You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » August 2006
The Turkey Connection?
Michael Totten, covering for Andrew Sullivan, picks up on a disturbing report that Iran might have funnelled arms to Hezbollah via Turkey.
Turkey is a key NATO member, an ally of Israel - and a potential EU member. "If it turns out that Turkey knowingly, rather than negligently, helped arm an Iranian-backed terrorist army in the heat of battle against a Western-allied democracy," Totten writes, "they can forget joining Europe forever."
True, well, hopefully true. The EU is not known as a close ally of Israel's, though it is to be hoped that relations have not sunk so far as to allow a Hezbollah facilitator to join the union's ranks.
That said, the author says that US and Israeli sources are treating the incident as a one-off error. A US insider said that the shipment of spare parts and missile launcher components was sent in a lorry through "rough terrain." He added that since the US protested about the shipment, Turkey is policing its borders "more aggressively." Turkish intelligence forces later declared they had grounded Iranian flights headed to Syria.
Intelligence is notoriously shady - and events around the borders of Turkey, Syria and Iran murkier still. While post-Iraq, readers in the US and Britain are likely to treat reports from their home agencies with greater suspicion, Israeli intelligence reports have a reputation for reliablility.
Totten concludes, "One of the best things about Turkey joining the EU, at least from an American perspective, is that Turkey would be all but forced to align itself permanently with the West and forswear forever these sorts of shenanigans. If Europe slams the door for whatever reason, we’ll likely see more murky and nefarious behavior from Ankara in the future."
Again, true enough, hopefully. Turkey and the US used to be close partners - now right-wing Americans attack the Turks, under their "moderate" Islamist PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "a liability" in the war on terror. Erdogan's unprecedented welcome to Hamas in January played a part in this, though Turkey's refusal to allow the US to use its territory to launch a northern front into Iraq in 2003 put relations under strain. It's likely though that most in the state department don't share the scorched earth approach to allies - "you're either with us 100 percent or you're an enemy" - and the future will see some trust-building exercises with the Turks. Supporting their entry into the EU - a consistent plank of the US's Turkey policy - will be part of this.
But for Europeans, there always seems to be a threat built into this equation, not unlike the widely-criticised letter from Muslim leaders to the British government, which appeared to warn that if foreign policy wasn't changed to suit Muslim tastes, more suicide bombers would strike the UK and its interests.
Is Turkey really so fragile that rejection from the EU will drive it into the arms of extreme Islam? And if its future is on such a knife edge between civilisation and fanaticism, is this really the kind of new member the EU needs?
And wouldn't it be nice, for once, if Europeans could have diplomatic relations with a Muslim country without the threat of terrorist reprisals lurking in the background?
