What If Turkey Agrees?

So, what will happen if Turkey eventually strikes a deal with the United States to let it use Turkish bases? Once war starts, this deal could mean disaster for everyone involved.

Turkish bases are key to U.S. war plans, which rely on a two-front concept to split Saddam Hussein's troops. After a massive aerial bombing campaign, the bulk of the U.S. army will invade from the south via Kuwait, while about 20,000 U.S. troops will invade northern Iraq from Turkey.

It's what the U.S. wants to trade for those Turkish bases that could lead to disaster in Iraq. While the U.S. media has focused exclusively on billions in U.S. aid money promised for Turkey -- $6 billion in grants and $20 billion in loan guarantees, at last count -- there are two other conditions that Turkey is insisting on that the U.S. seems likely to grant.

First, Turkey wants oil concessions in Northern Iraq. The Bush administration likes to pretend that this war is not about oil, but when it comes to negotiating with the one country, other than Kuwait, that the U.S. absolutely needs to have on board to make this war work, then oil is definitely part of the deal. And so is territory.

Two cities in the north of Iraq were, not so long ago, a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire: Kirkuk and Mosul. Turkey has long coveted these cities and most of northern Iraq. There's just one problem: The majority population in northern Iraq is Kurdish.

This presents a terrible dilemma: Turkey wants northern Iraq, but the Kurds also want northern Iraq as an autonomous republic, a Kurdish homeland. Turkey has spent the past decade fighting a guerrilla war against its own ethnic Kurdish population, exterminating whole villages and killing thousands of civilians in the process. If you were to ask a Kurd who is responsible for killing more of his compatriots -- Saddam Hussein or the Turkish military -- he'd be hard-pressed to give you a definitive answer.

The Kurds are a force to reckon with. Estimates of armed Kurdish militia men range from 70,000 to 130,000. Once the fighting starts, one of their goals will be to get control of key oil fields and maintain that control against all comers -- not just Saddam Hussein's forces, but also Turkish troops. Whoever controls the oil wells, controls northern Iraq. Although leading Iraqi Kurds currently disavow any plans to establish a Kurdish republic, the Kurdish militias are not united on this point. Indeed Kurdish groups represent a variety of political and religious leanings, from nationalist groups to fundamentalist muslim groups to Marxist ideology, and they occasionally fight each other over territory. During and after any war in Iraq, these groups will certainly work out their differences with bloodshed; but the invasion of a Turkish military might unite them against a common enemy.

The second condition that Turkey wants is for its army in northern Iraq to remain under its own control, and not the control of the U.S. command. Turkey has some troops in northern Iraq right now, and has occupied portions of northern Iraq since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. But once the fighting starts, Turkey is expected to send in a much bigger force, ostensibly (and ironically) to help the U.S. army deal with the large Kurdish refugee population that this "low-impact" war will create.

Kurds are deeply mistrustful of a military that has slaughtered so many Kurds in eastern Turkey. Kurdish militias have already warned that a Turkish invasion of Iraq will be met with force. Said Hoshiyar Zebari, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish groups in Iraq: "No one wants another fight, of course. But if there's a forced incursion, done under the pretext of 'I'm going to give you forced aid,' then believe me there will be uncontrolled clashes."