U.S. seeks support from Turkey over Iran

Turkey should help ensure Iran does not gain nuclear weapons, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Saturday in Ankara, adding the country should extend its tour of duty in Afghanistan.

“The mutual goal of Iran not achieving a nuclear-weapons capability, that we completely agree on, we just need to reinforce,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference Saturday.

Mullen visited Ankara to congratulate his newly appointed counterpart, Gen. Işık Koşaner, the new chief of the Turkish General Staff. Mullen discussed Afghanistan and Pakistan, the formation of a new government in Iraq, the joint struggle of Turkey and the United States against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, Turkish Foreign Minister officials told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review Sunday.

Noting that the positions of both Turkey and the U.S. regarding the nuclear-weapons issue in Iran were the same, Mullen said he did not plan to "question or rebut" Turkey over its “no” vote, but instead welcomed Turkey's stated intention to abide by United Nations sanctions.

The admiral said both countries agreed Iran should not achieve "nuclear weapons capability," and needed to do everything to ensure such a situation. Turkey voted “no” on the U.S.-backed U.N. sanctions against Iran in June, insisting on diplomacy as a solution to its neighbor's nuclear program. Turkey’s veto on the sanctions, however, disappointed the U.S. Administration.

The admiral said NATO is discussing potential locations for a missile-defense system of radar and interceptors including Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania – although he did not specifically address the plan with Koşaner.

“The membership of NATO believes that having a missile-defense architecture is a very important capability that needs to be put in place and evolve over time,” he said.

The system will be discussed at the upcoming NATO summit in November. Mullen praised Turkey’s role in charge of international troops in the region around the Afghan capital, Kabul, which expires in October, and in providing police training and staff for reconstruction teams.

“We would like to see Turkey sustain all of those efforts because they’ve been so important in Afghanistan and also because of the critical time in which we find ourselves in Afghanistan right now,” Mullen said.

A NATO official previously conveyed the demand to extend Turkish commands in Afghanistan for one more year. Earlier, Mullen said the U.S has no intention of pulling weapons out of Iraq across Turkish territory.

“Though we certainly rely on Turkey’s infrastructure to move some equipment in and out of our area of operations, we do not transport weapons through Turkey, nor do we intend to in the future,” the admiral said Saturday.

The U.S. has moved 38,000 pieces of rolling stock and over 2 million other pieces of equipment out of Iraq quietly without incident using very robust lines of communication, Mullen said.

“Certainly none of the military equipment, and none of the people have come through Turkey,” he said.

The U.S’s current agreement with Iraq is to withdraw all American troops from the country by the end of 2011, Mullen said.

“We have withdrawn almost 100,000 troops under the current agreement; we would do the same over the next 15 or 16 months. No decisions have been made in terms of how to do that. We eagerly await the formation of a new government in Iraq to start discussions about the future strategic partnership with this country,” Mullen said.

Regarding claims that arms sales to Turkey would be banned due to pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby in the U.S., the admiral said Washington had a robust military sales program with Turkey and that program would continue to flourish in the future.


/Hurriyet Daily News/