After the rapid collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan was achieved with minimal allied losses, senior officials are concerned that President George W Bush should prepare the public for what one called “the very real possibility that [Iraq] will not look like Afghanistan”. Afghanistan was nothing. This will be very bad. It’s unfortunate we have leaders who are foolish and egomaniacal.
But the most urgent problem facing the US in its push to war is Turkey, traditionally a staunch Nato partner. The Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, indicated yesterday there was little sign of the impasse being resolved quickly, saying there were no plans for a parliamentary vote this week on allowing US troops on Turkish soil.
Failure by Turkey to open its bases to American troops would mean that US transport ships carrying thousands of servicemen and essential equipment would have to be re-routed to the Gulf or elsewhere. Any diversionary attack against Baghdad from the north may then have to be scaled back dramatically. The block on US servicemen might also leave the Kurds vulnerable to an Iraqi counter-attack.
Still, an administration official said other issues were in contention in negotiating with the Turks — namely, the future of the Turkish military presence in northern Iraq and the Turkish desire for some oil concession at Kirkuk in Iraq.
“The Turks want to control the operation at Kirkuk, at a minimum through a pipeline,” the official said. “That’s in a way a better deal for them than American aid.”
But Mr. Bush and his aides have often said Iraq’s oil is for the benefit of the Iraqi people, and they realize that any discussion of guaranteeing access to the oil to Turkey — or any other nation — would make it appear that the war is about oil rights, not weapons of mass destruction. This is too funny.
There is though one major obstacle to this happening: oil. Oil is not just by far the most important commodity traded internationally, it is the lifeblood of all modern industrialised economies. If you don’t have oil, you have to buy it. And if you want to buy oil on the international markets, you usually have to have dollars. Until recently all OPEC countries agreed to sell their oil for dollars only. So long as this remained the case, the euro was unlikely to become the major reserve currency: there is not a lot of point in stockpiling euros if every time you need to buy oil you have to change them into dollars. This arrangement also meant that the US effectively part-controlled the entire world oil market: you could only buy oil if you had dollars, and only one country had the right to print dollars – the US.