Apr 9, 2014

As Al-Monitor columnist Cengiz Candar pointed out on April 7, if it wasn’t for the prestigious byline, few people would have noticed the London Review of Books article by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh. In Hersh's April 6 article, he alleges that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan aided and abetted the chemical attacks that killed more than 1,000 civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus in August 2013. According to Hersh, an al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel group carried out the attacks, not the Assad regime. It was a testament to the gravity of the issue that even Turkey’s cowering media outlets talked about it.

Irrespective of whether Hersh is right or wrong, the telephone interviews that this author has had with several Turkish bureaucrats since April 7 suggest that the claims in “The Red Line and the Rat Line” (which I hope are not true) will sharpen the paranoid attitude prevailing among Turkish decision-makers against the United States. More importantly, the assertions will worsen the morale of Turkish bureaucrats and their declining trust in their elected superiors.

For one thing, the Hersh piece comes at a very bad time for the Erdogan government. One Turkish diplomat in Ankara, who spoke to Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, went to some length to explain why the allegations troubled his superiors: “We’re in deep s*** if our American counterparts think that we went so far as to use chemical weapons in Syria to blame it on Assad.” The diplomat continued, “I don’t think that’s the case — that the Americans think we’re behind the chemical attacks [in Ghouta] — but when you combine that [Hersh] article with the recent leaks alleging that our government is trying to start a war in Syria, it looks bad.”

“I sometimes wonder,” the middle-aged diplomat jokingly added, “if someone somewhere is not trying to get us into a war with the United States and Syria at the same time.”

I asked my diplomat friend whether, given Erdogan’s increasingly hostile stance toward the United States, which he implicitly accuses of enabling the Fethullah Gulen group, the Hersh piece won’t put additional strains on US-Turkish relations. “Absolutely,” he exclaimed. “Things will only get worse before they get better.” He added, “But, long after these politicians are gone, it’s going to be mid-level people like me who’re going to clean up the mess.”