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By ANDREW FINKEL:



It is a brave or possibly simply vain commentator that is prepared to add even one more word to the zillions already published on today's American presidential election.

And it is the better part of valor that stops a morning paper published in İstanbul from congratulating the victor before the East Coast of the United States has even woken up to vote. At this eleventh hour, many of us are suffering from a phenomenon called "liberal twitchiness," and it is this that prevents us from taking for granted the conclusion of every opinion poll published every day for the last month that has predicted that Barack Obama will succeed in reclaiming the White House for the Democratic Party with room to spare.

There would be even less doubt about the outcome if the job of electing a US president was entrusted not just to the Turkish electorate or virtually any other country with the exception (according to a recent edition of The Economist) of Iraq, Algeria and the Congo. After eight years of George Bush, even the penguins of Antarctica are hanging their chads for the Democratic Party. Yet, curiously, there is a conventional wisdom that the outcome of the poll will make relatively little difference to Ankara's relationship with Washington. That argument runs that all US administrations get the same advice on Turkey's regional importance and that, therefore, any radical shifts are unlikely.

It is in any US administration's interests to see Turkey succeed with its application to the European Union; who in Washington will complain if Turkey assumes an elder statesman's voice in pushing for peace and common sense in a whole slew of regional issues from Palestine to Tehran's nuclear program Nagorno-Karabakh? That leaves the possibility that Congress might recognize a genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman territories in 1915, a tightrope that any US president has to walk. It is an issue no less tractable a concern for being "asymmetric," a fringe issue in the US that matters hugely to large numbers of Turks. Any American president, and any Turkish president for that matter, will see the valve to this particular pressure cooker in an improvement in relations between Ankara and Yerevan, as well as in a freer intellectual climate in Turkey itself. But that still leaves the question of Iraq.

The Bush presidency was a lesson, if one were needed, that the choices made by the American electorate reverberate round the globe. The decision to take down Saddam Hussein had huge implications for the region -- some of them intentional, but many of them not. Turkey's decision not to lend logistic support for the 2003 invasion transformed its whole relationship with Washington and, by extension, began what I believe will be recognized as a major transformation of the role of the Turkish military in Ankara itself. At the same time, the misery that followed the immediate aftermath of the American occupation of Iraq and the methods used to combat an insurgency has lent grim irony to the whole post-Soviet conversation on human rights. Turkey, too, began to harbor a grudge against the armed US presence on the other side of its border. It saw the US presence in northern Iraq was fortifying the de facto independence of the Kurdish administration that, in its turn, was giving succor to anti-Turkish Kurdish separatists. That bitterness has begun to recede in recent months now that Washington has agreed to share real-time intelligence of possible frontier infringements and to license Turkish troops to conduct cross-border operations of their own. The current debate in Turkey is not whether America somehow colluded in the recent lethal Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attacks on frontier posts, but why the Turkish military, with aerial photos in hand, refused to see them coming.

A new American president will bring a different timetable for disengagement from Iraq. This, in turn, will concentrate minds on the need to find a long-term basis for security on the Turkish border. Ankara's recent overtures to Massoud Barzani are presumably one sign that Ankara has already taken this on board. However, I do believe that an Obama presidency will present Turkey not just with challenges, but with opportunities. However, liberal twitcher that I am, let's wait until the votes are tallied before embarking on that.


todayszaman

04 November 2008

November 4, 2008 | 8:50 AM Comments  0 comments

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