erdogan's party has in mind. It may be a dramatic wake-up call, a defining moment in Turkey's drift away from the West. We shall see, but few will be watching more closely than the new head of the Turkish military, Chief of Staff General Yasar Buyukanit, who replaced General Hilmi Ozkok on Aug. 30.
There have been a number of oblique references in the Turkish media in recent months to military discontent with the Erdogan government. One commentator in The New Anatolian suggested that "what is being done through the media is nothing but the biggest attack against the Turkish military, an institution which is the most faithful protector of the nation and the state." And he stressed that the purpose of the media campaign was to stop General Buyukanit from getting the top job.
If so, the campaign failed, and Buyukanit's credentials as a pro-Western seculist in the Attaturk tradition are strong. Western diplomats believe he will not mince words in warning his government of the security implications of an Iranian nuclear weapon. If Turkey's drift back to Islam is to be reversed with a return to its long-standing NATO and EU and Western vocation, the coming crisis with Iran may be the moment of decision.
