There is a persistent air of slow-motion surrealism as Turks contemplate what is about to happen in Iraq. On television news, American convoys trundle east and men in orange suits are preparing the population for chemical warfare — Ankara is, after all, within range of missiles fired from Iraq. These preparations mingle strangely with the snow clearing and the blizzard reports; the war crisis is somehow muffled. There are endless discussion programmes, as prominent journalists and well-informed retired generals discuss it, but it is all very slow-motion.

For the past week the newspapers have been full of comment about what the Americans should pay, and there has been some unseemly haggling: Americans banging on the table, Turks prevaricating. There is always a possibility that Turkey might take the oil-rich areas of Mosul and Kirkuk. These — the population there is Turkoman, once nomadic cousins of the Turks — were claimed by republican Turkey in 1923, and only a decision by international courts, rigged by the British, prevented the claim from being realised (even now the wilder sort of Turkish politician says that the British must not get in on that area again). In default, then money — the latest figure approaching $30 billion.

The Turks’ demand for compensation is, in fact, fair enough. Their tourism may entirely disappear and the auguries otherwise are not good. In 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War, the then chief figure in Turkish politics, the hugely influential Turgut Ozal, did more or less whatever the US wanted. It was not a great success, because the problem of Iraq was not solved at all. Instead, Turkey had an inflow of Kurdish refugees that she could barely handle, and cross-border trade declined so far as to impoverish large areas of the Anatolian east. The Black Sea port of Trabzon used to do well out of trade with the northern Middle East. It, and the Black Sea coast generally, now has the second lowest GDP per capita in the country.

Turks put a figure of $30 billion on their losses since 1991, but the political losses have also been severe. South-eastern Turkey, on the Iraqi border, has a largely Kurdish population, often sunk in traditional tribal ways, with polygamy and a vast demographic problem. Uncertainties on the border have put a stop to organised trade. Worse, they have encouraged smuggling, not least of drugs and people, with the effects that Britain has seen at Sangatte.

Almost no Turk wants a war: the attitude is much the same as that of the Italian who said in 1942: “If England wins, we lose; if Germany wins, we are lost.” Saddam does at least contain problems that Turks would rather not face, and in any case the alternatives may not be any better.

Then there is the Kurdish problem. The Americans want to establish a “Kurdish entity”. But the Kurds of northern Iraq have cousins over the Turkish border, and since Ottoman times the whole region has been very difficult to control. It is not, Turks say, as if one could straightforwardly talk of “Kurdistan”, whatever the Americans believe. The Kurds are divided along tribal lines and there are other deep divisions, of religion, in that many are not Sunni at all, but Turkish-Alevi, so heretical as almost not to count as Muslims.

There is also no single Kurdish language. Abroad, efforts are being made to standardise “Kurdish”, but on the ground they make no sense because there are at least seven strikingly different variants. In Iraq an Arabic alphabet is used, in Turkey a Latin one. It is sometimes claimed that Turkey bans Kurdish publications, but this has not been true for years. In fact, people do not buy them. The PKK, the communist guerrilla movement with which Turkey has had to contend all these years, itself used Turkish and announced that Turkish would be the official language of “Kurdistan”.

If Iraq breaks up, will Turkey then face some sort of Kurdish entity — either dirt-poor, in the manner of Somalia, or, if it gets Kirkuk and Mosul, oil rich and able to threaten all its neighbours as Saddam did? Not an easy question for the Turks, who tend to say that the best thing for Kurds is to do as so many millions have done and migrate to central and western Anatolia, there to intermarry and assimilate.

However, Turkey is not used to saying “no” to the Americans. In principle, Turks know that they owe a great deal to the US, and there is even excessive imitation of its ways (in the private universities, set up on American models, the imitation is often very successful, but perhaps we can draw the line at “the feminist theory of international relations”). After the country’s first democratic election, more than 50 years ago, a government respectful of religion came to office. Its leader took Turkey into the Korean War and Nato, exclaiming that whatever America does is right by us.

A landslide brought a government of similar attitudes to office a few months ago. It has been a godsend for the US, which is only too glad to see a democratic Muslim state, helpful to it in its dealings with the difficult Europeans. High-level Americans have been back and forth to Ankara again and again, asking it in effect to repeat Turkey’s behaviour over Korea. At that time, after all, Turkey put herself again on the world map. This earned her a great deal of support, in US aid and in membership of international bodies such as the OECD that were reserved to the respectable.

Why, say the Americans, not do a Korea over Iraq? But Korea was not next door, and it did not open up various exceedingly difficult historical questions that the westernising Turks would be very glad indeed to forget. It is a time of slow-motion apprehension, and, whatever happens, the answers for Turkey are neither simple nor welcome.

The author is Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara

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