US bill on Armenia moves forward

[Galaico]

US bill on Armenia moves forward

A bill recognising the killing of Armenians in Ottoman times as genocide has cleared its first hurdle in the US Congress despite Turkish warnings.

It passed through the House Foreign Affairs Committee by 27 votes to 21 - the first step towards holding a vote in the House of Representatives.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul reacted swiftly to the result, saying that the move was "unacceptable".

President George W Bush had urged US legislators not to pass it.

"Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror," the US president said.

After the vote, President Gul attacked the vote, saying some politicians had "closed their ears to calls to be reasonable and once again sought to sacrifice big problems for small domestic political games".

"This unacceptable decision of the committee, like similar ones in the past, is not regarded by the Turkish people as valid or of any value," the Turkish president said, as quoted by the Anatolian news agency.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council told the BBC that the White House was "very disappointed" by the outcome of the vote.

Turkey is a regional operational hub for the US military, which uses its airspace to supply US forces in Iraq.

'Sobering'

The result means that only a change of heart by the opposition Democrats, who control Congress, can now stop a full vote on the bill, which would be non-binding.

Divisions within the Foreign Affairs Committee crossed party lines with eight Democrats voting against the measure and eight Republicans voting for it.

Tom Lantos, the committee's chairman, had opened the debate by admitting the resolution posed a "sobering" choice.

"We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people... against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying," he said.

Mr Lantos, himself a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, said he would introduce a resolution praising US-Turkish friendship next week, according to AFP news agency.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to take up their version of the resolution in the future.

BBC NEWS | Americas | US bill on Armenia moves forward

[Errigal]

I am against any legislature passing a judgement on historical events such as this. What is true or untrue about past events cannot be legislated.

[Arthur Gordon Pym]

Turkey recalls US ambassador for talks

By C. ONUR ANT, Associated Press Writer

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey ordered its ambassador in Washington to return to Turkey for consultations over a U.S. House panel's approval of a bill describing the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians as genocide, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

The ambassador would stay in Turkey for about a week or 10 days for discussions about the measure, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Levent Bilman.

"We are not withdrawing our ambassador. We have asked him to come to Turkey for some consultations," he said. "The ambassador was given instructions to return and will come at his earliest convenience."
State Department spokesman Tom Casey, said he was unaware of Turkey's decision, but said the United States wants to continue to have good relations with Turkey.

"I'll let the Turkish government speak for itself," he said. "I think that the Turkish government has telegraphed for a long time, has been very vocal and very public about its concerns about this and has said that they did intend to act in very forceful way if this happens."

Earlier, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, was invited to the Foreign Ministry, where Turkish officials conveyed their "unease" over the bill, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill Wednesday despite intense lobbying by Turkish officials and opposition from President Bush. The vote was a triumph for well-organized Armenian-American interest groups who have lobbied Congress for decades to pass a resolution. The administration will now try to pressure Democratic leaders in Congress not to schedule a vote, although it is expected to pass.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated his opposition to the resolution Thursday, saying the measure could hurt relations at a time when U.S. forces in Iraq rely heavily on Turkish permission to use their airspace for U.S. air cargo flights.

Relations are already strained by accusations that the U.S. is unwilling to help Turkey fight Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq.

About 70 percent of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey, as does about one-third of the fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq. U.S. bases also get water and other supplies by land from Turkish truckers who cross into the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey, however, denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying that the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
"It is not possible to accept such an accusation of a crime which was never committed by the Turkish nation," the Turkish government said Thursday. "It is blatantly obvious that the House Committee on Foreign Affairs does not have a task or function to rewrite history by distorting a matter which specifically concerns the common history of Turks and Armenians."

Armenian President Robert Kocharian welcomed the vote, saying: "We hope this process will lead to a full recognition by the United States of America ... of the genocide."

Speaking to reporters Thursday after meeting European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Kocharian also appealed to Turkey to join talks on restoring bilateral relations.

Turkey is under no pressure from the EU to call the Armenian killings genocide. The European Commission criticized France last year when that country's lower house voted to make it a crime to deny the killings were genocide. The upper house did not take up the bill, so it never became law.

Turkey has warned that relations with the United States will suffer if the bill passes, but has not specified possible repercussions. U.S. diplomats have been quietly preparing Turkish officials for weeks for the likelihood that the resolution would pass, asking for a muted response.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the Turks "have not been threatening anything specific" in response to the vote, and that he hopes the "disappointment can be limited to statements."


Turkey ended its military ties with France over its bill last year. But a decision to cut far more expansive military ties with the United States could have serious consequences for Turkey's standing as a reliable ally of the West.

"I don't think that Turkey will go so far as to put in doubt its whole network of allied relations with the United States," said Ruben Safrastian, director of the Institute of Eastern Studies of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. "In the end, not only is the United States interested in Turkey, but Turkey is interested in the United States."

Adding to tensions, Turkey is considering launching a military offensive into Iraq against the Kurdish rebels — a move the United States strongly opposes because it could destabilize one of the few relatively peaceful areas in Iraq.

Iraq's Kurdish region is heavily dependent on trade with Turkey, which provides the region with electricity and oil products. Annual trade at Habur gate, the main border crossing, is more than $10 billion.

In a recent letter, Turkish President Abdullah Gul warned there would be "serious troubles" if Congress adopted the measure. He reacted quickly Wednesday, saying "some politicians in the United States have once again sacrificed important matters to petty domestic politics despite all calls to common sense."

Turkish newspapers denounced the decision. "27 foolish Americans," the daily Vatan said on its front-page headline, in reference to legislators who voted for the bill.

Hurriyet called the resolution: "Bill of hatred."
The U.S. Embassy urged Americans in Turkey to be alert for violent repercussions. Wilson said he regretted the committee's decision and said he hoped it would not be passed by the House.

[source]

[Errigal]

None dare call it lunacy

Daniel Davies

October 12, 2007 6:30 PM
Comment is free: None dare call it lunacy
As Simon Tisdall says, the timing of the House of Representatives resolution on the Armenian genocide is wildly unfortunate. Given that Turkish tanks are being prepared to head over the border with northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists - a terribly irresponsible and dangerous over-reaction - it is a really bad time to have the Turkish government feel forced by domestic politics to withdraw its ambassador from the US. Diplomacy is badly, badly needed here.


Of course there was a genocide of the Armenians and it is both stupid and nasty of the Turkish government to deny it, and the provisions of the Turkish constitution which make it a speech crime to refer to this historical fact should be a serious obstacle to their accession to the EU. But given that the world is how it is, was there really such an urgency to pass a resolution about 1915?


It's something that makes me feel really out of touch with normal politics. A lot of people clearly definitely and sincerely believe that there is something intrinsically important about the act of making a public statement that a genocide happened. Conor Foley has written a number of excellent articles about how difficult the whole subject is, and I've complained myself a couple of times about the idea that "speaking truth to power" about genocide is an acceptable reason for upsetting actually existing diplomatic efforts to try and stop people from getting killed. The nature of diplomacy is that you make compromises, and the nature of compromises is that you feel bad about them. I don't think it's too controversial to say that facts matter more than feelings.


The opposite point of view - which, I reiterate, is widely held and seems to command a majority in the US House of Representatives - seems to be based in a rejection of "realism" in foreign policy. At its best, the anti-realism movement has some good points, as made in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, where he intelligently challenges the corrosive cynicism of foreign policy realists like Henry Kissinger, who are far too eager to support domestic strongmen overseas in the name of "national interests". On the other hand, the rejection of realism can be pushed too far (and I'd argue that Berman does in fact push it too far) into something that looks uncomfortably like a rejection of reality. A courageous stand on the Armenian genocide exists in the realm of ideas, but if Kurdistan becomes as unstable and violent as the rest of Iraq, then that will be a concrete fact, and this distinction matters a hell of a lot.


One group of people who recognised this are the Israeli government and their associated lobby in the US. Stable relations with Turkey matter a lot to the Israelis, and it might be thought that the government of the state of Israel, along with the anti-defamation league (ADL), know a little bit about the importance of remembering and recognising genocide. Last month, it very much appeared that the ADL was going to be swinging its considerable lobbying might behind the Bush administration's attempts to stall this resolution. But this caused a huge uproar (understandably, of course - "Director of ADL denies genocide" is pretty much the ultimate in "Man Bites Dog"), and while it looks like the Israeli government was working diplomatically behind the scenes, the real power of the "Israel lobby" is in the lobby part, not the Israel part, and that was not working against the motion.


I think that this demonstrates something quite important about the well-known book by Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The professors actually note in the book, but perhaps don't draw enough attention in public to the fact, that the lobby they identify is in essence a political one within the US, not a nationalist lobby for a foreign country. In my opinion it really ought to be called the neoconservative lobby, because that's what it is. Most of the time, the interests of the neoconservative, anti-realist tendency in foreign politics run absolutely in line with those of the state of Israel (where they come into contact at all). But sometimes they don't - arguably the invasion of Iraq was one such case, and the Armenian resolution was unarguably another. And in all cases where the so-called "Israel lobby" has to choose between Israeli national interest and neo-conservative politics (no matter how crazy), it is Israel, not neoconservatism, that gets the shaft.


The reason that Mearsheimer and Walt think in terms of the "Israel lobby" is that they are "realists" in the pejorative foreign policy sense - they don't really use analytical categories that aren't related to somebody's national interest. But the tendency that they identify in American politics is actually the ideology called neoconservatism - an anti-realist political movement dedicated to a political programme of extending the American system of government everywhere, by force if necessary. This political lobby group is currently trading under the brand "pro-Israel", but this is no more to be taken at face value than the logo on a fake Louis Vuitton handbag; it just happens to be the case that branding yourself "pro-Israel", like branding yourself Louis Vuitton, is a good way to extract more cash for your product than it is intrinsically worth.


This is, in my opinion, quite worrying. If the largest and most powerful foreign policy lobby group in American politics today was simply a nationalist movement within the US for Israel (rather in the way in which the Cuban-American lobby is purely and simply a nationalist anti-communist movement concerned solely with Cuba), then there would be some dealing with it. But it isn't. It's an ideology that is explicitly based on a refusal to compromise with squalid reality, and dedicated to cheerleading for war whenever one looks practical, and a rather coarse and unattractive self-aggrandisement of the US at the expense of all other countries (particularly Muslim ones) at all other times. I had heard of the "Confederacy of Dunces", but I didn't realise that these days it needs to be taken seriously as a political force.

Comment is free: None dare call it lunacy

[Weltschmerz]

Originally Posted by Errigal

I am against any legislature passing a judgement on historical events such as this. What is true or untrue about past events cannot be legislated.

Indeed, we risk ending up where some people say that they fear we might end up, in forgetting what actually happened, but I guess that's more like what they want.