Taking On Turkey: Republican Gambit For Armenian Vote Risks U.S. Interests

 Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Investor’s Business Daily
October 3, 2000

As House Speaker Dennis Hasten and his Republican colleagues struggle to retain control of Congress, they have had to endure the indignity of accepting deals — from raising the minimum wage to new entitlement programs to busting the budget caps — they would consider unthinkable under other circumstances. It remains to be seen whether their constituents will reward or punish the GOP at the polls for such behavior.

Unfortunately, there is one Faustian deal Hasten has felt obliged to strike that may help his party in November, but that will surely cost the nation dearly down the road. In a bid to help Rep. James Rogan’s uphill fight for re-election in a California district said to have more Armenians than any other place on earth outside of Armenia itself, the speaker is personally twisting arms to ensure passage of a resolution condemning the Ottoman Turk government for engaging in “genocide” against ethnic Armenians early in the last century.

If the full House of Representatives approves this legislation, which was favorably reported out of a House International Relations subcommittee last month, U.S. ties with Turkey will suffer serious, possibly irreparable, harm. Estranging Turkey is about as reckless an international action as the U.S. could take at this juncture. After all, Turkey is today a pro-Western, secular democracy has proven to be one of America's most reliable allies. It has also developed an enormously important strategic relationship with Israel. U.S. interests are especially well served by having such an ally where it is. In geopolitics, as in real estate, location makes all the difference. Turkey is situated amid most of the nations, crises and potential conflicts with which America is concerned at the moment: Iran, Iraq and the rest of the Persian Gulf; Serbia and the Balkans; the southern Caucasus and Caspian Basin; Russia, the Levant and North Africa.

Local Politics is Global as Hill Turns to Armenia

 

Steven Mufson
Washington Post
Monday, October 9, 2000

Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Calif.) doesn’t pretend to be a foreign policy expert. A former state assemblyman and onetime deputy district attorney who made his name prosecuting rapists, gang murderers and drug dealers, Rogan, 43, has traveled outside the United States only once in his lifetime.

But this is an age when politics can be local and global at the same time. Thus Rogan has sided with Armenians in an 85-year-old historical dispute that threatens to disrupt U.S. relations with Turkey, one of America’s most staunch allies and a moderate, democratic bulwark against Islamic extremism.

Rogan’s district in Southern California happens to be home to the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the United States. Locked in a tight race for reelection, Rogan has been courting this voting block with help from House Speaker J. Dennis Hasten (R-Ill.), who agreed in August to push a resolution labeling as “genocide” the massacres of Armenians that took place under the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. That resolution was passed by the House International Relations Committee last week and may come to a vote on the floor this week. But what began as a nod to a local constituency has turned into an international incident — and the latest example of the role Congress often plays when it seizes on one narrow facet of foreign policy. The Turkish government, successor to the Ottoman Empire, objects to branding the killings as “genocide.” Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer called President Clinton last Monday to express “grave reservations” about the resolution. U.S. corporate lobbyists fear that it could endanger billions of dollars in defense contracts. And U.S. diplomats fret that Ankara might limit U.S. use of Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey for patrolling the "no-fly" zone over Northern lraq. A letter signed by 13 former U.S. Cabinet members and military commanders said adoption of the resolution “would deliver a severe blow to U.S. interests in the region.” The flap is a case study of the clout wielded by members of Congress who latch on to a single dimension of U.S. foreign policy with little regard to broader national interests. Often these members are motivated by a constituency, contributor or personal passion. Such parochial interests are not new. But with the end of the Cold War, the breakdown of the congressional foreign policy establishment, and an administration that has been unable to forge a new foreign policy consensus, these lawmakers have stepped into a vacuum and acquired tremendous influence.

“The old adage that politics stops at the water’s edge has long since gone by the boards,” says former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.). “Too many people place constituent interests above national interests. They don’t see much difference between lobbying for highway funds and slanting foreign policy toward a particular interest group.” One former U.S. diplomat joked last week that politics still stops at the water’s edge, only now it’s the waters of the Bosphorus.

Statesmanship Missed

A former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas. W. Freeman Jr., laments what he calls “the franchising of foreign policy,” with various interest groups dictating areas of policy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, influences policy toward Israel. The Congressional Black Caucus often sways Haiti policy. Non-proliferation crusaders rule on North Korea. Farmers bend trade policy. Christian groups dominate discussion of Sudan, whose Muslim-dominated government is waging war on the largely Christian south. Cuban Americans resist any easing of sanctions on Havana. Part of the problem is ideological. Without a Soviet foe, the foreign policy agenda has become diffuse, with congressional power now spread among committees on banking, finance, appropriations, judiciary and the environment.

Part of the problem is institutional. Senior foreign policy specialists in Congress have departed, including senators Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and William S. Cohen (R-Maine). In 1999, first-term senators chaired all seven subcommittees of the Foreign Relations Committee. Many of them would have preferred other committee assignments.

Meanwhile, the Republican congressional leadership is isolationist and often uninterested in foreign policy. One exception was the effort by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to persuade the Clinton administration to sell to Taiwan destroyers built in a shipyard in his home state.

As a result, individuals can drive policy — even, as in Rogan’s case, when they are junior lawmakers and do not sit on the foreign affairs committees. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), whose district includes many Indian Americans, uses his position on the Commerce Committee to promote India’s interests. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who was once director of the New Jersey Right to Life organization, uses his perch on the International Relations Committee to restrict funding for United Nations organizations he feels promote abortions worldwide. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who also has a seat on International Relations, vociferously reflects the anti-Castro views of her Cuban American constituents. “What we’ve lost in Congress are the statesmen,” said William A. Reinsch, who has grappled with Congress as undersecretary of commerce for export administration. “People who tended to look at the bigger picture, who understood the broader range of U.S. interests and how at any given moment one would be more important than another, and who understood that presidents need flexibility.”


Adroit Lobbying

The Armenian genocide resolution illustrates this clash of special and national interests, as well as the stakes involved. Although the resolution is non-binding and does not have a Senate counterpart, the International Relations Committee debated it for seven hours in two sessions before a throng of Armenian Americans, corporate lobbyists, defense contractors, human rights activists and Turkish parliamentarians.

Lines outside the hearing stretched down the hail of the Rayburn House Office Building. “This is the most closely fought election in the House in 50 years,” said a lobbyist for Turkey. “Control could hinge on the outcome of a single race. And the speaker has succumbed to the temptation to bring this resolution forward, unaware of the consequences to the country if it were to pass.”

 Though Hastert’s support for Rogan was a catalyst, the resolution is also the product of years of political lobbying by Armenian Americans, who founded the Armenian Assembly of America as a grass-roots organization in 1972. Today it has 7,000 individual and organizational members and a budget of $2.5 million. It grades members of Congress on votes concerning Armenia. On the genocide resolution, it has retained the lobbying services of former representative Susan Molinari
(R-N.Y.).

Ross Vartian, executive director of the Armenian Assembly, says it has modeled itself on groups such as AIPAC, the tobacco lobby and the gun lobby. “You look at their methodologies,” he said. “It’s standard stuff. It’s numbers and intensity and the quality of your argument.” The Armenian Assembly has also made allies with Greek Americans and human rights groups, longtime critics of Turkey. In Congress, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), a Greek-American, has been a strong supporter. The organization has chalked up a string of victories. Armenia, with just 3.4 million people, receives $102.4 million in aid from the United States.

Moreover, Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act bars U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan, a strategically located oil producing country that has a long-running dispute with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. “Azerbaijan ends up becoming a very important location, and here we are with 1 1/2 hands tied behind our backs,” said one administration official. For more than a decade, however, the Armenian Assembly has sought and failed to win passage of a genocide resolution. Few people deny that massacres took the lives of hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children during and immediately after World War I. But some historians and Turkish officials say it resulted from forced relocations and widespread fighting in the region. They also say millions of Turks died in the same region over the same period. Usually the Armenian Assembly has pushed its genocide resolution around April 24, the anniversary of an initial 1915 roundup of 235 Armenian intellectual and religious leaders who were later murdered. This year Armenian groups changed their timing to take advantage of the importance of Rogan’s race to Republican efforts to keep control of the House. Rogan’s district boasts Armenian Boy Scout troops, churches and community groups; five Armenian newspapers; three Armenian-language cable TV stations; and more than 21,000 Arrnenian American registered voters. Armenian organizations are trying to boost their rolls to 25,000, about 8 percent of the electorate.

Rogan has long wooed these voters. In September 1999, he made his first and only overseas trip, visiting Armenia for five days and stopping in Rome to meet the pope.

The resolution, which directs the president to use the word “genocide” in statements marking the event, “is not an issue of foreign policy,” argues Rogan spokesman Jeffrey Solsby. “This is a moral issue. . . . It is our obligation to work with the Armenian community and their friends in Congress to make sure they are remembered and that this atrocity does not occur again on the face of the Earth.”

Rogan’s Democratic opponent, state Sen. Adam Schiff, does not intend to be outdone. Schiff has co-sponsored California legisltion on the Armenian genocide, to prohibit Turkey from funding academic chairs in Ottoman studies, and to fund an Armenian film foundation to document the massacres. Two weeks ago, Gov. Gray Davis (D) signed legislation Schiff sponsored to remove the statute of limitations and enable Armenian families to file insurance claims for losses that occurred during the massacres.

“This is an issue I’ve been active on for several years,” Schiff said in an interview. As for Rogan, Schiff charged, “how does he explain that in 3 1/2 years he’s never tried to bring this [genocide resolution} to a vote?”

 

Real Consequences 

 

To many policymakers, the stakes seem higher than 25,000 votes in Southern California.

In a letter to the House International Relations Committee, seven former top officials and six former military commanders — including former defense secretaries Frank Carlucci and William J. Perry and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili — urged members to consider “the real world consequences” of adopting the resolution.

The former officials noted that Turkey has helped combat terrorism, contributed to NATO forces in the Balkans, hosted U.S. and British forces enforcing the Iraqi no-fly zone and imposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s government even though the sanctions have cost the Turkish economy billions of dollars.

American defense contractors also quietly support Turkey, which plans to spend $20 billion modernizing its armed forces over the next five years. Textron Inc. is trying to wrap up a sale of 145 attack helicopters for an estimated $4.5 billion. A Russian diplomat said last week that tensions over the House resolution have revived Moscow’s hope that Turkey might choose instead a Russian helicopter equipped with Israeli avionics.

Turkey has also deployed lobbyists, including former Republican representatives Bob Livingston (R-La.) and Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), each of whom gets $700,000 to represent Ankara, and former Democratic representative Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), who is being paid $400,000. Turkey’s parliament dispatched a delegation to attend last Tuesday’s session of the International Relations Committee. One Turkish lawmaker told the committee that the massacres were “indisputable” but that there was no evidence their purpose was genocide.

Rep. Smith of New Jersey said the Turkish parliamentarian’s denial “made our case” and showed the need for the resolution. Other committee members bristled at the thought that they should mute historical facts for the sake of strategic interests. One asked whether some future German government, in the name of strategic alliance, could insist that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum be dismantled “brick by brick.” After the committee passed the resolution by a vote of 24 to 11, Turkey announced that it would send an ambassador back to Baghdad for the first time since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, but it did not link the move to the resolution. Separately, the leaders of Turkey’s five major parties said they would bear in mind the resolution when Turkey’s parliament decides whether to renew the U.S. mandate to use a Turkish base for flights over northern Iraq. The mandate expires Dec. 30. “What is most important for us is that the resolution should be stopped before it can overshadow the strategic partnership we have,” Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, Baki Ilkin, said in an interview. He contended that passing the resolution would be “a disservice to Armenia” because “Armenia needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Armenia.” And he warned that “the fabric of our relations with the United States would inevitably be affected.”

That, however, would be a matter for the next administration, and Congress, to deal with.

 

Holdwater adds: If this Res. 596 was the same bill as Res. 398, both bills having been brought up at the same time, one has to wonder about the ethics of  the twenty-four politicians who voted for its passage... after hearing the compelling testimony of Professor McCarthy. Even if they were convinced of the genocide's having taken place, surely the points the professor raised must have created room for uncertainty; a courtroom would have needed far more evidence before a jury would have voted to convict the killer. A sad day for Truth and Integrity.

 

Consider this: Armenian-Americans perhaps spent less than 1.5 million
dollars per year on average, to get some of these congress people elected
to the U.S. Congress, which totals $ 15 million in 10 years (1991-2001).
In the same ten years, these congress people paid back "their debt" to the
Armenian-Americans by sending $ 1.5 billion (with a"b"!) to that terrorist
state called Armenia… Each dollar invested into the election campaigns of
Pallon and Knollenberg came back as $100 in U.S. aid to Armenia ! Not
bad for a country whose number one export is terrorism and number one
import is American handouts, don't you think?

Samual A. Weems, excerpt from THE AMERICAN CONGRESS SELL OUT!
AMERICAN FARMERS GET NO FARM BILL BUT ARMENIA GETS 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS!, early 2002