Word: turkeys
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Even as the U.S. works to stabilize a postwar Iraq, Turkey is setting out to create a footprint of its own in the Kurdish areas of the country. In the days after U.S. forces captured Saddam's powerbase in Tikrit, a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops were dispatched south from Turkey. Their target: the northern oil city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. Using the pretext of accompanying humanitarian aid the elite soldiers passed through the northern city of Arbil on Tuesday. They wore civilian clothes, their vehicles lagging behind a legitimate...
...argument when he says it was Pentagon diplomacy, rather than State Department efforts, that won the U.S. basing rights in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But it was the same Defense Department diplomacy, in the form of Paul Wolfowitz's intense direct lobbying, that failed to sway the Turks: Turkey is a "guided" democracy in which the military holds considerable sway. And the Turkish military, despite its closeness to Washington, declined at a crucial moment to advise parliament on how it should vote on Iraq - for reasons that have more to do with the Turkish military being dissatisfied...
...foreign policy is being systematically sabotaged by a determined group of fanatics in the very department charged with carrying it out. The evidence? Quite simply that most of the world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq; that no UN Security Council resolution could be garnered to authorize it; that Turkey could not be permitted to provide basing rights for a northern front; that the populations of such traditional allies as France, Germany and South Korea have become overwhelmingly hostile to U.S. foreign policy. This, Gingrich concludes, can only be the result of a failure of diplomacy - he repeatedly uses...
...problem was not the packaging, Newt, it was the policies. The only way the State Department could have changed the outcome in Turkey was if it had mastered the art of mass hypnosis...
...succeed in its self-appointed role as a kind of regional point man for Washington will probably be determined by many factors beyond Turkey's control, not least what happens next on the uncertain road to peace between Israel and Palestine...