The Daily Grasshopper

Today’s Boston Globe carries a front-page story about how the Bush administration’s planned war on Iraq is flying in Turkey. The story, “Iraq showdown leaves Turkey in a quandary,” is accompanied by a photo of a large anti-war street demonstration that took place in Istanbul yesterday. Probably the only people who will suffer more from the fallout of this impending tragedy are the Kurds and the Iraqis themselves, which explains why 4 out of 5 Turkish citizens oppose it. You can read the article here:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/027/nation/Iraq_showdown_leaves_Turkey_in_a_quandary+.shtml

Pretty incredible, isn’t it? Here’s my favorite part:

“More than 80 percent of the population, and both major parties in Parliament, are opposed to following the United States into such a conflict. At the same time, Turks from the streets to the elites say current American efforts to enlist Turkish participation in an assault on Saddam Hussein could very well succeed.”

Well, when you consider that “the elites” are the ones deciding for “the streets,” maybe it’s not such a mystery. Later in the article, an unnamed (naturally) “Western diplomat” further explains how the system really works: “[The Turkish leadership] see that some of their interests lie with the United States, but they have a tough set of factors to handle. It is hard for any government to get through Parliament something that 80 percent of its people oppose.” So, when it comes right down to it, it seems the elites (the government and their friends) are actually going to have to subvert the will of an overwhelming majority of the Turkish people because “some of their interests lie with the United States.” It’s all in a day’s work for your typical “formal democracy” in the opening stanza of the 21st century.

Just what sort of enticements could persuade a government to go against the expressed will of 80 percent of its citizens? The article’s author, Charles Radin, spells it out: “More International Monetary Fund assistance for the limping economy, an easing of restrictions on Turkish purchases of military high technology, and a beefing up of Turkey’s regional influence in the postwar era all could be available to Turkey if it engages in joint action with the United States against Iraq.” So Turkey’s government is basically being bought out by Washington, despite the potential disaster for the country and its people (which Radin also spells out). A shopkeeper from the capital city of Ankara offered this blunt assessment: “Against? Of course I’m against… But America is the boss. If they say start, we will start. We must. America doesn’t give us this IMF money as a donation.”

(First of all, and as sort of an aside, Turkey has already received plenty of “military high technology” from the U.S. In fact, before it was just recently displaced by Colombia, Turkey was #3 – after Israel and Egypt - on the list of recipients of the most annual U.S. military aid. This was during the 1990s, after the Cold War had ended. What was it doing with the armaments? Radin’s article alludes to what happened in a couple of places:

“Turkey is dead set against the rise of a Kurdish state. An estimated 15 to 20 million of Turkey’s approximately 70 million citizens are ethnically Kurdish, and a long, bloody battle between the state and Turkish separatist groups that sometimes resorted to terror tactics ended only a few years ago.”

Turkey carried out a massive campaign of extermination against ethnic Kurds in its southeast provinces in the mid- to late-1990s, with the majority of the funding and armaments coming from the U.S. government. As today’s Globe article declares, the Kurdish insurrection is “a situation that at present Turkey feels it has well in hand.” They do, indeed – thanks to U.S.-taxpayer-funded guns, tanks, personnel carriers, etc.)

But back to U.S. pressure on Turkey to back the attack on Iraq. There’s plenty. Radin does a good job of explaining why the U.S. needs the Turkish government’s support:

“Turkish participation would inoculate the United States against charges that it is a Christian nation making war on Muslims in a way that its alliances with the Persian Gulf monarchies does not. It would open the door to key ports and air bases and to Turkey's border with Iraq - enabling the opening of a northern front against Hussein that analysts say probably would shorten the conflict and save American lives.”

So there’s the other half of Turkey’s “quandary.” But there will also be plenty of pressure on other nations, especially France and Russia (as another front page Globe story informs us, “Powell appeals for ‘great coalition.’”) Both countries have oil contracts with the existing Iraqi government. As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies notes in her online primer about the war, the U.S. may be able to get support for war from countries like France, whose citizens are adamantly opposed to war, by making oil concessions to French multinationals. Here’s her answer to the age-old question of “cui bono?” or who benefits?:

"U.S. oil companies would be among the first to benefit, through priority access to Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest in the world. This access means not only increased supply of crude oil, but also enormous power in the global oil market, undermining that of Saudi Arabia and OPEC. In the late 1990s through 2002, Iraq signed contracts that would give French and Russian oil companies privileged access to Iraqi reserves once economic sanctions were lifted. The U.S. has used these contracts to pressure France and Russia in Security Council deliberations. The threat - hinted at by U.S. officials and made explicitly by leaders of the Iraqi opposition - was that a post-Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would void the existing contracts, and that French and Russian companies would have no access to new oil leases if their governments stood in the way of U.S. plans. (The countervailing concern is that in the short term a war-driven drop in oil production could have serious economic consequences. But most oil companies seem to believe they would benefit from the higher retail prices that would accompany such a production decrease.)

Companies producing and installing oil equipment would also benefit. Vice-President Cheney was CEO of one such company, Halliburton Oil Services, before returning to Washington in 2001 as part of the Bush administration. Between 1997 and 2001, Halliburton under Cheney's leadership made deals with Iraq worth at least $73 million to rebuild Iraq's war- and sanctions-shattered oil infrastructure, but U.S.-led sanctions limited this reconstruction. With the U.S. military in control of a post-war Iraq, and U.S. oil companies in privileged positions, oil sanctions would certainly be lifted and companies like Halliburton would win giant rehabilitation contracts.

U.S. arms manufacturers would also benefit. Military producers have already won new, expanded contracts to produce more and better weapons. Boeing Aircraft, for instance, manufacturer of the "J-DAM" kits that transform huge lethal 500 and 2000-pound bombs into huge lethal 500 and 2000-pound "smart" bombs, is working around the clock on Pentagon contracts to produce the kits in anticipation of an Iraq war. Boeing is building a new 30,000-square-foot factory in St. Charles, LA to keep up with demand and its suppliers, including Lockheed, Honeywell, and Textron, are also ramping up production. Boeing spokesman Bob Algarotti anticipates "a higher level of production through the end of the decade."

You can read as much of the primer as you want at the Institute for Policy Studies website: http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/primer1.htm.

So we see that there’s plenty of economic incentive to go to war, provided you’ve set yourself up in the right line of work (i.e., oil, “defense”). As for the governments serving as the fronts for these “interests,” it’s a less appealing option – they’ll face the domestic turbulence - but they'll go ahead with the U.S. anyway. Good for business. It’s clear that this war lacks support from a lot of quarters. It’s also seems clear, at least in the case of Security Council members France and Russia, and probably China, that oil will grease the skids to their eventual buy-in on supporting the war. Even though a whole lot of their people are opposed to the idea. Same is true in the U.S.

“Look, 70 percent of Americans don’t want this war,” Cemal Kaya, a Turkish member of Parliament from the Republican People’s Party, told the Globe. “But they can’t say no to the Texas oil companies.” That’s democracy in the year 2003. Not a pretty picture, is it?