Turkey-U.S. Relations

The NY Times has a short editorial on Turkey-U.S. relations that’s worth taking a look at.  The piece basically suggests that the U.S. is making the right move by appointing a retired Air Force general and former NATO commander to help coordinate the Turkish government’s crackdown on rising Kurdish separatist violence. 

The logic is that U.S. foreign policy has destabilized Iraq and emboldened Kurds in the north, which has had a spillover effect on the Kurds in Turkey.  To mend relations with Turkey, where Turks have increasingly negative views of the U.S. and E.U., something needs to be done to show that the U.S. takes responsibility for creating conditions that have led to escalating violence in Turkey.

This rings a bell.  Has anyone seen Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, the documentary on U.S. foreign policy toward the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey?  I’ll admit I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds interesting.  On the one hand, the U.S. bolstered the Kurds of northern Iraq as victims of Saddam throughout the 90s, on the other hand they were helping the Turkish military fight against Kurdish separatists in eastern Turkey.

Who edits the editorial?
The one thing I don’t get about this editorial is its closing line:  “The United States must not ever take Turkey for granted.”  Besides being awkward as all get-out for using the phrase “must not ever,” its ambiguity warrants at least another paragraph. 

Do the authors mean the U.S. shouldn’t assume its relationship with Turkey will always be hunky-dory?  If so, why not give an example, like Turkey’s refusal to let U.S. troops use Turkey to enter Iraq from the north in 2003?  Or do they mean the U.S. should remember that Turkey has a lot to offer as an ally.  If so, what exactly does it have to offer?  The authors hint at Turkey’s importance as a mostly Muslim, secular democratic country bridging Europe and the Middle East, but they’ve dodged the question of what that’s supposed to mean.