Turkey hosts antiwar summit

Turkey gathered several of Iraq's neighbors, plus regional powerbroker Egypt here Thursday for a high-profile meeting billed as a forum to find ways to avert a US-led war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Turkey is the one regional ally whom the Bush Administration has been waiting on to complete its plans, hoping for an official go-ahead to station thousands of US troops here for a ground invasion of northern Iraq. But as the Pentagon moves closer to implementing plans for an attack on Iraq, Turkey's discomfort with the concept of allowing its soil to be used for a strike against its neighbor appears to be growing alongside European resistance to the use of force.

Foreign ministers from Iraq's neighbors Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, who met at a heavily guarded palace-turned-hotel along the Bosporus, were expected to announce late Thursday that a subsequent meeting would be held in Damascus, Syria.

Turkey has grown increasingly vocal about its reservations about aiding the US in a war against Iraq, a fellow Muslim nation, and has now assumed a role as a regional consensus-maker. But while Turkey's diplomatic drive throws another kink into the Bush Administration's war scenarios, Ankara is continuing to cooperate with senior Pentagon officials: Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited here this week amid reports that the the two militaries are already discussing specifics of a US deployment here.

That leaves some observers concluding that Thursday's meeting was mostly to show the public here and in various other countries that regional governments are doing everything in their capacity to avoid war. But the effort is likely to be unsuccessful, analysts say, and could be raising false expectations and putting Turkey's new leaders up to a task they cannot achieve.

"The reason why this will result in a failure is because this will be seen as a new attempt by Turkey to lead the region, which is historically not at all welcomed, even though this is a brave effort to avert war," says Ali Carkoglu, the reserach director of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.

"At the end of the day, Turkey will take part in an active way, if it is cooperation with a Western alliance. But if this is only a unilateral move on the part of the US and if no other major military force is actively taking part in this operation, Turkey would find itelf isolated," Mr. Carkoglu adds. "We will be left with the Americans alone in the Middlle East, and we will be perceived as importers of an unacceptable solution to the region."

Turkey's history with many of the countries gathered here Thursday is colored by the fact that this was, less than a century, ago, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, under whose control large parts of the Islamic world fell. But regional Arab countries say they are far less concerned about the prospect of a renascent Turkish role in regional politics than they are about the outcome of a possible war against Iraq.

"There is no guarantee the whole region will be better off after this war than now," says Gamel A. G. Soltan, senior researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

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