Turkey

Turkey occupies a revealing place in Noam Chomsky’s account of post-Cold War power: it is described first as a major beneficiary of U.S. support for its campaign against the Kurds, then as an ally offering troops for the American War on Terror. The relationship links military assistance to mass displacement and destruction, while showing how a government’s own record of repression could be recast as a qualification for joining an international counterterrorism campaign.

U.S. arms and the Kurdish campaign

Chomsky states that the United States supplied Turkey with 80 percent of the weapons used in its counteroffensive against Kurdish communities in the country’s southeast during the 1990s. He describes a campaign in which tens of thousands of people were killed, between two and three million were driven from their homes, and 3,500 villages were destroyed. He compares the number of destroyed villages with Kosovo, saying it was seven times higher than the total there under NATO bombing.

The scale of U.S. military supply changed alongside the course of the campaign. Chomsky says the flow of weapons rose sharply in 1984, when Turkey launched its attacks against the Kurds, and did not return to its earlier level until 1999, after the campaign’s stated aims had been achieved. In that year Turkey lost its position as the leading customer of American arms dealers, apart from Israel and Egypt; Colombia took its place. Chomsky presents the sequence as a consistent pattern in which U.S. arms and training went to governments associated with severe human-rights abuses.

He also characterizes the Turkish campaign as a major episode of ethnic cleansing and destruction in the 1990s, one that remained little known because of the United States’ substantial responsibility for it. When the issue did surface, he says, it could be dismissed as a minor discord within a broader American commitment to ending inhumanity. That contrast—between the scale of the reported consequences and the marginal place given to them in public discussion—is central to his treatment of Turkey.

Acknowledgment and the offer of troops

After the September 11 attacks, Turkey was the first country to offer troops for the next phase of the American War on Terror. Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit described the offer as an expression of Turkey’s particular debt of gratitude to the United States. Chomsky stresses the implication of that explanation: the American contribution being acknowledged was Washington’s support for Ankara’s fight against terrorism, meaning the campaign against the Kurds that he had described as a campaign of state terror.

The relationship thus appears in two political registers. In one, Turkish actions against Kurdish communities are described by their consequences: deaths, displacement, and the destruction of thousands of villages, enabled in significant part by U.S. arms. In the other, Ankara is welcomed as a partner in fighting terrorism and recognized as a prospective guarantor of authority in Kabul. Chomsky argues that Turkey’s offer was not detached from its history of repression; it was explicitly framed by its prime minister as repayment for U.S. support during that history.

Repression recast as counterterrorism

Chomsky treats Turkey’s participation in the new campaign as an example of how governments could use the American declaration of a War on Terror to seek support for their own internal conflicts. Governments, he says, joined the campaign partly in the hope of securing assistance against groups they called terrorists at home. He names Russia and Turkey as especially clear cases, while noting that Turkey had already received substantial American assistance.

In his account, the terminology of counterterrorism obscures a reversal: a government whose own campaign against a population had received U.S. arms and diplomatic backing could now be presented as an ally entrusted with opposing terrorism elsewhere. Turkey’s proposed role in protecting Kabul sharpened this contradiction. Chomsky emphasizes that the same superpower that would fund Turkey’s participation had previously supplied military means and diplomatic and ideological support for the actions he identifies as its recent crimes.

Kosovo and the politics of military credibility

Turkey’s standing as a partner was also strengthened through its participation in the Kosovo humanitarian effort. Chomsky notes that Washington praised Turkey for taking part with U.S.-supplied F-16 aircraft, aircraft that, in his account, Turkey had used effectively in its own operations against the Kurds. The contrast is not simply between two theaters of military action: it is between the praise attached to Turkey’s role under a humanitarian label and the scale of the Kurdish campaign that had received American support.

He places this contrast within a wider criticism of the way military action is named and justified. In discussing interventions, he observes that governments have used humanitarian language to describe the use of force, while arguing that such language can conceal other purposes. In the case of Turkey, praise for its participation in Kosovo sits alongside his account of U.S.-backed repression at home. The juxtaposition makes Turkey an example of how the same state can be cast as a humanitarian participant abroad and a recipient of support for destructive policies within its own borders.

The wider strategic relationship

Chomsky returns to Turkey when discussing the consequences of the September 11 attacks beyond the immediate military response. He argues that governments around the world could exploit the attacks to establish or intensify repressive policies. Turkey, he writes, offered troops for the new phase of the American campaign in recognition of U.S. assistance to its harsh campaign against the Kurdish population. He describes the United States as having supplied large quantities of weapons that were decisive to that campaign, and notes that Turkey had been warmly praised for its record of state terror during the 1990s.

Turkey’s importance in the account therefore lies not only in its actions or its alliance with Washington, but in the continuity connecting them. The aid and diplomatic support that had helped sustain the Kurdish campaign became, in Chomsky’s framing, the basis for Ankara’s declared gratitude and its new counterterrorism partnership. The book presents that continuity as a warning about a political system in which the label of terrorism can be applied to an adversary while state violence by a favored partner is supported, praised, or made less visible.