Word: turkishly
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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...
...Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. "They did not come here with a pure heart," says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville. "Their objective is to create an environment that can be used by Turkey to send a large peacekeeping force into Kirkuk...
...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 by the terms it was offered on Iraqi Kurdistan than with some failure of State Department PR to persuade...
...Gingrich blithely ignores these realities and lays into what he sees as a communications failure by Powell's people: "The State Department communications program failed during these five months to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States...
...Turkey wants to balance its position with the U.S., it wants to play the moderator in the region," said a journalist in the Turkish foreign minister's entourage, suggesting that Ankara is now busy trying to undo the damage caused by its refusal to allow American troops to use its territory for the invasion of Iraq...