Turkey's military actions in Syria will be on its own terms
While Turkey's parliament has passed an authorization to send troops into Syrian or Iraqi territory, the country's plans may not dovetail with those of the anti-Islamic State coalition's.
Unexpected support from the ultranationalist and fervently anti-Kurdish Nationalist Action Party (MHP) authorizing the government to send troops into Syrian or Iraqi territory comforted the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu duo and prevented a repetition of the notorious “March 1 motion” that the Turkish parliament aborted on that day in 2003. The 2003 vote effectively closed all chances the United States had to open a “second front” on the eve of its war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In 2003, even though the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) backed the motion, opposition parties combined with some AKP defections defeated the measure by four votes. While many quarters in Turkey lauded the result as a turning point salvaging Turkey’s foreign policy from being mortgaged to the West and as a source of national pride for the country and the AKP government by bestowing upon Turkey great prestige in the Middle East, the reality was that it caused serious damage to US-Turkey relations that needed a long time to repair. This placed Turkey in a bystander position vis-a-vis developments in its immediate neighborhood.
That wasn’t the case this time. The motion needed a simple parliamentary majority to pass. Although about 50 ruling party legislators were in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, the vote deficiency that could have jeopardized the outcome was offset by equal numbers of the arch-nationalist opposition deputies of the MHP.
The AKP has 312 and the MHP 52 members in parliament. The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HDP), which had announced their decision to vote against the motion, have a total of 157. The 14 independent members of parliament also were in no position to play a crucial role in the vote determined by the AKP-MHP combination, which also could be referred to as the Islamists plus the Turkish nationalists’ rightist bloc.
