The Wall Street Journal said Ankara was “riled.” However, whatever rage there was, not much of it was on display. The Sabah newspaper dismissed the whole voting procedure of the august House Committee on Foreign Affairs as “farcical.” The Turkish foreign minister displayed dignified nonchalance, calling the session in which the vote was kept open so that stragglers could roll up as “lacking in seriousness.” He complained of a lack of vision in Washington, suggesting with schoolmasterly disapproval that the American government wasn’t really up to the job of running an alliance.Even the Taraf newspaper -- some of whose columnists have been on the firing line for expressing the unpopular view that Turkey must atone for its misdeeds in 1915 -- was mocking of the whole affair. “This year’s genocide season has begun,” its headline ran. While the world waits for Turkey to snarl at the congressional committee’s decision, public opinion has simply looked away in dignified contempt. “The old genocide film is making the rounds again,” yawned Mehmet Ali Birand in his syndicated column.
Of course, this sangfroid is predicated on the assumption that the resolution will never make its way to the floor of the House for a final tally. That is what happened in previous years when the vote committee was far closer than last Thursday’s 23-22. However, in previous years the administration was far less conflicted. Barack Obama’s Hamlet-like deliberations can be heard from a long way off. Does he do what he thinks is right, or what he knows to be expedient. “It’s not anger that Ankara is experiencing; its fear,” a diplomat told me from one of those countries which has already passed a genocide resolution. Once America concedes the existence of genocide, it will become the received wisdom.
Through the miracle of Internet streaming, I followed the committee’s debate. The “ayes” had no reservation that the tragedy befalling the Armenian people was the first genocide of the 20th century, that survivors and their offspring had a right to have this truth recognized. Some congressman were sorry that this had to be at the expense of a trusted ally but that it was in Turkey’s own interests to face up to the past. Some were less apologetic. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, labeled Turkey a “paper tiger” and that it was high time to call its bluff. Those against the motion said it was not the business of Congress to judge the past, particularly if that meant damaging US interests in the present. It was not the business of government to adjudicate between the claims of one set of “hyphenated American” against another, according to Texan Republican Ron Paul, which is as close as anyone got to accusing the other side of barnstorming to their electorate. However, no one used the crib-sheet provided by the Turkish Historical Society (TTK) that the genocide never happened.
The debate wended its way to a cliffhanger finish -- and before he knew it, poor Namık Tan, Turkey’s envoy in Washington, was being recalled onto the next plane home for consultations. The message he should bring is that Turkey can win the battle and it can win the war, but that it has lost the argument.
“Look at our allies,” my neighbor told me during my efforts to conduct an impromptu vox populi poll. His list included pretty much the whole of the American defense industry: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, United Technologies Corp, Northrop Grumman. With friends like that, who needed enemies, he suggested, and added that lots of countries had recognized the genocide without the sky over Ankara falling down. I don’t suppose his is the majority view in Turkey and, should the resolution pass, Ankara may not spin off into a frenzy of self-harm, but it will hardly shrug the matter off. Rapprochement with Armenia will move from its current position on the back burner off the stove entirely.
