[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 74 (Monday, May 19, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H4208-H4210]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CALLING FOR THE RESIGNATION OF PAUL WOLFOWITZ
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) is
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I was appalled 2 weeks ago
to read that Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key
policymakers in this administration, had publicly criticized, for
Turkish consumption, the Turkish military for abiding by democracy. In
an interview, which I will put into the Record, with CNN Turk, Deputy
Secretary Wolfowitz repeatedly criticized the Turkish military because
it had allowed democracy to function in Turkey. And he ought to resign.
We have much too much at stake in our effort to bring stable democracy
to the world in general, and particularly the Middle East, to allow a
man to stay in that high office who has allowed himself to say that the
military did too little, was not strong enough in pressing a
democratically elected government. Indeed, it is especially disturbing
to have that said with regard to the government of Turkey.
Trying to encourage Islamist movements that are genuinely democratic
is one of our highest goals. The clash that some have argued exists
between Islamic fundamentalism and democracy is a terrible threat to
the world. We have in Turkey now a government that has Islamist groups,
the political majority, and is also committed to democracy. And that
parliament made a decision, not the government but the parliament, that
we did not like. It failed to get a sufficient majority to join us in
the war effort.
And here is what Paul Wolfowitz has to say: `` . . . many of the
institutions in Turkey that we think of as the traditional strong
support is the alliance were not as forceful in leading in that
direction.''
Question: ``Which traditional alliance are you talking about?''
`` . . . I think particularly the military.'' This is Mr. Wolfowitz:
``I think for whatever reason they did not play the strong leadership
role on that issue that we would have expected.'' And the questioners
were somewhat puzzled. Here is a high American official. We have said
we are going to war in Iraq in part to bring about democracy, and he is
criticizing a military in Turkey because it had not strongly tried to
influence the elected officials? So they say what kind of a role the
military might have because after all the military is not in
parliament. And another interviewer says: ``And they have been
criticized by getting involved in politics.''
Mr. Wolfowitz seems to realize he said something that he should not
have, but he cannot help himself. His contempt for the democratic
process, if it comes out with results he does not like, was too strong.
His partisanship on this issue was too strong. So here is what Mr.
Wolfowitz says: ``I'm not suggesting you get involved in politics at
all. I mean, I think, all I'm saying is that when you had an issue of
Turkey's national interest . . . I think it's perfectly appropriate,
especially in your system,'' my emphasis, ``for the military to say it
was in Turkey's interest to support the United States in that effort.''
The interviewer says: ``Didn't they say that?''
Mr. Wolfowitz's response: ``I don't know. My impression is they
didn't say it with the kind of strength that would have made a
difference.''
In other words, they did not muscle the government. They did not use
armed force, the threat of armed force, as unfortunately the Turkish
military has in the past, to force the Turkish Parliament to take an
action which we wanted them to take.
Mr. Wolfowitz is the Deputy Secretary of Defense. As David Greenway
pointed out in the Boston Globe last week, ``The Turks are perfectly
aware of the Pentagon's creeping takeover of U.S. foreign policy. There
will be some who consider Wolfowitz's remarks as encouragement to boot
out Erdogan,'' the Turkish prime minister.
Let me stress again how important it is for the experiment we are
seeing in Turkey to succeed, a democratic Islamist government, and they
had a tough issue that we dropped in their laps; and the parliament
voted and the government tried and could not get a majority. And the
Deputy Secretary of Defense says the military was not strong enough,
the military did not intervene forcefully enough the way that they
traditionally have? This is appalling to have such a high-ranking
American official say this, and we have already got problems in post-
war Iraq.
The administration's policy is a shambles there. Mr. Wolfowitz can
take some of the responsibility for that. He is one of those who
scoffed when Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said we are going to need
several hundred thousand troops, and now of course we are being told
150,000 troops is not enough. But we have this terrible problem in Iraq
clearly now since there have not been found the kinds of weapons that
the administration said there would be, certainly not in the quantity
they predicted.
The justification for Iraq is the impact it will have on governments
in Iraq and in the rest of the Middle East. How does it help to have
our Deputy Secretary of Defense, one of the shapers of that policy, now
say, by the way, when we say democracy, we mean a democracy where the
military intervenes strongly, not just gives its viewpoint but
intervenes strongly to make sure things come out? Things in Iraq and
our credibility are in enough trouble without Paul Wolfowitz
compounding it, and he ought to resign.
[From the Boston Globe, May 16, 2003]
Democracy, Neocon Style
(By H.D.S. Greenway)
Neoconservatives, who have risen to great power and
influence within the Bush administration, have told us of
their sweeping design to transform the Middle East into a
model of democracy. Skeptics have demurred, but the neocons
have countered that the doubters lack vision. There have been
recent events, however, that bring into question the
sincerity of these grand visionaries.
Take, for example, the recent remarks of Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the most influential of
the right-wing conservatives in government. Although the
State Department got most of the blame for the diplomatic
debacle over Turkey's failure to allow US troops to transit
en route to Iraq, it was Wolfowitz who conducted much of the
negotiations.
As it was, Turkey's new, democratically elected Parliament
said no, much to Washington's chagrin and to the
embarrassment of the Turkish government, which had urged a
``yes'' vote. Turkey was not the first government in a
democratic state to be rebuffed by legislators. It happens in
the United States all the time.
But last week, in an interview with CNN, Wolfowitz lashed
out at the Turkish military for the failure to fall into
line. ``I think for whatever reason, they did not play the
strong leadership role that we would have expected,'' he
said.
Consider the ramifications of this statement in the Turkish
context. Democracy in Turkey is alive but fragile. Open
elections began only in the 1950s. Traditionally the Turkish
military has seen itself as the guardian of the secular state
that Kemal Ataturk put into place following the end of the
Ottoman Empire after World War I.
The Turkish generals have made it a habit to step in from
time to time to dismiss governments they do not like,
returning rule to
[[Page H4209]]
civilians only when it suits them. The last time this
happened was in the late 1990s, when Prime Minister Necmettin
Erbakan was chucked out of power by the military for being
too anti-Western and too Islamic.
Islam is a growing force in Turkey, especially among the
rural poor now flooding into cities. Turkey's armed forces
and the elites are determined to keep the country secular.
Recent Turkish elections swept all the establishment parties
away and brought to power a new Parliament with a decided
Islamic bent. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former
mayor of Istanbul, was at first banned from becoming prime
minister because of a nationalistic poem with Islamic imagery
that he had once read aloud.
But Erdogan and his party had gone out of their way to be
pro-West and moderate, and the military kept to its barracks.
Eventually, Erdogan was allowed to assume the prime ministry,
which he deserved, but not before he had been received by
President Bush in the White House.
Bush rightly decided that, far from being a threat
Erdogan's clean government ticket could serve as an example
of how a Middle Eastern government could be Islamic,
democratic, moderate, and pro-Western all at the same time.
Erdogan and his government wanted to allow US troops to use
Turkish soil to attack Iraq, and not just because of the huge
bribe the United States had offered. But the government
couldn't persuade enough legislators. Many Turks felt the
Parliament had made a mistake, that Turkish interests had
been hurt, but the Parliament didn't agree, and that was
that. End of story; or so it should have been.
One might have thought that anyone interested in true
democracy would have been impressed and delighted. Here was
Parliament defying the government, and the military didn't
intervene. An American foreign policy goal is to get the
European Union to accept Turkey. One of the EU's legitimate
complaints is that the EU is a grouping of democracies and
that the banana republic-like actions of the Turkish military
over the years indicate that Turkey's democracy is only a
sometime thing. But this time around, the Turkish military
was not interfering.
Then up steps Paul Wolfowitz, saying that the Turkish
military had not played ``the strong leadership role that we
would have expected.'' Does that mean that, in Wolfowitz's
view, there should have been a military coup? Or that the
Turkish generals should have threatened the Parliament? In
the Turkish context there is every reason to interpret the
deputy secretary of defense's remarks in that way.
The Turks are perfectly aware of the Pentagon's creeping
takeover of US foreign policy. There will be some who
consider Wolfowitz's remarks as encouragement to boot out
Erdogan as they did Erbakan. Americans have a right to ask:
Do the neocons really want democracy, or do they simply want
to bully the Middle East into a semblance of democracy that
will toe the American line and further neoconservative
imperial fantasies?
____
May 6, 2003.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz Interview With CNN Turk
(Interview Cengiz Candar and M. Ali Birand of CNN Turk)
On the web: http://dod.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030506-
depsecdef0156.html
CNN Turk. Welcome Mr. Secretary with Cengiz it's been a bit
tight you can imagine to come over to Washington you know to
see for 36 hours so if jetlag I think we can manage that but
thank you for giving your time.
Wolfowitz. Thank you to have the two distinguished
journalists like you here it's a great privilege for us.
CNN Turk. That's great but let me fire the first shot.
We've had, we know how keen you are around Turkish American
relations. We've had a wonderful relationship starting Korea
and the Cold War, Afghanistan whatever you name it. But
something went wrong, dreadfully went wrong. We started with
strategic alliance with strategic relationship. Strategy is
gone the relationship I don't know how it's going, and in the
meantime we are having two different versions, one version
from Pentagon and one version from State department, but yeah
we've had a bit of trouble but it's no problem. We want to
have your view on those relations. Where are we standing? Is
it the crisis or what happened?
Wolfowitz. I think we had a big disappointment. But it
remains the case that this has been a strong alliance over
many years. I think it will continue to be a strong alliance
and it remains the case that Turkey is a very important
country in this era because it's a country with a Muslim
majority that has a strong democratic tradition and I think
it remains the case that Turkey can be an important model for
that part of the world that we are trying to move in a more
positive direction. But I don't think if we want to sustain
this strong alliance and indeed strengthen it in the future
then we ought to understand what went wrong, we ought to
understand the nature of that disappointment and some of it
has to do with, if you like, the U.S.-Turkish bilateral piece
of it. But I think it's more helpful to think of the
disappointment in terms of the failure to understand what was
going on in Iraq. From a U.S. Turkish point of view there is
good news and bad news. The good news is that a majority of
the parliament did vote to support us in the things that we
asked for. The bad news is that because of the procedural
issues that wasn't a big enough majority to get it done and
that many of the institutions in Turkey that we think of as
the traditional strong support is the alliance were not as
forceful in leading in that direction.
CNN Turk. Which traditional alliance are you talking about?
Wolfowitz. Well I think you know which ones I mean but I
think particularly the military. I think for whatever reason
they did not play the strong leadership role on that issue
that we would have expected.
But I think the bigger disappointment has to do with the
general failure of the Turkish public reflected also in the
government, about what the stakes were in Iraq and that here
you have a neighbor with an overwhelmingly Muslim population
where the people were suffering under the worst dictators in
the world. And one would have thought that Muslim solidarity
would have led people to say let's help the Americans
liberate these people and that isn't what happened.
Okay, that's past. We are now in the present and future.
The present and future is there's a spectacular opportunity
in Iraq to help these newly liberated people achieve their
real potential and I think that's what we need to work on
together, Turkey and United States and I think what Turkey
needs to do is look into its democratic soul and say, yes we
believe in democracy, we believe in democracy for Muslims and
Arabs. There's an opportunity now, whatever happened in the
last few months, there's an opportunity now to work with the
Americans to build that in Iraq. Let's seize that opportunity
and do everything we can as Turks to support it.
CNN Turk. But if you make a prognosis of what went wrong
earlier, since you mentioned for example the military the
traditional institution which had strong connections to the
United States did not play a leadership role, so for the
future to repair the relationship and bring it back to its
original level that means that you have to need a leadership
role to be played by those who haven't played it. What kind
of a role the military might have because after all the
military is not working in Turkey's parliament political
parties (inaudible)?
CNN Turk. And they have been criticized by getting involved
in politics.
Wolfowitz: I'm not suggesting you get involved in politics
at all. I mean, I think, all I'm saying is that when you had
a issue of Turkey's national interest and national strategy I
think it's perfectly appropriate, especially in your system,
for the military to say it was in Turkey's interest to
support the United States in that effort.
CNN Turk. Didn't they say that?
Wolfowitz: I don't know. My impression is they didn't say
it with the kind of strength that would have made a
difference. But look let's not dwell too much on the past.
CNN Turk. Let's stick to the past.
(Laughter)
Wolfowitz: No.
Voice. Were you surprised that when you heard that the
Turkish Parliament rejected it?
Wolfowitz. They didn't reject.
CNN Turk. Passed through?
Wolfowitz: They didn't pass through. In fact lets, I don't
know many Americans are going to watch this program but let's
not keep mis-educating people that Turkey's parliament
rejected it. They did not get the majority that was needed
and it's true we did not get the full support that was
needed.
CNN Turk. Thanks to the Turkish constitution.
Wolfowitz. And I think at the end of the day, I think
Turkey has paid a bigger price for that than we have. I think
for one thing the whole economic package could have been
something much more substantial. But I also believe we
would've achieved more rapidly the kind of stability in
Northern Iraq that is as much in Turkey's interest as it is
in ours. But we are where we are today and achieving
stability in Northern Iraq remains in Turkey's interest, it's
very much in our interest, we need to work together to make
sure that that's achieved. I think it can be achieved. We've
been saying repeatedly and very emphatically, starting with
my trip in Ankara back in July, that we oppose an independent
Kurdish state in Northern Iraq, that we strongly support
maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq. I think it's
very interesting and positive that today both of the key
Kurdish Barzani and Talabani are in Baghdad trying to become
major forces in a future integrated Iraq. That's a positive
development, which we all ought to welcome. We need to work
together to make that happen. We need to work together,
although it's mainly going to be our responsibility, but to
make sure that the very difficult property claims that people
are making in the north get resolved peacefully and not
through force. There are going to be a lot difficult problems
in the period going forward. And I just, you know every so
often I hear some people suggesting, well the right reaction
for Turkey to this bump in our relationship is, well we
should make more friends with Iran and more friends with
Syria. Excuse me, that's absolutely the wrong way to go. The
right way to go, as I say, is to think about where the real
democrats, where does democracy need to be supported. It's
going to be a huge boon to Turkey when the sanctions are
lifted from Iraq when trade can move easily across the
borders and when Iraq begins to realize it's real potential
as a democratic neighbor of Turkey.
[[Page H4210]]
CNN Turk. This is also a matter of debate within Turkey
itself but whenever an argument is brought it is not the time
to have a close relations with Iran and with Syria at
juncture of history. Some come up and say that they are our
neighbors, when I mean some, they are officials following
Islam, they are our neighbors it's very natural that we would
have these kinds of relationships. And look the American
Secretary of State goes to visit Syria and historically the
American Secretary of States like they are one of them,
Warren Christopher visited 22 times, never stepping his foot
in Turkey. So if this kind of an argument comes, we and
Turkey feel that there are different signals coming from
Washington. Which kind of signal we have to be the recipient
more than the other?
Wolfowitz. I'm sorry I think there's one signal with
respect to Syria. This Secretary of State--I'm not going to
talk about previous ones--this Secretary of State went to
Syria and delivered a very tough message about how Syria
needs to shape up and stop supporting terrorism and stop
interfering with Iraq. That's the message that ought to come
through and I think anything, that Turkey does what Syria or
does with Iran should fit into an overall policy with us, of
getting those countries to change their bad behavior. In the
meantime, it seems to me, I know this an American view but,
if I were Turk I'd believe I would say in spite of whatever
has gone wrong in the last year, Turkey's strongest friend in
the world is the United States. Turkey's real interests lie
with the United States and when we look at our neighbor to
the south this newly liberated country called Iraq, we have
the same interest the Americans do in keeping it a unified
country and making it a democratic country and helping to
change the economy from this sort of Stalinist structure that
the Iraqis have lived under for 30 years, into the kind of
free enterprise economy that's going to be a huge boon to
Turkey and all the neighbors.
CNN Turk. So in a way, you are not against Turkey's having
relations with Syria and Iran but you want the same message
to go to those (inaudible).
Wolfowitz. Absolutely, I mean of course they are your
neighbors. But you want them to behave as neighbors. You
don't want to suggest that well they can ignore the
message of the Secretary of State of the United States
because our powerful Turkish friend is ignoring it also. I
think it's very important that we be coordinated.
CNN Turk. We need to discuss some misunderstanding as well
for the time being and for the future of Iraq between two
countries, two allies, Turkey and the United States and they
are recently. We have two different interpretations about an
incident that took place in Northern Iraq near Kirkuk between
the American forces and the Turkish Special Forces. According
to the American media the Turkish Special Forces were trying
to bring weapons into (inaudible) Kirkuk they were
intercepted by the American military there and then escorted
back to Turkish frontier. Why would Turkish Foreign Minister
say it was an humanitarian aid convoy which was assisted by
some security personnel so they were there to secure the free
travel of the Humanitarian aid convey. So what's the
interpretation since we are speaking here in the Pentagon?
What happened?
Wolfowitz. Well I don't think I want to get into it. You
want to do history I want do the future. What happened
shouldn't have happened. And it was clearly something that
was done ignoring everything that we have said. But it was
fixed. I don't think it'll happen again, I think Secretary
Powell and Foreign Minister Gul had a very good clear
discussion about it and hopefully we are on a better track
now. But that's a good example I think, of where, whatever
Turkey does in the north, and we understand Turkey has
important interest in the north. It's got to be coordinated
now through the coalition, through General Franks. We can't
any longer have unilateral action in Northern Iraq.
CNN Turk. Why the question for the future then? On the same
issue there is a small Turkish military presence in Northern
Iraq.
They had to record it with the coalition forces you are
saying right?
Wolfowitz. Well as long as they are there, yes.
CNN Turk. And the short coming future?
Wolfowitz. The goal ought to be, they shouldn't be needed
in the long run. But let's in the meantime . . .
CNN Turk. That's what I'm after, I mean now there's a
Kurdish authority--kind of a self-rule in Northern Iraq. Who
happened to become America's close allies in the last war
effort there? So in the coming future if they come up and say
that we don't need anymore, the Turkish military presence
despite it's small (inaudible) military personnel. In such a
case, by being the real leader to the element in the area, in
Northern Iraq what (inaudible)?
Wolfowitz. The real military elements in Northern Iraq are
the coalition forces. We now have very substantial heavy
American forces up north and that is the real military
element and everybody better listen to the instructions of
General Franks including any armed groups, any Kurdish
groups. But I think the goal has got to be a free and
democratic Iraq where Northern Iraq is never again a
sanctuary for terrorists to be attacking Turkey. We've got to
find a way to make sure that doesn't happen again. When we
are confident about it then there is absolutely no reason for
any Turkish presence. But if there's going to be a presence
as long as it's there it clearly has got to be under the
direction and control of the coalition. . . .
____________________