It all started the week before when the successive visits to Washington by Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül and Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt drew attention from the Turkish media (interestingly, but not surprisingly, this was not the case for the American media). Both visiting dignitaries had come to discuss security matters over Northern Iraq and to ask the Bush administration to scuttle the resolution on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives recognizing the events of 1915 as a genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens.

In many respects, both visits have bought enough time and patience for Turkey. By meeting with his counterpart Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon officials, Mr. Gül has conveyed to the American side that Turkey is still considering diplomatic and political options in its dealings with the government of the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Arbil. In fact, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan precisely made that point by stating that Turkey would “develop relations with the Kurdish government...if it would bring peace to us both.”[1] Gen. Büyükanıt, on the other hand, resorted to a more emotional discourse and expressed his points in Washington to the order of “as a soldier and as someone who fights the PKK, it is not my responsibility to talk to the Iraqi Kurds who openly support the PKK.”

And entered Turkish journalists with their typical thirst for sensational news. Looking at this picture, many yelled “crisis” and tried to point to a divergence between the civilian and military branches of the government. Yet it was in the same press statement that Gen. Büyükanıt maintained that fighting terror had economic, armed, sociological, and psychological dimensions. He pursued this point by further and asserted that “every mechanism, if it is to help fighting terror, must be supported.”[2]

Possible talks with Mesut Barzani and President Celal Talabani would perfectly fit this description. What people need to see is that both Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds are bogged down in a typical case of “mutual insecurity.” Under the straight-jacket of “mutual insecurity,” every move to maximize one side’s security is reciprocated in kind by the other side, which leads to a spiral of events that preserves the balance of insecurity.

In order to start transcending this aura of insecurity, Iraqi Kurds and the Turkish government need to sit down and talk. (The central government in Baghdad has more existential problems and it is doubtful if they have any resources to allocate to this question.) It is crucial to note that these talks should be conducted in an atmosphere of complete honesty (granted, this is not a common feature in politics). But if it is to facilitate more open discussions, the two parties should use reliable intermediaries, such as journalists or academics. Turkey is expresses its unease about Kirkuk and Mt. Kandil while the Iraqi Kurds are holding the PKK as a trump card in case Turkey decides to intervene in Northern Iraq. It is in the best interests of both Turkey and Iraqi Kurds to have a stable Northern Iraq. Each party should calculate its moves very carefully and move in a direction to increase their mutual security.

With this basic requirement at hand, the last thing that Turkish newspapers should do is to exaggerate the statements made by Turkish statesmen and Kurdish leaders. For their part, political figures need to refrain from giving excuses to the members of the visual and print media. As an ascribing historian of the Cold War, I now know that many of the “dramatic” statements made by American and Soviet leaders during the Cold War were in fact not as dramatic as they seemed at the time. Notwithstanding this, a spiral of misunderstanding and misperception led humanity very close to total annihilation. It is up to Turks and Kurds to draw their conclusions from that lesson and to decider whether they should choose a hot war or a cordial peace.

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Barın Kayaoğlu is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a regular contributor to the Journal of Turkish Weekly.

E-mail: kayaoglu@virginia.edu