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May 03, 2005
Rubin Sees a Comedy of Errors in U.S-Turkish Relations
Three years after the "Turkish Grand National Assembly voted 319 to 101 to send troops to Afghanistan to assist the United States in its Global War on Terror," U.S.-Turkish ties "are in disarray," contends Michael Rubin in an American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy article headlined "A Comedy of Errors: U.S.-Turkish Diplomacy and the Iraq War."
Mr. Rubin noted that, "In December 2004, Mehmet Elkatmis, head of the Turkish Parliament’s Human Rights Commission, accused the United States of “conducting genocide in Iraq.” Faruk Anbarcioglu, a Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP) deputy, suggested the dissolution of the Grand National Assembly’s Turkish-American Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group," he added,
"American officials, long friends of Turkey, also sounded alarm bells," Mr. Rubin asserts. "Despite frequent assurances from both Turkish and American diplomats that U.S.-Turkish relations were on the mend, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith acknowledged the problems during a February 17, 2005, speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. Responding to a question from a Turkish reporter, Feith said,
“It’s crucial that the appreciation of . . . relationships extend beyond government officials [and] down to the public in general, because otherwise the relationship is not really sustainable.”Mr. Rubin said Mr. Feith "implied that the AKP was responsible for the rise of anti-Americanism, commenting,
“We hope that the officials in our partner countries are going to be devoting the kind of effort to building popular support for the relationship that we build in our own country.”Mr. Rubin's article is worth reading. I value it because it provides a glimpse at the thinking of some of the players in U.S-Turkish relations.
Posted by Munir Umrani at May 3, 2005 04:52 PM
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