A Blind Alley

CUMHURIYET- Columnist Orhan Birgit writes about a possible US-led war against Iraq. A summary of his column is as follows:
Perhaps even the US president and the Pentagon don’t know exactly when a war against Iraq will begin, but each step Bush takes on the road to Baghdad shows more and more that he is a ‘lonely man’ walking down ‘Warmongers Boulevard.’
Yesterday at the European Parliament, hundreds of Greens, Communists, Socialists and Social Democrats made clear their feelings, holding ‘No to war’ signs in their hands against ‘Big Brother’s’ hysterical war cries, as if they were demonstrating in an anti-war rally on the streets. The American people as well as Turkey’s ‘irregular prime minister’ must have seen the EU parliamentarians live on television. And we once again witnessed that Recep Tayyip Erdogan had taken the wrong course last year by appealing to President Bush in an attempt to drum up support for Turkey’s EU accession.
The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has begun beefing up its military presence on the Iraqi border, sending additional ammunition and materiel on Wednesday, following Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz’s threat that Iraq would attack any country which allows US soldiers to use their soil as an invasion staging ground. Yet, our ‘prestigious’ media confined themselves to merely citing the threat of an Iraqi attack against Kuwait. How I wish the situation were that simple, but unfortunately it’s not. What will happen when the US completes its military preparations in our country’s airbases and harbors? Not only Kuwait, but the Turkish people as well are under a serious threat of war. The wolf of war is at our door and Turkey is about to turn into a blind alley.

SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION