ABSTRACT
On 1 March 2003 the Turkish Grand National Assembly defeated the Turkish government by three votes. By this narrow margin, the Turkish Parliament prevented the American and British governments from attacking Iraq from the north. This controversial vote has momentous implications for the future of Turkish democracy, itself intimately bound up with Turkey’s relations with the democracies of the United States and the European Union. This chapter considers Turkey’s involvement with the Iraq War from five very different angles of what constitutes democratic legitimacy
Public opinion
In the first place, the Parliament’s anti-war vote was in part driven by public opinion. In March 2003, an Ankara research centre reported that Turks were 94 per cent against the use of Turkish bases and troops by the American forces, and that 87 per cent opposed American intervention. However, elite opinion was deeply divided on the issue. Many senior officers in the army and officials in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved of the government decisions to comply with American requests to seek permission from Parliament in the spring of 2003 for the use of Turkish facilities and in the autumn of 2003 for Turkish peacekeeping forces to be made available to the Iraqi National Council.
