Bad alliance, bloody truth

Old promises never die; they just fade away. So it is with the House’s Armenian genocide resolution, the delicate dream of an underdog people who have, since their slaughter and dispossession in 1915, struggled to bring memory to power.

When the resolution cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 10, I was in L.A. -- the diaspora’s nerve center -- and Armenian schools and churches were rumbling in anticipation. All that remained was for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to keep her promise to give the resolution a full House vote.

Then, suddenly, the Washington machinery growled. Turkey recalled its ambassador to the U.S., while its lobbyists caught up with members of Congress. The political media -- from National Review to the Nation -- showcased a powerful set of hostilities toward the resolution. And within a few days, at least a dozen co-sponsors withdrew their support. “It’s a good resolution but a horrible time to be considering it,” said Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.).

A horrible time because Turkey is a “key strategic ally,” or, to exorcise the flattery, a crutch in America’s democratic balancing act in the Near East. As it happens, Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey serves as a transfer point for 70% of U.S. cargo headed for Iraq. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates cited “our heavy dependence on the Turks” in his case against the resolution.

Many other reasonable worries have been splashed around -- not all of them by the usual troublemakers. The Armenian patriarch in Istanbul opposed the resolution because he feared for the safety and standing of Armenians in Turkey. Even I, the great-grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, wrote against the resolution -- not because I don’t believe there was a genocide but because the resolution’s text and attendant political grandstanding cheapened the reality of that tragedy.

The House has no business voting on the past. But the White House -- the conductor of U.S. foreign policy -- has the obligation to face history honestly. If the absorbed historic narrative is wrong or politicized or incomplete -- like our understanding of Baathism and the Iraqi insurgency -- foreign policy falters.

Unlikely though it sounds, the 92-year-old Armenian genocide is key to U.S. foreign policy. It unlocks a closet of skeletons -- but not that of the Young Turks of 1915, stuffed with 1.5 million Armenian skeletons. Instead, it opens the closet of today’s Turkey, which puts its own Nobel laureate on trial for insulting “Turkishness”; which has become, according to a 2007 Pew survey, the most anti-American country in the world; where “Mein Kampf” hit the bestseller list in 2005; which denies the Armenian genocide committed by a past fascist government probably because it retains some spiritual loyalty to it.

It is no irony, then, that in denouncing the Armenian genocide resolution as a smear on its democratic name, Turkey is threatening extremely undemocratic behavior. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recently issued plan of “six reprisals” includes a shutdown of Incirlik Air Base (a betrayal of the war on terrorism), a slow withdrawal from NATO (a betrayal of the West) and a revamped partnership with Iran (a betrayal of peace in the Near East). The flap over the resolution has revealed that Turkey’s Western leanings are not based on steady principles but on friendships of convenience.

Which is why I believe that the generally bad Armenian genocide resolution came at precisely the right time for the United States. It came at a time when our president could observe Turkey’s fascistic convulsions and would be forced to choose between two historical narratives. Would he choose the denialist fiction that would keep afloat a rotting alliance and maybe his war? Or would he choose the bloody truth?

At a news conference called just before the Foreign Affairs Committee debate two weeks ago, President Bush brushed off the truth. He urged Congress to stop the recognition, not because Congress trespassed into Bush’s foreign policy jurisdiction but because it disrupted his agenda. In turn, our ally responded Monday by announcing that it would defy the pleas of the United States and cross Iraq’s northern border to conduct military operations.

This latest breach of friendship -- or, rather, revelation of enmity -- affords the president yet another chance to recalibrate the national conscience and to reappear in the Rose Garden for two announcements: the first, a request that Congress withdraw its resolution; the second, a modest notice that the Armenian genocide of 1915 has not, in fact, faded away, but quietly has been absorbed by America’s historical narrative.