Thank god for small favors. At least there’s some good news on the Turkish 
front this morning. Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, head of the Turkish General Staff and de facto arbiter of Turkish civilian governments, said today that — barring a massive deterioration of the situation in Northern Iraq — he will not send troops into Iraqi Kurdistan. That staves off one truly nightmarish scenario.
Yet look a bit further down in the article and you see a deeply revealing comment from Gen. Ozkok.
I have difficulty understanding those who claim there is a threat to them across the ocean. And when Turkey says the same threat exists on the other side of its border, this is found to be unbelievable.
What answer can we make to this?
It’s difficult to fully grasp the deeper import of this remark without some sense of how deeply pro-Western and, 
more specifically, pro-American an institution the Turkish General Staff is. These are notes of resentment being sounded by our most loyal friends — in the region, or anywhere for that matter.
My column in The Hill this week is on the Turks and the rise on the American right of a foolish, dangerous and utterly self-serving argument which holds that our problems with Turkey are due not to our own high-handed incompetence but rather to rising Turkish Islamic fundamentalism. The people who make this argument are either liars, utterly ignorant, or folks who are so unwilling to confront the reality of what’s happened in Turko-American relations over the last three months that they’ve just willingly spun themselves. As I write toward the end of my new piece in The Hill …
The Bush administration acted toward Turkey like the stereotypical rogue from a 1950s B-Movie. First we told Turkey what we wanted. When she balked, we got a little rough. When even that didnât do the trick, we pulled out our wallet, saying in essence, âFine, how much do you want?â When even cash failed, we told her to get out of the car and walk home.
This just gets uglier and uglier. And the costs keep rising.
