The Turkey Mess

By Massimo Calabresi

Even in Turkey, all politics are local. In a major blow to U.S. war planning, a raft of first-term lawmakers broke ranks with their party last weekend to block approval of the deployment of 62,000 U.S. troops to the northern front of a potential war with Iraq. After months of negotiations between the two governments, the vote dealt a serious blow to the Turkish government's efforts to strike a deal with the U.S. "This is a definitive parliamentary decision," Turkey's ambassador to the U.S., Faruk Logoglu, told TIME Saturday. "It's very serious."

For the U.S. the vote could mean a delay in war plans and might necessitate a smaller, less effective force's attacking Saddam's troops from the north. Forty ships carrying the 4th Infantry Division and its equipment have been awaiting orders to deploy to Turkey. If the vote stands, they will have to steam to Kuwait or other destinations to deploy by air to bases in Kurd-controlled northern Iraq--at least two weeks of extra travel. U.S. commanders say they can handle it. But the rejection is also a diplomatic blow that could set back U.S. efforts to get U.N. backing for the war against Iraq.

Ankara had told U.S. diplomats it thought the votes were in hand. Privately, senior Turkish officials blame Washington for not pushing dissident Iraqis who held a meeting in northern Iraq last week to provide a seat for Iraq's Turkoman minority in a newly established body to coordinate with the U.S. after a war with Iraq. "We had been insisting that the Turkomans be a constitutive part of that," a senior Turkish official said. In the end, though, the newly elected pro-Islamic legislators may have been looking mainly to their home districts. "A lot of these guys are right out of their villages and never expected to be in parliament," says Philip Gordon, an expert in U.S.-Turkish relations at the Brookings Institution. "They were elected on an Islamist platform and just couldn't go back home and say, 'I voted for this war.'" --By Massimo Calabresi