The Boston Globe February 13, 2003
NATO impasse seen slowing a US attack from Turkey
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent
WASHINGTON -- NATO's continued refusal to approve Turkey's request for military aid in preparation for a possible US-led war against Iraq could complicate American war plans, which call for immediately opening a northern front from Turkish territory for air and ground assaults deep inside Iraq, according to US and European military officials and analysts.
Alliance members France, Germany, and Belgium continued yesterday to block Turkey's request for NATO to begin readying early warning planes, Patriot antimissile batteries, and chemical and biologial protection units.
They said that at this stage such planning would effectively endorse a US war to topple Saddam Hussein. Several European nations remain opposed to such a war, and military action has not been approved by the United Nations Security Council.
After a third day of meetings in Brussels, US negotiators proposed a compromise that would focus solely on NATO assistance to defend Turkey and drop secondary requests, such as dispatching alliance troops to increase security at American military bases across Europe and possibly to replace US peacekeepers in the Balkans in the event they were needed in the Gulf. But the proposal failed to break the impasse.
''We entered a new phase of the discussions,'' Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO, said yesterday. ''It may take some time to get to the end.''
The NATO deadlock is one of the most serious crises in the 53-year history of the alliance. It calls into question the durability of the NATO charter, which states that any of the 19 members can request immediate assistance from allies if it considers itself under threat.
Officials said that eventually Turkey will probably get most, if not all of what it is asking for, if not through NATO, then from individual alliance members, including the United States.
But the NATO rift presents an obstacle for US war planning, which calls for Turkey to be a critical jumping off point for operations in Iraq. Any delay in beefing up Turkish defenses would affect the US timetable for starting the war, the officials said.
''Whether it slows us down or not, it changes the plan,'' said a military official at the US European Command in Germany, which is responsible for the geographic region that includes Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member, and is overseeing the flow of forces and equipment into the country. The official agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
Some of the military items requested by Turkey -- such as Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, planes and some chemical defense capabilities -- are considered NATO assets and are under the control of the alliance's senior decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council. NATO's AWACS fleet was dispatched to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to help monitor the skies over North America.
Other equipment, however, can be transfered from individual members of the alliance without a NATO agreement. The Netherlands has pledged Patriot missile defense systems.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that Turkey would be defended in the event of war. ''What we have to do for the United States is make sure that the planning does go forward, preferably within NATO, but if not, bilaterally,'' he said.
But doing so could come at the expense of other military priorities, as the United States readies an invasion force of as many 150,000 troops and hundreds of combat planes around Iraq.
''The Amercians can help, as well, but they must be running out of Patriots by now,'' said a NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
And such preparations take time, the NATO official added. ''It can't happen overnight. There are many individual pieces, and you have to integrate them.''
Some officials estimated that the defensive package being proposed for Turkey could take as long as 30 days to put in place.
Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Turkey will be critical in military terms, defense analysts said. It is expected to be the scene of a separate front in any US invasion of Iraq. In the first Gulf War, US and allied forces concentrated in and near southern Iraq, adjacent to occupied Kuwait and neighboring Saudi Arabia.
The United States already has a small but unknown number of special forces troops in northern Iraq, moved there from Turkey, and is said to be planning to move thousands of airborne troops to Iraq from Turkey, which is also home to Incirlik Air Base, which US and British planes have used to monitor Iraq's northern no-fly zone.
In addition, US military planners are counting on thousands of Turkish troops to follow them into northern Iraq to help stabilize the heavily Kurdish region, which Ankara fears could seek to create an independent state in cooperation with Kurdish rebels opposed to government rule in Turkey's minority Kurdish regions.
Yesterday, Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq urged Kurdish youths in Turkey to join guerrilla forces. The guerrillas fear that Ankara will use a US-war on Iraq to squelch Kurdish aspirations for an independent country.
Analysts insisted that the American war plan is highly dependent on Iraq's northern neighbor. ''Turkey will be playing an extremely important role, in that it will be a staging ground for airborne units to capture air fields in northern and western Iraq,'' said Patrick Garrett of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va.
Garrett's recent analysis indicates that elements of the 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions may be deployed to Turkey in the coming weeks, from which they could attack targets such as an airfield in western Iraq known as the ''H3,'' where Saddam Hussein is suspected of having missile garrisons that could threaten neighboring countries with Scud missiles and other weapons.
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
