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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