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Behind the Tensions in Israeli-Turkish Relations

[Middle East Strategy at Harvard] Michael Reynolds - In the post-9/11 shift in U.S. policy under George Bush from support of the status quo in the Middle East to revision of it through the toppling of multiple regimes, not a few Turks, including those in think tanks and the military, believed that the ultimate target of Operation Iraqi Freedom was not Middle Eastern despotism but the Turkish Republic. In the name of democracy, it was thought that the U.S. would detach Turkey's eastern provinces to form a Kurdish state. The belief that outside forces are steadily and consciously working to undermine Turkey and divide it is almost hard-wired in Turkish institutions. Suspicion also fell upon Israel, primarily because it was the country in the region closest to the U.S., but also because it was known to have cultivated ties to the Kurds of Iraq in the past. The writer, an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, is currently a visiting scholar at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard.
2009-02-04 06:00:00
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