No Way To Treat An Ally

By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, October 10 1996; Page A21 The Washington Post

For nearly 50 years, the United States promoted stability in Turkey as an overriding American foreign policy goal. The Truman Doctrine, which set America's containment strategy in the Cold War, was forged out of concern over turmoil in Turkey and Greece.

No more. Today stability is the last thing the Clinton administration wants for Turkey's government. Official Washington eagerly waits for Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan's coalition regime to crash and burn. A looming economic crisis for Turkey now raises hopes in Washington that the Islamic fundamentalists will soon fall.

The reasons for the administration's quick turnaround on Turkey are not hard to understand and applaud. Erbakan has been in Libya this week, breaking U.N. sanctions on travel to that rogue nation and signing a trade pact with Col. Moammar Gadhafi. In August, Erbakan with great fanfare visited Iran, also on the State Department's list.

Erbakan -- who also says that no one in his government has a quarrel with Iraq's Saddam Hussein -- would realign Turkey with America's enemies abroad. He seeks ideological and financial support from them to entrench his Islam-based Welfare Party and counter the Western orientation of Turkey's powerful military and its weak secular parties.

But the unspoken Clinton policy of waiting for Erbakan to self-destruct is a policy of last resort. It is an indictment of the administration's mishandling of an important ally in a region that will demand priority attention from the winner of November's presidential election.

Bob Dole struck a glancing blow at Clinton's failing policy on the Central Asian-Middle East crossroads by noting in Sunday's debate that Saddam Hussein is better off today than he was four years ago. But Dole failed to follow up and point out that neighboring Turkey is an American ally that is in measurably worse shape than it was in 1992.

That is largely because of choices the Turks themselves have made. Erbakan's party won 21 percent of the vote in March and formed a coalition government in June. Years of human rights abuses against the population at large and a vengeful military campaign against the Kurds of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq had already undermined the economy and the authority of the Ankara government.

But an inconsistent, at times neglectful, U.S. approach has contributed to Turkey's suddenly becoming a factor of instability in the region. Turkey has been treated to a feast of overblown U.S. rhetorical support that reinforced Ankara's sense of self-importance, and a famine of material and political aid for its mounting problems. The U.S. approach has combined the worst of this administration's tendency to overpromise, cease to pay attention and then walk away from tough problems.

Only two years ago senior U.S. officials characterized Turkey as the world's new "front-line state." Its position bordering on the conflicts of the Balkans, Central Asia and the Middle East made it the post-Cold War equivalent of West Germany in American foreign policy, the State Department's senior officials said.

As a matter of policy, the United States refused to criticize the Turks for hammering the Kurds. Treasury Department officials who sought to impress on Ankara the risks of its highly inflationary, deficit-producing stop-and-go economic policies were shushed with reminders from the State and Defense departments of Turkey's strategic importance.

But Washington failed to follow through with meaningful acts. The Turks complained bitterly that they had to sacrifice $27 billion over five years because of economic sanctions against Iraq without receiving compensation. Ankara's requests to buy 10 Cobra helicopter gunships and three antiquated frigates from Washington have been held up in Congress by pressures from the Greek lobby and human rights organizations. The vacuum that U.S. policy created in northern Iraq allowed Kurdish guerrillas to operate against Turkey. U.S. economic aid sank in five years from $120 million a year to a quarter that level.

Performance failed to match promises. Turkey came to understand that beyond the Cold War there were no front-line states. When Saddam retook control of the Kurdish homeland in northern Iraq last month, Erbakan, the Turkish military and Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller knew they had little to gain, or to lose, from Washington. So they refused to oppose in word or deed Saddam's defiance of America.

Washington is probably right: Erbakan will dig his own grave. In Libya, Gadhafi publicly criticized the Turks for their inhumane Kurdish policy (more than Bill Clinton has ever said on the subject) and provoked a furor in Turkey. But this is policy and leadership by default and an invitation to even greater trouble ahead.