If there has been one fixed point in debate about war with Iraq, it has been that Iraqis deserve deliverance from Saddam Hussein, and that the Iraqi Kurds in particular -- who now have a precarious freedom -- should have it confirmed.
Some see the price to the world for that deliverance as far too high, some see it as bearable. But there is agreement that a war which ends in a worse situation for the Kurds would be the worst of all possible wars. Men and women would have died, and dangerous consequences risked by the US and Britain, and yet the one group of people who had already been partially rescued would be thrust back into the fire.
That is why the way in which American plans for the northern front have unravelled in recent weeks has been so alarming.
The vote in the Turkish parliament which blocked the passage of American troops knocked strategy sideways, leaving a whole division of American troops floating disconsolately offshore in the eastern Mediterranean. And not just any division. The Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division is the most advanced formation in the American army, fully "digitalized," as today's electronic soldiers say, and possessing a formidable mixture of tanks and helicopters.
"This is the best we've got," says the military analyst Anthony Cordesman. It is the most potent expression of the technological superiority which the US expects will allow it to wage war with maximum speed and minimum casualties.
The Turks may change their minds, and if they do the Fourth may yet reach northern Iraq, to join the lighter forces America is inserting into the region. But it will be very, very late, and that lessens the chance of fixing Iraqi divisions which might otherwise retreat, and thus make the final fight for Tikrit and Baghdad harder.
In its anxiety to get troops into northern Iraq, the US was not only ready to pay a high price in cash, but it appeared, to bargain with the political future of the Kurds. The Turks demanded, and got, American agreement that they could put large forces into northern Iraq and have a voice in determining what kind of system Iraq would have after Saddam.
Having failed to secure a passage for its troops, and still uncertain whether it will be allowed to use Turkish air space, the US is now arguing that Turkish troops should keep out of Iraq, but the Turks are not listening.
Turkey's supposed main fear, apart from its concerns about Turkish Kurdish rebels who operate from northern Iraq, is that the Iraqi Kurds want their own state and might try to seize the oil resources of the north to give that state an economic basis.
This is nonsense and the Turks are well aware that it is nonsense, because Iraqi Kurdish leaders know that a landlocked mini-state, even if it somehow did get hold of the northern oil, which is in any case running out, is neither a realistic nor a desirable prospect. The real fear of the Turks is rather that the Iraqi Kurds would be able successfully to combine a degree of autonomy for their region, including an agreement on oil resources, with participation in an Iraqi central government.
This "loyal autonomy" would be a model to which Kurds in Turkey might then aspire, and that is a concept which Ankara would find incredibly hard to accommodate, given the fiction of homogeneity upon which its nationalism is based. The clear danger arises that a Turkish military presence and a supposed "right" to be consulted on political matters, would be used to spoil the chances of a successful political outcome in northern Iraq, and thus might damage the prospects for Iraq as a whole.
All that the US and the Kurdish parties could wrest out of the Turks at a meeting in Ankara two days ago was a vague agreement to take part in a committee to minimize friction between the forces the Turks insist they will put into Iraq and American and Kurdish units.
The fact that America will have weaker forces in northern Iraq than it expected at the start of hostilities will make it more difficult for Washington to exert leverage on Turkey, but not of course impossible. More US troops will come later, and in any case Turkey is enormously dependent, politically and economically, on its relationship with America.
But it is another index of how much the Iraq conflict has overturned the certainties of the past that it is not entirely sure that American leverage will prevail.
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