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TURKEY’S FOREIGN POLICYTOWARDS IRAQ
Nur Cetinoglu Harunoglu
1
R
elations between Turkey and Iraq provide an ideal framework for reflecting on
Turkey’s main foreign policy principles in the field. To give some examples, in
1958 when General Qasim’s coup occurred in Iraq, prompting the withdrawal
of Iraq from the Western-supported defence organization, namely the Baghdad Pact of
which Turkey was a member, Turkey reacted through the lense of the Cold War by seeing
this coup as an instrument of the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union, to dominate
the Middle East. This evaluation was undoubtedly the consequence of the general
perception dominant in Turkish decision makers’ minds, which was in turn determined
by the Western Bloc’s security perception during the 1950’s. On the other hand Turkey
evaluated the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 independently of Cold War parameters,
perceiving the war as competition between two regional powers in the Middle East and
applying its policy of non-interference. This was a foreign policy approach that had been
sown by Turkey in the 1960s.
The developments related to Iraq in the post-Cold War period were nevertheless
significant for Turkey insofar as they revealed the main challenge Ankara faced in this new
period. In effect, the country’s deviation from its non-interference policy, which had been
the basic principle underpinning Turkey’s foreign policy since the 1960s, was first observed
with the outbreak of the Gulf crisis in 1990. This deviation from the non-interference policy
inherited from the Cold War period gained momentum with the Iraq War in 2003. The
aftermath of the war in particular has made it incumbent on Turkey to adopt a much more
comprehensive approach towards Iraq. From this perspective, the importance of Iraq is
undeniable insofar as it offers a perfect reflection of how Turkey’s foreign policy has evolved.
1 Department of Political Science and International Relations, Marmara University, Istanbul.