Let Turkey Make a Meal of Saddam

Facts and CommentsForbes Magazine, 12 October, 2001While we fight to bring down the Taliban in Afghanistan, we should open a second, infinitely more important front: Iraq. We need not re-create a 1991 Gulf war-like coalition. Instead, after imposing a no-fly zone over all of Iraq, we should award northern Iraq to Turkey, under the condition that the Turks give the area home rule. The north holds most of Iraq's oil. The vast majority of people there are Kurds, an ethnic group distinct from the Arabs, who, though they have no love for the Turks, would much prefer them to the sadistic Saddam, who slaughtered and gassed them by the thousands. After WWI this territory was taken from Turkey and given to Baghdad by the British, with the understanding the Kurds would be granted substantial autonomy, a promise not kept, with murderous results. The Turks, aided by our air power, would make short shrift of any Iraqi armed resistance to their marching into northern Iraq. The advantages of such a move would be momentous. The Turks would use the oil for benign domestic purposes, rather than for acquiring weapons of mass destruction and oppressing the local population. This would be an object lesson to states harboring terrorists: Cross the civilized world, and you will be punished. And bin Laden-like fanatics could hardly accuse the heirs of the Constantinople-conquering Ottoman Empire of being anti-Islamic latter-day Crusaders. Saddam's long-cowed officer corps and intelligence apparatchiks would rise up and destroy him. What enabled Saddam to suppress rebels after his 1991 Kuwait fiasco was our letting him use his helicopters to put down local uprisings. Would the dismemberment of Iraq create a vacuum that would be filled by mullah-oppressed Iran? The Turkish presence in the north would take care of that. In fact, the overthrow of Saddam would encourage anti-ayatollah forces in Iran who have recently staged impressive pro-America demonstrations in various cities and whose liberalizing goals are largely shared by the popularly elected but clerically hogtied President Mohammad Khatami. Democratic, secular Turkey would become an even more potent model for the Arab world.