Category: Middle East

Surprise Visit to Iraq

By Michael D. Shear

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 7, 2009; 10:07 AM

ISTANBUL, April 7 — President Obama made a surprise visit to Iraq Tuesday afternoon, landing on Air Force One in Baghdad at 4:42 p.m. local time after concluding an eight-day overseas tour through Europe.

The unannounced visit to a war zone was a closely guarded secret that
was kept from many of the president’s staff and the press corps, which
had been following him across the globe for the past week.

It is Obama’s first visit to Iraq since becoming president and comes
after he fundamentally altered the mission there, launching a 19-month
drawdown of most combat troops by the summer of 2010.

As a candidate, Obama had promised to end the war, which will have
lasted more than 7-and-a-half years by the time most of the troops are
gone. But as president, he has moved cautiously, saying that he had a
responsibility as president to safeguard U.S. troops and Iraqis as
American forces withdrew.

“So some people might say, ‘Wait, I thought you were opposed to the
war, why don’t you just get them all out right away?’ ” Obama told
students at a town hall meeting in Istanbul just before he left for
Iraq. “Well, just because I was opposed at the outset it doesn’t mean
that I don’t have now responsibilities to make sure that we do things
in a responsible fashion.”

Obama’s last visit to Iraq came during the height of the
presidential campaign in July. During that trip, which also included a
visit to Kabul in Afghanistan, then-senator Obama met with senior Iraqi leaders, U.S. officials and military commanders.

In a news conference in July, Obama rejected criticism from his
Republican opponent that he was planning to ignore the advice of U.S.
military leaders.

“The notion is, is that either I do exactly what my military
commanders tell me to do or I’m ignoring their advice,” he said at the
time. “No, I’m factoring in their advice but placing it in this broader
strategic framework . . . that’s required.”

Since then, the security in Iraq has largely continued to improve, although six bombs ripped through Baghdad on Monday, killing more than three dozen people in separate incidents.

In America, the political and military discussion has largely shift
to Afghanistan, where security has worsened amid a resurgence of the
Taliban and the al-Qaeda terrorists who U.S. officials say are hiding
on the border with Pakistan.

Two weeks ago, Obama announced a broad new policy on the region, saying
he would send 17,000 additional combat troops to Afghanistan, largely
drawn from the slow decrease in troops expected in Iraq.

The policy counts on fresh support from America’s European allies to
provide help in training a new Afghan police force and in building the
political and social structures that can help change the dynamic in the
war-torn country.

Allies this week largely refused to provide additional combat troops for the mission there. But the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and others did offer strong endorsements of a new and more aggressive approach to defeating terrorism in the region.

April 7, 2009
‘terror without mercy’ in Gaza

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed – sometimes for hours – the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel’s military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.

Human rights groups have accused Israel’s military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. “The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone,” the report said.

In one incident, the researchers found a Palestinian, Muhammad Shurrab, 64, and his sons Qassab, 28, and Ibrahim, 18, were shot by Israeli troops at close range without warning on 16 January during a ceasefire. Qassab was hit in the face and died soon after. Ibrahim was hit in the leg. The soldiers refused to give medical aid, and only after 23 hours was an ambulance allowed to approach, by which time Ibrahim was also dead.

Yohanna Lerman, a lawyer with the medical rights groups, said although their report was a preliminary investigation this one case alone was enough to indict Israel’s political and military leaders.

The Israeli military has said it does not target civilians and is conducting its own investigations into some cases arising from the war.

Source: The Guardian, 7 April 2009

April 7, 2009
Pentagon unveils large cuts to defence budget

Tim Reid in Washington

A contract to provide President Obama with a fleet of new helicopters that had been awarded in part to the British company Westland was scrapped last night amid swingeing cuts to the Pentagon’s weapons programmes.

Robert Gates, Mr Obama’s Defence Secretary, said he was scrapping the contract to build a new generation of presidential helicopters as part of a “fundamental overhaul” of America’s weapons programmes aimed at cutting costs and scaling back on some of the military’s biggest and most high profile projects.

Mr Gates also recommended a halt in production of the F-22 fighter jet, part of his new strategy to shift America’s defence priorities away from fighting conventional wars to the newer threats the US faces from insurgents and terrorists in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The moves will face stiff resistance on Capitol Hill, where the defence industry has enormous resources and influence and where many congressmen and senators will fiercely defend the military manufacturers in their states because of the jobs they provide.

Within minutes of Mr Gates’s press conference, and the unveiling of his $534 billion budget proposal, Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-22, warned of the huge layoffs if the fighter jet programme were ended. The defence Secretary said production of the jets, which cost $140 million each, would be halted at 187.

The contract for a fleet of new “Marine One” presidential helicopters was awarded to the joint Italian/British venture AugustaWestland six years ago. Since then the contract for the VH71 helicopter, a 64ft (19 metre) aircraft that is meant to be able to deflect missiles and resist the electro-magnetic effects of a nuclear blast, has almost doubled in price to $11.2 billion (£7.7 billion), from its original price of $6.1 billion.

Much of the current fleet of 19 presidential helicopters were built in the 1970s. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks it was decided that a faster and safer helicopter was needed. But in the current economic crisis, Mr Obama wryly noted last month that his current helicopter seemed “perfectly adequate”.

The promised emphasis on budget paring is a reversal from the Bush years, which included a doubling of the Pentagon’s spending since 2001. Spending on tanks, fighter planes, ships, missiles and other weapons accounted for about a third of all defence spending last year. But Mr Gates noted more money will be needed in areas such as personnel as the Army and Marines expand the size of their forces.

Some of the Pentagon’s most expensive programs would also be scaled back. The Army’s $160 billion Future Combat Systems modernisation program would lose its armoured vehicles. Plans to build a shield to defend against missile attacks by rogue states would also be scaled back.

Yet some programs would grow. Gates proposed speeding up production of the F-35 fighter jet, which could end up costing $1 trillion to manufacture and maintain 2,443 planes. The military would buy more speedy ships that can operate close in to land. And more money would be spent outfitting special forces troops that can hunt down insurgents.

Source: Times Online, April 7, 2009

April 7, 2009
Turkey Wants U.S. ‘Balance’

By ROGER COHEN

Published: April 5, 2009

Roger Cohen

LONDON — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is a man of brisk, borderline brusque, manner and he does not mince his words: “Hamas must be represented at the negotiating table. Only then can you get a solution.”

We were seated in his suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel, where a Turkish flag had been hurriedly brought in as official backdrop. Referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, Erdogan said, “You will get nowhere by talking only to Abbas. This is what I tell our Western friends.”

In an interview on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey, his first to a Muslim country since taking office, Erdogan pressed for what he called “a new balance” in the U.S. approach to the Middle East. “Definitely U.S. policy has to change,” he said, if there is to be “a fair, just and all-encompassing solution.”

A firm message from Israel’s best friend in the Muslim Middle East: the status quo is untenable.

How Hamas is viewed is a pivotal issue in the current American Middle East policy review. The victor in 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas is seen throughout the region as a legitimate resistance movement, a status burnished by its recent inconclusive pounding during Israel’s wretchedly named — and disastrous — “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

The United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization. They won’t talk to it until it recognizes Israel, among other conditions. This marginalization has led only to impasse because Hamas, as an entrenched Palestinian political and social movement, cannot be circumvented and will not disappear.

Former Senator George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, has expressed support for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. I think this should become a U.S. diplomatic priority because it is the only coherent basis for meaningful peace talks. Erdogan called Mitchell “perfectly aware and with a full knowledge, a very positive person whose appointment was a very good step.”

The Turkish prime minister, who leads Justice and Development, or AKP, a party of Islamic inspiration and pragmatic bent, earned hero’s status in the Arab world when he walked out on the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a debate earlier this year in Davos. Any regrets?

“If I had failed to do that, it would have been disrespectful toward myself and disrespectful of the thousands of victims against whom disproportionate force was being used,” Erdogan said. He alluded to the children killed in Gaza — 288 of them according to the United Nations special rapporteur — and asked: “What more can I say?”

Erdogan, 55, urged Obama to become “the voice of millions of silent people and the protector of millions of unprotected people — that is what the Middle East is expecting.”

He went on: “I consider personally the election of Barack Hussein Obama to have very great symbolic meaning. A Muslim and a Christian name — so in his name there is a synthesis, although people from time to time want to overlook that and they do it intentionally. Barack Hussein Obama.”

I suggested that synthesis was all very well but, with a center-right Israeli government just installed, and its nationalist foreign minister already proclaiming that “If you want peace prepare for war,” the prospects of finding new bridges between the West and the Muslim world were remote.

“Your targets can only be realized on the basis of dreams,” Erdogan said. “If everyone can say, looking at Obama, that is he is one of us, is that not befitting for the leading country in the world?”

Dreams aside, I see Obama moving methodically to dismantle the Manichean Bush paradigm — with us or against us in a global battle of good against evil called the war on terror — in favor of a new realism that places improved relations with the Muslim world at its fulcrum. Hence the early visit to Turkey, gestures toward Iran, and other forms of outreach.

This will lead to tensions with Israel, which had conveniently conflated its long national struggle with the Palestinians within the war on terror, but is an inevitable result of a rational reassessment of U.S. interests.

I asked Erdogan if Islam and modernity were compatible. “Islam is a religion,” he said, “It is not an ideology. For a Muslim, there is no such thing as to be against modernity. Why should a Muslim not be a modern person? I, as a Muslim, fulfill all the requirements of my religion and I live in a democratic, social state. Can there be difficulties? Yes. But they will be resolved at the end of a maturity period so long as there is mutual trust.”

The problem is, of course, that Islam has been deployed as an ideology in the anti-modern, murderous, death-to-the-West campaign of Al-Qaeda. But Erdogan is right: Islam is one of the great world religions. Obama’s steps to reassert that truth, and so bridge the most dangerous division in the world, are of fundamental strategic importance.

Synthesis begins with understanding, which is precisely what never interested his predecessor.

April 6, 2009
Israel pleased with new NATO chief

By Amir Oren, Haaretz Correspondent and AP

STRASBOURG, France – NATO leaders appointed Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO’s new secretary general yesterday after overcoming Turkish objections to a leader who angered Muslims around the world by supporting the right to caricature the Prophet Muhammad.

Israeli officials here expressed their satisfaction at Rasmussen’s appointment, noting that he has taken a very friendly approach to Israel in the past few years. NATO’s outgoing head, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said NATO’s 28 member nations reached unanimity after a series of Turkish concerns were addressed.

“Every head of state and government is fully convinced that Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the best choice for NATO,” de Hoop Scheffer told reporters at the end of the alliance’s two-day, 60th-anniversary summit. “A solution has been found also for the concerns expressed by Turkey and we are unanimous in this.”

“There were important efforts to make sure that everyone felt included,” U.S. President Barack Obama said after the meeting.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that his government’s requests had included the closure of a Kurdish satellite television broadcaster based in Denmark; the establishment of contacts between NATO and Islamic countries; appointment of a Turk as an aide to Fogh Rasmussen and senior NATO command positions for Turkish generals.

Fogh Rasmussen infuriated many Muslims by defending freedom of speech during an uproar over a Danish newspaper’s publication of the cartoons in 2005.

He has also angered Turkey by opposing its membership in the European Union.

Turkish leaders argued against Fogh Rasmussen on the grounds that he would be a bad choice at a time when NATO was trying to win support from Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to a diplomat from a member country who asked not to be identified.

Fogh Rasmussen, who stood next to de Hoop Scheffer during the announcement, said he was honored by the decision.

“I have total understanding for the issues raised by Turkey,” Fogh Rasmussen said, adding that he viewed Turkey as a bridge to the Islamic world.

“A dialogue with the Muslim world is important,” he said.

De Hoop Scheffer’s term runs out August 1.

Source: www.haaretz.com, April 05, 2009

April 5, 2009
The Evolving Turkish Role in Mideast Peace Diplomacy

Author:

Steven A. Cook, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies

April 2, 2009

As President Obama arrives in Ankara, he will find a Turkish government eager to play an influential role in the Middle East. While Turkey has made important contributions to the region in recent years, its activism has been controversial in Washington. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stormed out of a contentious panel on the Gaza crisis at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he injected additional controversy into Turkey’s diplomatic foray in the Middle East.

The incident produced a torrent of criticism from some U.S. policymakers, analysts, and journalists who regarded the uproar in Davos as proof positive that Turkey, under Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which is rooted in Turkey’s Islamist movement, had made the turn away from the West in favor of the radicals of the Middle East. Erdogan’s behavior at Davos, his seeming embrace of Hamas during Israel’s Gaza offensive, and his strong criticism of Israel, which at times veered into classic anti-Semitism, left observers wondering whether Turkey could continue to play a constructive role in the Middle East.

The Prodigal Pasha

Since the Justice and Development Party (known as AKP) came to power in late 2002, Ankara has pursued a conscious strategy of reestablishing Turkey’s links with the former Ottoman domains to the south and the east. To be sure, there have long been Turkish diplomatic missions throughout the Middle East, but given Ankara’s foreign policy orientation, which placed a premium on relations with the West and the official secularism of the republic, Turkey was a marginal player at best in the Middle East. The AKP governments, first under Prime Minister Abdullah Gul and since early 2003 under Erdogan, embarked on an ambitious foreign policy–concomitant with their equally bold domestic political and reform program–that sought to secure Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European Union while simultaneously cultivating relationships with Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Riyadh, and Tehran. Turkey’s effort to draw closer to both Europe and the Middle East reflected a belief within the AKP that its foreign policy needed to be normalized. Although Turkey’s almost exclusive orientation toward Europe and the United States might have been appropriate during the Cold War, when its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was a paramount foreign policy fact, Turkey’s interests now demanded a multidimensional foreign policy.

The Justice and Development Party’s approach was met almost immediately with skepticism in Washington. The often testy negotiations between Washington and Ankara in late 2002 and early 2003 over the use of Turkish territory for the planned invasion of Iraq and the parliament’s subsequent inability to pass legislation giving U.S. forces permission to launch the attack from Turkey angered the United States. Yet Iraq was just the first in a series of episodes where Ankara and Washington found themselves on opposite sides in the Middle East. In 2005, for example, as the United States sought to isolate Syria over Damascus’s alleged responsibility for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and its central role in funneling jihadis into Iraq, the Turkish government continued a policy of deepening its diplomatic and economic ties with the Syrians. After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, then Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and other Turkish foreign ministry officials hosted Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshal, at AKP headquarters in Ankara. These developments came against the backdrop of improved relations between Ankara and Tehran and Prime Minister Erdogan’s periodic tough rhetoric that Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were tantamount to “state terrorism.”

Ties Shift, Eyebrows Rise

Each of these developments at first blush raises serious questions about Turkey’s foreign policy orientation. Ankara’s seemingly abrupt divergence from the Western consensus was disorienting to policymakers and other observers who concluded that Turkey could no longer be considered a reliable partner or play the “honest broker” role in Middle Eastern conflicts that Turkish officials coveted. Hosting Khaled Meshal, who is responsible for a fair number of both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, was clearly a mistake. Not only did the Hamas leader resist Turkish entreaties to recognize Israel and to renounce armed struggle, the encounter also angered Jerusalem and Washington–two strategically critical relationships for Ankara. Yet, it is important to note that with all the questions about who “lost” Turkey and whether Turkey is “tilting East,” there is nothing extraordinary about Ankara’s approach to the Middle East. Against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s tortured relationship with the European Union, and the security fallout from the invasion of Iraq, any Turkish government would likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of AKP. The Hamas episode aside, it is abundantly clear that Turkey’s Middle East policy is consistent with Turkey’s national interests, and importantly, one that Washington can leverage to advance its own regional goals.

On the range of important issues from Iraq and Iran to Middle East peace, Turkey’s policies are generally consistent with those of the United States. The Turks have long sought a stable, federal Iraq. The flowering of relations between Ankara and Irbil, the seat of the Kurdish Regional Government, combined with considerable Turkish investment in northern Iraq mitigates a complicating factor in Washington’s Iraq policy. The situation in Kirkuk and the persistence of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) violence against Turkey remain flashpoints, but as the Turks and Iraqi Kurds develop closer ties, the magnitude of these problems diminishes, forestalling some of the most dire scenarios about Turkish military intervention that could unravel the progress that Iraq has made over the last eighteen months. In the context of improved Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish relations, the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, has called upon PKK terrorists to lay down their arms or leave Iraq. For the United States, Turkey is no longer the malevolent wildcard in the game of stabilizing Iraq.

Iran, Syria, and Mammon

Viewed from a U.S. standpoint, Turkey’s two most controversial relationships in the Middle East are Iran and Syria. While critics have often used these ties as clear indications of AKP’s Islamist worldview, Ankara nurtured relations with Tehran and Damascus in the late 1990s (before Justice and Development even existed) and early 2000s. The Turkish leadership supports the Obama administration’s efforts to establish a dialogue with Tehran. From Turkey’s perspective, good bilateral relations with Iran and regional stability are critically important, not for ideological reasons, but economic calculation. Iran is the largest supplier of natural gas to Turkey only after Russia. Although the Turks would like to diversify their supplies and have plans to invest in large-scale renewable energy programs, in the short and medium term, Ankara will do all that it can to ensure its relations with both Tehran and Moscow remain cooperative and friendly.

The exigencies of energy supplies are not bound up in Turkey’s relations with Syria, but there is a strong economic component to the relationship. Turkey’s predominantly underdeveloped southeast is closer to Damascus than to Kayseri, Ankara, or Istanbul. The Turks believe that increased bilateral trade serves two critical purposes–it promotes development in places like Cizre, Gaziantep, and Diyarbakir and provides a boost to the Syrian economy. The architects of AKP’s foreign policy make the argument that if Turkey’s neighbors prosper, they are also more likely to be pacific, ensuring Turkish security and providing a regional environment more conducive to peace. Turkey’s ties with Syria serve another geostrategic interest. In 2006-2007, some foreign policy analysts were seized with the idea that Damascus could be “peeled away” from its strategic relationship with Iran. Although it is unlikely that Damascus will easily relinquish its ties with Tehran, the Turks can play an important role in providing the regime of Bashar al-Assad with an attractive alternative to Iran. It is surely preferable to Washington for the Turks to be engaging in dialogue with the Syrians than for Assad to be speaking with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in isolation. Turkey’s ties with Syria have already paid dividends in the Middle East as Ankara sponsored indirect talks between Israelis and Syrians in 2008. Those negotiations did not produce an agreement and were halted over Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008, but by all measures the Syrians and Israelis made progress with the help of Turkish mediation.

O, Jerusalem

Perhaps Turkey’s most complex relationship in the Middle East is with Israel. While the two countries maintain close military and economic ties, relations have been decidedly uneasy. From the start, the Israelis perceived a Palestinian tilt in AKP’s approach to the Middle East and were wary of Ankara’s relations with Tehran. At the same time, the Israelis, by their own admission, have complete trust in Prime Minister Erdogan’s efforts to mediate between Israel and Syria. For their part, the Turks were concerned about reports that the Israelis were developing ties with both the Iraqi Kurds and an organization related to the PKK, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan or PJAK, which is battling Iran. Ankara also argues that Israeli actions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip only undermine their efforts and those of others to broker peace. Relations between the two countries deteriorated during Israel’s Gaza offensive, yet recent reports that the Israelis have dispatched a senior foreign ministry official to Ankara may indicate that both governments are looking for ways to reestablish trust. If incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu places an emphasis on striking a deal with Syria, as many expect, Turkey will initially play a prominent role in bringing the two parties together and brokering their negotiations.

Ultimately, the challenge for Turkey is, first, whether it has the capacity to pursue an activist role in the region without undermining its other priorities, and second, the extent to which other regional powers want Ankara to play the role it intends. Thus far, the Turks seem able to balance their desire to be influential in the Middle East with other national interests in the Caucasus, Cyprus, and Europe. There is also a palpable sense in the Middle East that Turkish activism, while helpful at times, can nevertheless undermine the efforts of more traditional regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. As Cairo and Riyadh seek Palestinian reconciliation, there is concern that Turkish activism will provide a way for Hamas to resist Arab pressure to come to terms with Fatah. Still, there is no question that Turkey can play a constructive role in the Middle East. It has gained the confidence of the regional players on most of the major issues of great importance. As a result, in an era of diminished resources for the United States, Turkey can be a critical ally in the pursuit of Washington and Ankara’s overlapping interests.

April 2, 2009