BY YILMAZ OZTUNA
TURKIYE- Columnist Yilmaz Oztuna recommends changes in Turkey’s foreign policy. A summary of his column is as follows:
Violence and brute force have once again reared their ugly heads in the Middle East. Moreover, the Balkans, the Caucasus and northern Africa have also emerged as regions where enemy forces shed blood and engage in barbarism. Britain, France, Russia and others once boasted that they would administer those regions better than the Ottomans did, but they only managed to hang on for a few decades.
Today the US has the same claim, and it seems it will have the same end. The Jewish-Palestinian conflict has again flared up in the worst way possible, and there’s a Turkmen-Kurdish war brewing in Iraq. Because of a half-dozen national issues, Turkey is very interested in developments in Iraq, on which these developments are centered. In Siirt, the PKK terrorist group has again shed Turkish soldiers’ blood. Ankara’s timid foreign policy has put us into this fix and caused us no end of problems. We’ve gotten so used to inaction that now the notion of an active foreign policy gives us nightmares and makes us shudder.
We should be in Iraq not just symbolically, but as a unified force, and act as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t wait for developments to occur, because events follow each other and this is how history happens. We need to find our proper role in these developments as soon as possible.
As this is an extraordinary situation, it’s natural that the National Security Council (NSC) will reconvene in two months. This was decided to help Iraq’s reconstruction. We should make a decision at once.