Relations among Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan-Iraq, the Wider Middle East, and Iran

In this essay, I address cooperative economic, trade, and political relations among Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan-Iraq, the Wider Middle East, and Iran, some of which were imposed and expedited by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003. I also address the relations in the broader context of the US-initiated and European-supported Wider Middle East Initiative (WMEI). The WMEI is interpreted here as a policy to support privatization and capital markets in the Middle East, and not just as a fund-raising instrument to support democratization.¹

In my view, it is essential to consider Turkey's relations with Iraq, Kurdistan-Iraq, and Iran within the context of the objectives of the WMEI, especially with respect to Turkey's relations with the United States, Israel, the American Jewish community, Jordan, the Palestinians and the Arab Gulf countries (the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf area).²

As a theoretical construct to support my arguments, I use Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Raymond Hinnebusch's "middle level powers" and omnibalancing theories.³ I argue that international relations theories dealing with middle-level powers implementing omnibalancing, especially non-European powers, are not usually equipped to deal with authoritarian, hegemonicly driven countries. The United States is a prime example of such a country, bent on the domination of a vital region of the world whose control and occupation of resources it seeks to use to project its geopolitical and geostrategic power in order to dissuade any other power or combination of powers from challenging its global hegemony. This is especially true since many of the international relations theories from realism to constructivism have been conceived and propagated by Americans who were unable to think or conceptualize that their own country would break the boundaries of even what they describe as a superpower. American international relations theorists were simply unable to conceive that the United States would pursue policies akin to those of authoritarian states of early twentieth-century Europe. Their theories of hegemony somehow conceptualized that American hegemony would be democratic or "soft."⁴ They could not think in such a manner, and I knowingly use the word could and not did, because I think and argue that it was culturally impossible for them to conceive of an authoritarian America. In this study I argue that the leadership of other countries, in this case Turkey, could perceive of an authoritarian America, unwillingly to be sure, but believing in realpolitik, it adapted their policies accordingly.

Omnibalancing postulates that Third World countries reproduce, rather than provide havens from, the anarchy of international politics, i.e., Third World politics are a microcosm of international politics.⁵ Balancing is as critical for groups within states as it is between states. Unlike balance-of-power theories, omnibalancing suggests that Third World states construct their alignments on their perceptions of how to best protect themselves from threats they face, whether internal or external.⁶ Omnibalancing is relevant to this study in another sense; it can also be construed to include three international relations theories—the rational actor, the irrational actor, and the capital accumulator—in that they represent three implicit survival requisites that potentially shape policy: geopolitically shaped national interests and external threats, domestic politics and internal ideological legitimization needs, and economic needs. Ehteshami and Hinnebusch state, "In a given regime and at any given time, threats to one or the other may be dominant in decision-makers' calculations, although in the long run if any are neglected, regime stability is put to risk. The notion of omnibalancing could also be extended by taking rationality [of the neorealist school] to mean attending not only to security threats [both internal and external] but also to capital accumulation and rent acquisition requisites. Since these various requisites of state formation may conflict in any given situation, and no policy is therefore likely to appear fully rational from all points of view, the highest rationality may be the ability to make a reasonable series of trade-offs."⁷ In the remainder of this text, I make the argument that this...