Twenty years ago this week, the so-called "free" world, that is, the U.K. and other valuable allies in the EU, lined up behind the U.S. to invade Iraq and destroy its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and punish Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein who, amassing those weapons, put the whole world in the path of destruction. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations Security Council, shaking a vial of an unknown substance, presented “the” evidence of Iraqi WMDs, including biological ones. As a result, in March 2003, U.S. forces invaded Iraq.
“These are opening stages of a broad and concerted campaign,” then-U.S. President George W. Bush said. Indeed, they were. As the president warned two years earlier, nations were either with him or against him. After overwhelming evidence of one full vial of WMD presented by the U.S., no nation would dare to be against humanity’s savior – and no one was. Those who disagreed with the invasion of Iraq, such as Türkiye, for instance, did not allow the U.S. forces to use their territory to enter Iraq and did not take an active role in the coalition of troops the U.S. put together. To convince the world and to prove those who did not believe in Powell’s fable of WMDs, the U.S. occupation administration forces started an intensive search. Still, a year later, they silently conceded that their pretext for invading large stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Saddam’s bases was mistaken. David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons inspector, told U.S. Congress in January 2004: “We were almost all wrong.” Two years later, a presidential commission concluded that “not one bit” of prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was correct.
WMD intelligence proved illusory, and there were over 4,700 U.S. and allied troop deaths, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed; the initial effort to “decapitate” Iraq’s leadership had worked, and the intricate ethnic balance of power had gone. Now questions linger over Iraq’s fractious political situation. Then, Iraq, as we knew it, came to the brink of dismemberment. Today it is on the verge of breaking into three parts: Independent Kurdistan and Shiite and Sunni Arab territories.
As the U.S. Marine Commander of more than 60,000 troops waiting in their ships to operate from Turkish ports into the Iraqi territory, who, after the Turkish Parliament failed to pass a proposal to allow them to land, had to go back to find another way to Iraq, this four-star general observed: Turks are going to pay for this dearly! I am not sure if Turks have been paying dearly, but the March 1 Memorandum (as it had become famously known) became a turning point in relations between Türkiye and the U.S. The general was Jim Mattis, who served as the 26th U.S. secretary of defense and resigned in protest when then-President Donald Trump had asked him to withdraw all the U.S. personnel from Iraq and Syria, leaving the task of fighting with Daesh to the Turkish army. In Türkiye, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was serving as the chairperson of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Still, he had not been elected to Parliament yet, and Abdullah Gül was the prime minister keeping that seat warm for Erdoğan; almost all of the U.S. “deep state” blamed Erdoğan for the refusal. Years later, Gül said he pushed the AK Party deputies to endorse the proposal, but they listened to Erdoğan. Since that day, the central U.S. media, pro-establishment think tanks and report-writers of the RAND Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the writers of their respective publications never wrote Erdoğan’s name without adding the possessive construction of “Islamist.” They always looked for a cunning motive, even in his government’s EU-endorsed reforms. When Erdoğan introduced the presidential system to prevent loss of time with crises within coalitions whose average lifespan was not longer than 14 months for almost 70 years of the so-called parliamentary system, the cohort of neo-cons and neo-liberals magnanimously added new adjectives: strong man, autocrat, and populist-authoritarian ruler. As if he didn’t get endorsed in elections every four (or five) years by the people, those U.S.-based report writers now have the guts to announce “a U.S. military operation” to prevent another Erdoğan victory in the forthcoming elections.
The person who uttered those words is a familiar one: Henri J. Barkey, an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the CFR and an instructor at Lehigh University. We all remember him coming to Istanbul before the unsuccessful coup bid on July 15, 2016. A former adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Barkey stands accused of taking part in the action that sought to overthrow the government. The indictment against Barkey and his co-conspirator tycoon Osman Kavala purports defendants took “active roles in the coordination and continuation of the coup attempt by Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) members in favor of foreign states and monitored the execution of actions and intervened in the progress of the coup via the coordination and contacts they had established when necessary.” Barkey fled from the country as the coup attempt was unsuccessful, while Kavala was held in Istanbul.
Barkey, in his recent article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Turkey’s Turning Point: What Will Erdoğan Do to Stay in Power,” delineates Erdoğan’s crimes and concludes that to save “himself, his family, his cronies, and many others who have personally benefited from his rule” from the severe repercussion of losing the elections he is “likely to employ almost any means to avoid defeat.”
This shameless and scandalous slander comes at a time when the chorus of his ilk penned similar calumniations. One after another, this inglorious cohort tried to egg the U.S. and EU governments to do something to “prevent” another Erdoğan victory. The idea that Erdoğan himself and his party, as well as the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), are highly unpopular and they are going to lose elections if they are fair-and-square has been repeated so many times in the U.S. and European press that one wonders if they are talking about Türkiye. The government tried to mitigate the dreadful impact of price inflation resulting from long months of pandemic-related shortages, a broken chain of logistics, and the capitalistic greed of manufacturers and resellers to a certain degree. Despite the hardship people felt, there are no mass demonstrations in Türkiye; no paralysis of daily life because of mass strikes, and no one is burning city streets in major towns as in Europe.
Some fabricated fake news in the newspapers and on social media support the six-party opposition alliance! Barkey portrays it as “unexpectedly well-managed and a relatively disciplined front”; but it could not even agree upon a candidate for president yet, and there are only 97 days left until the elections. Barkey’s primary motive seems to be drawing the ire of U.S. President Joe Biden for the forthcoming election disaster that their celebrated six-party alliance will seemingly face. The foundation stone of the coalition had been laid by then-candidate Biden long before the U.S. elections. In his infamous interview with The New York Times Editorial Board on Dec. 16, 2020, a year before the presidential elections, he said a candidate must have many things in mind. Still, Türkiye and its president’s future were such a pressing issue in Biden’s mind that he had to devote a portion of interview time to it. When he won the elections, he said, “We can support those elements of the Turkish leadership that still exist and get more from them and embolden them to be able to take on and defeat Erdoğan.” Why? The first thing Biden mentions is the allegation of Türkiye’s “clamp down its Kurds.” The candidate is “very concerned about it. I’m very concerned about it.” But he is very optimistic: "But I’m still of the view that if we were to engage more directly like I was doing with them, we could support those elements of the Turkish leadership."
He did. In a culture where even two similarly oriented political parties can hardly get together to form an election alliance, as a commendable effort, the six obvious – and one secret – members of the opposition were able to sit down around one desk and work out a document putting together the “common points.” This fact was also voiced by the alliance’s Western-appreciation-hungry member Ali Babacan when he smilingly declared that the Europeans would look at “our document and they will send their kudos.” But one thing that was missing in this excellent document: the primary issue that the architect of their alliance had built their partnership: The self-determination rights of Kurdish people in Türkiye. Biden and the neocons he inherited from Bush: the issue that finally had the U.S. created the Autonomous Kurdish Region in Iraq and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. This is the only matter that Biden helped form “those elements of the Turkish leadership that still exist” and create the alliance so that the U.S. would “get more from them.”
Now, despite the efforts of the U.S. and its new envoy in Ankara, Jeffry Flake, a former U.S. senator from Arizona who single-handedly called EU ambassadors to close down their consulates to business citing alleged security threats, the table of six, acting as if they have not been “embolden” enough, shun away from the significant issue that is the raison d’être of their alliance.
Now, Barkey is portraying a rosy picture that the opposition will win the elections, but Erdoğan will prevent that. In case Erdoğan tries to overthrow an election that is being watched by 85 million Turks and the whole world, Barkey suggests three ways the U.S. should be prepared.
Among his possible moves that Barkey suggests the U.S. should be observing and be prepared to respond to are: “an “accidental” though minor clash with Greece in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions,” “a confrontation with the U.S. in northern Syria" and “a change of the status quo on the Turkish part of Cyprus.”
Well, we heard it from the horse’s mouth. Barkey says it simply and plainly: If he wants it badly enough, Biden can even change the results of an election won justly and honestly by Erdoğan, and nobody can do anything about it.
