Turkish yarn
By rejecting a measure yesterday that would have allowed US troops to use the country as a base for attacking Iraq, Turkey's parliamentarians have handed American diplomats and military strategists a seriously unwelcome complication. One immediate outcome is that US troops will not be wearing Turkish-made outfits any time soon.
A staple of Pentagon contracting for decades has been a "Buy American" provision, but as Dan Morgan reported on Thursday in The Washington Post (registration required), part of the reward for letting US troops use the country as a staging point for an attack on Iraq would have included a temporary waiver of the provision to allow the Pentagon to purchase Turkish-made apparel for its forces. Expanding on the background of the proposed deal, Morgan wrote:
"Greater access to the U.S. textile market has long been a top priority for Turkey, which sells nearly $1 billion worth of clothes and textiles in this country each year. A senior Turkish official said here this week that improving the terms of his country's textile trade with the United States was high on Turkey's wish list in negotiations over the stationing of U.S. troops.During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Turkey won textile quota relief valued at around $100 million. With its economy recovering from one of the deepest recessions in decades and public opinion overwhelmingly opposed to a war with Iraq, Turkey is attempting to negotiate concessions that would make the stationing of U.S. troops on its soil more palatable to its people and parliament."
The US textile industry, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past decade, was sharply opposed to the "Buy American" provision waiver so it will be pleased with the result of yesterday's vote, but Turkey's economy will surely suffer. So too will campaign momentum and morale. And permitting more imports of clothing from Turkey would have been one of the more acceptable arrangements of this regime-change push — certainly more honourable than tolerating Russian savagery in Chechnya, ignoring Chinese colonialism in Xinjiang and consorting with Saudi mediaevalists.
