Saturday, October 20, 2007
Opinion

Pelosi, Speaker (not thinker) of the House

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...”

Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) listens during her weekly news briefing on Oct. 11.
CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

In the late 16th century, playwright Christopher Marlowe reminded his audience how the beauty of “Helen of Greece” prompted a war between ancient Greece and Troy—the latter occupying what is now Turkey. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,” he wrote, “and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”

In 2007, it is clear that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s mouth alone can launch a thousand ships, inflaming hostilities not with her beauty, but with her ineptitude.

Last spring, she visited Syria, thereby granting an American seal of approval to a regime suspected of masterminding the assassination of several anti-Syrian members of neighboring Lebanon’s Parliament. Lebanon has maintained an alliance with the United States despite fierce pressure brought to bear against a fragile coalition government. Fortunately, though Syria has a military, aside from smuggling arms from Iran to Hezbollah, its operations have generally been limited to predicting the demise of certain Lebanese politicians with shocking accuracy, and moving into Lebanon whenever it felt like it. Pelosi traipsing around Damascus’ jewelry market with a scarf slung over her head hurt Lebanon’s feelings, but it didn’t provoke military tensions.

Turkey, however, is another matter altogether. When Pelosi recently made good on years of campaign promises to the large Armenian community that makes up part of her California constituency by putting her power as speaker behind a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917 at the hands of the Turks, her blunder had dangerous impact.

Turkey does not deny that its 1915 government killed thousands of Armenians. But it disputes that its former government killed about a million Armenians, which is the number put out not only by Armenian groups but non-Armenian historians as well. The numbers matter because the deaths of thousands of Armenian families can be passed off as the result of disorganized ethnic conflict, but killing hundreds of thousands points to a systematic attempt to wipe out the entire Armenian community. At some point, a massacre becomes genocide.

Nonetheless, Turkey’s history is its own burden to bear, and there is every reason to believe that it will sooner, rather than later, come to terms with the events of 1915-1917 of its own volition, without any help from a Congresswoman in a country that, in the view of some, has never really come to terms with the U.S.-government-promulgated genocide of Native Americans.

Pelosi’s timing was epically disastrous.

Setting aside Turkey’s strategic importance to both military and humanitarian efforts in Iraq, never has America’s relationship with Turkey been more important. Turkey is governed by Islamic moderates. Its majority is secular and not interested in becoming a theocracy. Moderate Turkish politicians have doggedly sought membership in the European Union in part because they need the support of the West in fending off the influence of Muslim extremists. The EU, in its fear of Islam, has ignored Turkey’s pivotal role in defusing such extremists, and Europeans continue to oppose allowing the Turks in. Europe’s rejection has been a blow to Turkish moderates, who are feeling increasing pressure from less-moderate Muslim groups and hard-line nationalists to align with a pan-Islamic political front.

Pelosi’s proposed symbolic recognition of an atrocity carried out nearly a century ago by a long-dead regime sends the message to Turkey that the American Congress is shamefully out of touch with its present-day political reality. Where does that leave Turkey? With its most extremist factions emboldened and its moderate leaders in doubt regarding support from the United States—even as Turkey’s role in a rapidly changing East-West political configuration becomes more crucial.

As for a heartbreaking chapter in history, Turkey has managed to maintain an intellectual community of academics through all kinds of political climates, and those same scholars will likely lead a fact-finding mission regarding the Armenian tragedy of 1915-1917. But they will not have the freedom to do that if Turkey’s relationship with the West is damaged so much that its internal balance is tipped toward anti-intellectual—and anti-Armenian—Islamists. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.