In what is the latest of a long series of diplomatic setbacks for the Bush Administration, the Parliament of Turkey rejected military cooperation with the United States in any campaign to disarm Iraq.
This decision represents something more than a logistical problem for U.S. and allied military planners. Turkey is, after all, one of our closest and most faithful NATO allies. Its friendship with Israel is the linchpin of our strategy for security and stability in the Middle East. It is the very model of the tolerant, pro-Western democracy that we are encouraging the entire region to emulate. There can be little question that its democratically elected parliament was reflecting Turkish popular opinion in the decision to turn down a "deal" with the United States to take part in the war against Saddam Hussein.
In other words, the Turkish decision was a lost battle in what we (echoing Sen. Joe Lieberman's term) have called the "wider war" against threats to world security, emanating from Iraq, from other rogue states, or from terrorist networks. Far from building broad support for our efforts to rein in madmen seeking weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration's inveterate habits of unilateralism and Texas-style bluster are losing us supporters we already had.
To a remarkable extent, the President and his advisors have made American dominance, not Iraqi defiance, of the world community the key concern for many people who would never defend Saddam Hussein. This devolution has taken awhile, but the steady undermining of U.S. credibility began practically the moment George W. Bush took office, with the unilateral decisions to reject the Kyoto Protocol, the Comprehensive Test Treaty, and international criminal court jurisdiction over American citizens. It continued with the Administration's announcement of steel import quotas, which abandoned American leadership of trade liberalization efforts for transparently crass domestic political reasons.
After 9/11, the United States was the object of an enormous and almost universal wave of sympathy and solidarity from around the world. The President quickly dissipated this mood with his "Axis of Evil" speech, soon buttressed by official announcement of a new foreign policy doctrine that claims for the United States a historically unique right to choose and preemptively defuse threats to national, regional or global security.
Under pressure from Congressional Democrats and his own Secretary of State, the President changed course last fall and went to Congress for a use-of-force resolution, and to the United Nations for a resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with earlier U.N. calls for its disarmament. He got both, the former with considerable Democratic support, and the latter on a unanimous Security Council vote.
As though it regretted this multilateral step, the Administration then spent several months preparing for a military campaign and issuing belligerent statements that made it clear any U.N. authority for action against Iraq was strictly optional. Until Secretary Powell's powerful testimony to the Security Council last month, the Administration consistently made U.S. security concerns about Iraq, not Saddam's defiance of the international community, the crux of its case for war.
In effect, the Bush Administration has treated this nation's allies around the world much as he has treated Democrats at home: as worth considering only to the precise extent that they serve his purposes.
And so, opposition to military action against Iraq, at home and abroad, has developed from well-earned mistrust of the President and his Administration. It's so strong that the United States is struggling to get a simple majority in the Security Council for a resolution simply stating the obvious: that Iraq is not complying with the "final chance" resolution passed last September. And it's so strong that our staunchest allies, especially Britain's Tony Blair, are in dire political straits.
None of this in any way changes the fundamental facts about the need to disarm Saddam Hussein, with or without as many allies as we ought to have. Letting Saddam Hussein off the hook now would set an intolerable precedent of accepting serial defiance of the world community on the gravest possible of issues, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And it would also further encourage the dangerously irresponsible course being pursued by some of our European allies under the leadership of the French, which would make the United Nations and NATO more concerned about U.S. power than threats to collective security. Democrats in the United States who are driven to distraction by the Administration's clumsy diplomacy should never forget that the wider war for peace and democracy in the Middle East does require action to disarm Iraq. When it comes to Iraq, the President is doing the right thing so far, if often in the wrong way.
But there's more to war than military operations, and the Bush Administration needs to be held strictly accountable for diplomatic blunders that are making the war harder and more dangerous than it should be, and that call America's post-war intentions into question all over the world.
After all, we are faced with this challenge in the first place because the first Bush Administration blundered badly by failing to finish the Gulf War and topple Saddam Hussein, for reasons that now seem exceedingly foolish. Indeed, the Turkish Parliament's decision against following us into Iraq a second time is partly attributable to broken U.S. promises after the 1991 war, which left Turkey with a devastated economy and a huge refugee problem.
We can only hope the Administration learns from its recent mistakes, and those of its last Republican predecessor. Otherwise, even if, as we devoutly hope, it succeeds in toppling Saddam Hussein by force or its imminent threat, it will be in danger of winning a battle but losing the wider war.
