NATO
Expands South, Hindered By US-created Chaos
By Nicola Nasser
10 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Discreetly but progressively
and confidently the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is expanding
south and southeast almost uncontested -- after the collapse of the
former USSR-led Warsaw Pact -- outside the mandate designated by its
statute into the Arab Middle East as well as into the Caspian Sea regions.
However, the U.S. obsession with the Iranian threat and with finding
an exit strategy from the Iraqi quagmire made Washington less attentive
to Turkey’s legitimate vital national interests, thus insensitively
antagonizing the alliance’s southern strong arm and alerting it
into the defensive, not against enemies, but against its own allies.
Turkey now stands in the eye of a storm created by this same ally, a
storm threatening a geopolitical fall out between the two NATO allies
since 1952.
NATO has already secured its presence on the middle tier between the
two regions, in Turkey (a member), Afghanistan (where it has a 25.000-strong
force) and to a lesser extent in Iraq where the western alliance is
training the “new Iraqi army.”
The contesting French influence had eased when former President Jacque
Chirac near the end of his term shifted to coordinating with the United
States in Lebanon; the French contest, particularly on the African theatre
and especially on NATO’s northern Arab tier seems to have been
completely neutralized with the electoral victory of the new President
Nicolas Sarkozy, who chose to engage Washington as a “friend”
and decided to rejoin NATO’s military structure.
The absence of any credible indigenous system rules out any worthwhile
obstacles to NATO expansion from within the Arab Middle East region.
The League of Arab States is practically no more than a fractured, division-burdened
high level forum of a regional gathering structure with no teeth at
all, threatened by the US-Israeli strategic alliance and the NATO with
disintegration into an alternative wider “Greater Middle East”
security structure that would embrace Israel as an integral leading
partner.
The expansion southward was highlighted on October 9 with the signing
of a treaty with Egypt at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, “in
a move that opens the door for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) to be involved in security matters along Egypt's border with
Gaza (Strip),” according to the Jerusalem Post the next day, to
possibly secure in particular the Salahuddin Passage (Philadelphi Route)
according to Ynet. Egypt has become the second Middle Eastern country
to sign a treaty with NATO after a similar treaty with Israel in 2006.
Both treaties with Egypt and Israel were initiated under the Individual
Cooperation Programmes (ICP), which aim at “promoting political
and military ties with the Euro-Atlantic and the Mediterranean regions
along with security cooperation with NATO and MD partners, in order
to enhance Mediterranean regional security and stability,” NATO
said in the statement.
The ICP was upgraded from the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI),
which was adopted by the NATO summit in Istanbul on 28-29 June 2004
with an eye on the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
to have priority in joining the alliance in partnership arrangements.
Both the ICP and ICI were conceived as mechanisms to bypass the NATO
statute, which confines its expansion to Europe and the North Atlantic
regions.
The Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) was the vehicle the NATO used to approach
partnership arrangements in the region. This dialogue was originally
initiated by European founders of NATO to promote economic and political
cooperation with the southern Arab neighbors; in 2002 the MD was upgraded
to security matters of concern and in 2004 NATO elevated its dialogue
status to conceived genuine partnerships and an expanded framework of
cooperation. The MD branched off the much older European – Arab
dialogue, which began in the last quarter of the 20th century as an
economic, political and cultural forum that has nothing to do with NATO
or military prospects.
The ICP produced the Egyptian and Israeli treaties; the ICI had earlier
produced cooperation arrangements with seven MD countries, namely Israel,
Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan; similar cooperation
was arranged with non-MD members of the GCC, namely Kuwait, Qatar, UAE,
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (which became an ICI partner in January). Since
July 2005, the NATO has also provided air transport for peacekeeping
forces in Sudan’s volatile Darfur region.
Areas of both ICP and ICI cooperation arrangements include joint military
war games, military training, defense reform, war on terror, countering
Islamist militancy, military and security intelligence sharing, control
of borders, demilitarization of the surplus of old and obsolete ammunition
stockpiles and Unexploded Ordnance (UXO), serving NATO ships at partners’
seaports, hosting NATO-supported regional Security Cooperation Centre/s,
providing logistical support to NATO’s peacekeeping operations,
helping NATO in patrolling the Mediterranean Sea and regional waters,
countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, “to get
these states closer to NATO's way of thinking” according to a
NATO official, opening NATO defense colleges to partners' military officers,
and other mechanisms to enhance practical cooperation on regional stability
and security.
Initially adopting a low-key approach, NATO now feels more confident
to send its Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and his deputy
on unprecedented public visits to Algeria and other ICP and ICI “partners.”
Scheffer may be officially warmly or cordially welcomed, but on the
popular level NATO is conceived as a U.S. tool to prolong both American
grip on Arab oil and Israeli grab of Arab land. Accordingly its presence
in the region is abhorred and is fomenting further deep-seated anti-Americanism
because of the U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq and the
U.S. limitless support to the Israeli occupation in Palestine, Syria
and Lebanon.
Specifically, NATO’s treaties with Egypt and Israel, its cooperation
with Jordan, with Lebanon falling within its mandate and the around
the clock NATO patrols in the Mediterranean is in practice creating
an external NATO wall that reinforces the internal military occupation
walls Israel is erecting to tighten the siege it imposes on the Palestinian
people.
Interrupting, Disrupting Kurdish – Turkish Crisis
However, “Just as the White House claims it has finally turned
the corner in what it defines as the ‘central front’ in
the ‘war on terror’ - Iraq - it has found itself desperately
trying to contain new crises on the war's periphery stretching east
to Pakistan, west to Turkey and south to the Horn of Africa,”
Jim Lobe wrote in Asia Times on November 10.
To prove his point, Lobe cited Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's
latest “coup,” the continuing threat of a Turkish invasion
of Iraqi Kurdistan, the looming probability of war between U.S.-backed
Ethiopia and Eritrea, “amid a lack of concrete progress on the
Israel-Palestinian peace process, the ongoing political impasse in Lebanon,
and still-mounting tensions between Iran and the U.S.” and amid
an anti-Americanism that now pervades the entire region.
This is for sure an unwelcoming environment for NATO, but at the same
time an environment that the U.S. leading NATO player will use as the
raison d’etre for dragging the North Atlantic Alliance into even
more expanded role in the region.
“The situation along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan
most directly threatens the administration's efforts to stabilize Iraq,”
said Lobe, but this is exactly where the NATO’s gradual, confident
and successful expansion south could be curtailed, hindered and face
problems because the US double-standard policies vis-à-vis what
Washington herself list as “terrorist organizations” as
well as her regional hegemonic plans pit the alliance against its Turkish
founding member or at least create an environment conducive to a collision
course between the two allies.
In October, Turkey's parliament overwhelmingly voted 507 to 19 in favor
of ordering the army to launch an offensive across Turkey's south-eastern
border in search of P.K.K. Turkish-Kurd rebels hiding in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Turks made no less than 24 attacks into Iraqi Kurdistan since 1984,
but without effect. The P.K.K. guerrillas could easily disappear in
the rugged mountain terrain of the Qandil Mountains.
Now the Turks are after their “terrorist-harboring” Iraqi-Kurdish
hosts as well, who were securing a safe haven for Kurdish rebels, demanding
their extradition, a demand that the U.S.-allied Kurdish Iraqi President,
Jalal Talibani, and the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government,
Masoud Barzani, had categorically rejected and, motivated by seemingly
Pan-Kurdish loyalties, announced their readiness to fight back any Turkish
military incursion into their territories.
The prospect of a Turkish – Kurdish war that could embroil the
Iraqi Kurds, the only trusted Iraqi ally supporting the U.S. occupation,
and destabilize the only stable Iraqi region of Kurdistan to open a
new front with a potential new flood of Iraqi refugees, this time Kurds,
is a nightmare for the U.S. Washington can ill-afford to lose the support
of either the Iraqi Kurds or that of the Turkish government across the
border; both play a vital role in supporting the U.S. war effort in
Iraq.
“With American troops already stretched thin and U.S. military
leaders not trusting most Arab-dominated units of the Iraqi armed forces,
the United States has relied extensively on Kurdish forces for counter-insurgency
operations throughout Iraq,” Stephen Zunes wrote in the “Foreign
Policy in Focus” on October 25.
US Double-standards
Meanwhile Washington has turned her eyes away from the fact that Iraqi
Kurdistan has become a safe haven for organizations outlawed by the
US as “terrorist” groups. The U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds were
honest to their rhetoric of Pan-Kurdish nationalism and turned their
U.S.-protected region into a base for Kurdish rebels from and against
neighboring countries. The U.S.-outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (P.K.K.)
took on Turkey; but a U.S.-sponsored Iranian Kurdish group known as
PEJAK took on Iran.
Washington also turned a blind eye to the fact that P.K.K. since two
years has become the mother organization of four splinter groups each
of them working separately but in coordination in Turkey, Iran, Syria
and Iraq.
On Oct. 28, the turkishweekly.net quoted the author of the forthcoming
book “The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle
East Crisis,” Reese Erlich, as saying that, “Kurdish and
American sources say the United States has been supporting guerilla
raids against Iran, channeling the money through organizations in Iraqi
Kurdistan.” Writing in the latest issue of Mother Jones, Erlich
reported that the P.K.K., which is listed on the United States State
Department List of Terrorist Organizations, “about two years ago
split into four parties in each of the countries where the Kurds live”
in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. “So the P.J.A.K. is the Iranian
affiliate. Basically they're still part of the same organization.”
He added that the United States accommodates the presence of the P.K.K.
in Iraq, but opposes its actions in Turkey, while on the other hand
it supports attacks by P.K.K.’s splinter group on Iran.
Osman Ocalan, brother of the imprisoned P.K.K. leader Abdullah Ocalan,
told AP last week that some fighters had moved toward Iran, and that
there were now more P.K.K. fighters there than in northern Iraq. “P.K.K.
forces are split into three parts situated in Turkey, Iraq and Iran,”
Ocalan said. “If there is Turkish pressure on our forces in Iraq,
the fighters will head toward Iran.” How could this free movement
on Iraqi soil be possible without accommodation by the US occupying
power and their Iraqi Kurdish arms?
Iraqi Kurds’ Pan-Kurdish “solidarity” with their Turkish,
Iranian and Syrian compatriots is undercutting U.S. efforts to contain
further deterioration in its ties with Turkey. Two weeks ago, Iraq’s
Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani, said that Iraq could not solve Turkey’s
problems. “The handing over of P.K.K. leaders to Turkey is a dream
that will never be realized,” he said.
Washington seems caught between Iraq and a hard Turkish place, with
whom relations are already thinly stretched by the recent U.S. Congress
resolution declaring the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks
90 years ago a Turkish “genocide.” A recent German Marshall
Fund poll found that only 11 percent of Turks have positive views of
the United States. One of the main factors in the extraordinary growth
of anti-U.S. sentiment among the Turks was the U.S. unwillingness to
pressure its ally Barzani to stop the P.K.K. from crossing into Turkey.
President George W. Bush spelled out U.S. opposition to a Turkish invasion
of northern Iraq. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan
was infuriated to declare that the future of bilateral ties with the
U.S. will be determined by Washington’s active involvement against
the P.K.K., without “double-standards,” in accordance with
U.S. law that labels it as a terrorist organization. Erdogan returned
disappointed from his November 5 summit with Bush in Washington; the
crisis lingers on as Bush could not assure the Turkish leader enough
for Ankara to rule out the military option.
“This crisis was predictable and predicted. U.S. officials have
long known that a Turkish incursion was just one terrorist event away.
As tensions mounted, the administration had numerous opportunities to
engage in preventive diplomacy. A combination of lack of imagination,
incompetence and sheer lack of knowledge at the State Department has
caused this impasse,” Henri J. Barkey wrote in the Washington
Post on October 27.
The New York Times on Oct. 22 reported that “American officials
acknowledged that neither the United States nor Iraq had done much recently
to constrain” the P.K.K. Current and former Bush administration
officials said a special envoy appointed by the Bush administration
in 2006, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, “had recently stepped down in
frustration over Iraqi and American inaction.”
Ahead of their summit Bush sent his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
to Ankara and to the meeting of Iraq neighbors in Istanbul with a “diplomatic”
proposal to diffuse the crisis based on hitting at the heart of the
Pan-Kurdish declared loyalties of the Iraqi Kurds’ leaders, Talbani
and Barzani, by splitting the Kurds into a terrorist camp, which Rice
declared in Ankara as the “common enemy” of her country,
Turkey and Iraq and a non-terrorist camp which both men represent.
During their summit on Nov. 5, Bush promised Erdogan that Turkey would
be furnished with U.S. intelligence on the camps and movements of the
P.K.K. The Turkish press reported this as a “green light for military
strikes.” For the U.S., the main issue now is that “Turkish
military action is limited and strictly controlled,” commented
Spiegel on-line. “Where possible,” the publication added,
“military action should be coordinated with the (Iraqi) Kurdish
regional government so as to avoid clashes between the Turkish army
and the northern Iraqi Kurdish militias.”
NATO had earlier expressed its solidarity with Turkey. On October 24,
NATO defense ministers meeting in The Netherlands said the 26 allies
expressed solidarity with Turkey in the face of the attacks. P.K.K.
rebels have killed more than 40 Turks in hit-and-run attacks over the
past month. “I think the Turkish government is showing restraint,
remarkable restraint under current conditions,” NATO chief Hoop
Scheffer told a news conference.
But for how long could Turkey practice restrain before her NATO allies
translate their so far verbal solidarity into deeds?
Scot Sullivan, writing in The Conservative Voice on Nov. 9, had a different
interpretation of the results of the Bush-Erdogan summit: “The
U.S. is appeasing Iran and Iran’s P.K.K. allies while preparing
to confront Turkey. Such is the inescapable conclusion following Erdogan-Bush
Summit. A careful assessment of the Erdogan-Bush summit indicates that
Bush remains hostile to Turkey and sympathetic to the P.K.K.-Iran Axis
that seeks to partition Iraq. Bush made only two modest assistance offers
to Turkey. Each offer raised more questions than answers.”
First, Bush’s offer to share intelligence with Turkey implies
that the U.S. has been withholding such intelligence from Turkey until
now despite U.S. obligations within NATO and despite bilateral counterterrorism
agreements. Second, the establishment of coordinating mechanism between
the U.S. and Turkey for conducting joint operations against the P.K.K.
is in reality “no more than a hotline, or more accurately a US
phone number.”
To add insult to injury, the “U.S. brush-off of Turkey became
evident, according to Sullivan, when “General Petraeus was named
as the U.S. point of contact. For the Turkish military, GEN Petraeus
is pro-Kurdish. He approved without question the P.K.K. military buildup
in northern Iraq. He also approved granting the Kurdish peshmerga the
status of an independent military force that is answerable only to Kurdish
president Barzani.”
Wider Strategic Envelopment of Turkey
Turkey is a close NATO ally; she contributes troops to NATO's operation
in Afghanistan and provides access to Incirlik air base for heavy U.S.
military logistical support and supply to its forces in Iraq, where
NATO is training the new Iraqi army. However, more importantly Turkey
sits astride the cross roads of the huge oil reserves in the Caspian
and Gulf regions.
The Caspian Sea region is gradually emerging as one of the most explosive
parts of the world and the US and NATO involvement is linking it inextricably
to the already war-torn Middle East region. This NATO-US involvement
is alerting the five Caspian states - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan,
Russia, and Turkmenistan – to be on guard; in the past decade,
the number of warships on the Caspian has almost doubled, while coastal
infrastructure is also being rapidly reinforced, Vasilina Vasilyeva
reported in Moscow News on Nov. 8.
On a wider scale the NATO-U.S. heavy and aggressive involvement in both
regions is strategically invoking defensive responses by Chine and Russia,
which geopolitically consider both regions, but the Caspian in particular,
their backyards; hence their evolving bilateral strategic coordination
as well as their growing closer ties with Iran, the regional major player
targeted by the NATO-U.S. involvement.
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is considering the possibility
of providing security for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline,”
Vasilyeva quoted Robert Simmons, the NATO secretary general's special
representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, as saying. “The
Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline runs to Turkey, a NATO country, and passes
through the territory of Azerbaijan, a NATO partner. The protection
of energy infrastructure includes the security of this oil pipeline
in addition to other energy infrastructure facilities.” NATO has
also finalized a long term program to provide military support for all
pipelines along the Caspian-Turkey-Balkans route. Vasilyeva added that
terrorism is the biggest threat to the pipeline.
On October 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Iranian media in
Tehran that “international terrorism cannot be dealt with by expanding
a military-political organization that was originally set up to counteract
the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union and no
Warsaw Pact today, while NATO not only exists but is expanding.”
Counterproductive US policies is antagonizing Turkey, which is indigenously
deeply involved in both regions with vast strategic, economic and political
interests, and consequently threatening to disrupt a successful NATO
expansion south, invoking cracks within the NATO membership, and creating
a pragmatic possibility for potential Turkish strategic shifts.
Under the headline, “Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East,”
the July/August edition of the magazine Foreign Affairs wrote, “a
significant shift in the country’s foreign policy has gone largely
unnoticed: after of decades of passivity, Turkey is now emerging as
an important diplomatic actor in the Middle East.” Within this
context Turkey’s pragmatic evolving ties with Iran and Syria,
both condemned by Bush as two pillars of a world’s “axis
of evil,” is an indication.
Similar pragmatic evolution of ties and coordination with the two major
obstacles to NATO’s expansion south and southeast, namely Russia
and China, could not be ruled out should the United States, the backbone
of the alliance, persist with its political and military insensitivity
to the strategic interests of her allies.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait,
UAE, Jordan and Palestine; he is based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the
Israeli-occupied territories.
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