Consul General Deborah K. Jones at Kadir Has University

Remarks by Consul General Deborah K. Jones at Kadir Has University

Istanbul
April 18, 2007

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I thought he was going to say that I have a lot of mileage on me, which is true. I do. About a quarter of a century in this business.

I was thinking, when asked to speak to you during a session about Art & Culture, how I could tie what I do into that theme. Of course, many people talk about diplomacy being an art form of one sort or another. You’ll hear many definitions, for example: “Diplomacy is the art of remembering to celebrate a woman’s birthday while forgetting to note her age.” Another is that “Diplomacy is the art of being able to tell someone to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip.” That’s a good one. And yet another is that “Diplomacy is saying ‘nice doggie, nice doggie’ while you look for a rock.”

It strikes me that all of these imply a certain element of deceit. I like to define “diplomacy”-- and hopefully this will lead into our general topic on Art & Culture -- as “finding space within the same words or concepts for people to agree, to come to agreement.” And the way we do this often irritates a lot of people because they think it is a form of dishonesty, as the sayings I’ve quoted suggest. My military colleagues at the War College used to say to me: “You know Deborah, you can’t nuance a missile. You diplomats like to parse and choose your words so carefully and to find something that is so indefinite that it pleases everybody. But once we launch a missile it is launched. We can’t call it back.” And I would reply, “Yes, because that is what you do for a living. You fight wars with missiles. But in diplomacy, our weapons, or our tools, are our words and the way we speak.”

Tonight I want to talk a little bit about words and the difficulty of conducting of diplomacy in an age of information overload. And what that means for you too, especially for younger people and for students, when you live in an age where you are so overloaded with “the word” that it’s hard to sift through what’s truth and what’s not. And in connection with that, we’ll get around to the U.S-Turkish relationship, and maybe talk about some of those related words. For example, today I saw a headline in the New Anatolian that drove me crazy, saying that the U.S. really wanted PKK terrorists to stay in Kandil and attack Iran. When I see things like this my blood pressure goes up, but that’s probably because of my age as well!

Christian texts often suggest that at the beginning of creation there was the Word, or that Jesus Christ was “the Word made flesh.” In other words, the “word” was key to the divine order of the Universe. Another word frequently used in liturgical texts is “logos,” which is Greek for “word” or “speech,” and is obviously also the root for “logic,” another reference to the way in which we order the world. And in one of the first stories in the Bible, after the world is created, what does Adam do? He defines order. And how does he do that? He does that by naming the animals, and naming the things around him. Men and women order the world and create a reality for ourselves by putting words to things.

Now it is very difficult for us to imagine a world where the human voice was dominant. But if you think back to the great orators or rhetoricians, or the great religious leaders, they all have come down from the mountain or come back from self-imposed exile with words that give order and structure to society, whether it is Moses coming down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, or Jesus on the Mount of the Beatitudes, or the Prophet Mohammed returning from his encounter with the angel Gabriel. Or Cicero, for the classicists among you. You have to imagine a world where the sound of the human voice was the dominant feature: no airplanes overhead; no trucks rumbling by; no electricity humming underneath. None of those other sounds. The human voice was a powerful sound, and it conveyed a hierarchy of words establishing order in the world.

Now, however, there are so many words, so many sources of information, so much background noise, that it’s very hard to sift through to establish what is “real” and what is not. And if anyone thinks that we haven’t been taught to think in certain ways, with a certain logic, then I --if we had a black board – would share with you a simple series of words I used to present to my students when I was in graduate school: Time flies you can’t they fly too fast. It makes absolute logical and grammatical sense with the right punctuation, in precisely the order in which it’s presented here. But it will take you a long time to figure it out. Because we’re taught to see the world in certain ways, and to think in certain ways. And those terms or ways of thinking really do guide the way that we see everything else. Interestingly, one of the diagnostic elements of schizophrenia is that someone has lost the “filters” the rest of us use to screen out the things we don’t need -- or perhaps simply don’t want -- to see. So while most of us are kind of stumbling through life seeing what we wish to see or what we choose to see, whether it’s another person’s reaction to us or whatever, a schizophrenic doesn’t have that filter. So for them every thing is coming in very intensely, every emotion, every color -- the grass is very, very green. They often create very beautiful art work. In relationships, they don’t filter: if you are being cynical or facetious, when you really don’t like them, they can pick up on that much more quickly than a person who is considered sane. And that is because, again, we filter, and we do the same in our lives. We structure our lives according to ideas, which are conveyed in words.

So with this entire information overload, how do we sift through these words? How do we avoid falling prey to false rhetoric? We are all susceptible --and this has always been the case-- to charming rhetoric, and to being led to believe that things are true which are not. In weighing information, we probably are influenced by unexamined prejudices. For example, believe it or not, my generation didn’t have email, and the Fax was a relatively new invention in the early 1980’s. When I was growing up, if I saw that something had been printed in a book, I considered it had a certain element of truth; the printed word carried a certain weight. I suspect that’s probably true for most of you. And I think that trust has now expanded to include -- certainly it has with my teenage daughters-- the “Web.” “But I found it on the Web!” they exclaim. Or people go to “Wikipedia,” which is a great invention, but it is not necessarily God’s truth, by the way. But when you read something, it takes on a certain authority. Because you have seen the word structure, you have seen the logic. Nonetheless, you can have logic that is absolutely sound, but if the facts are wrong, it is not true. It’s a lie.

And so your challenge particularly now, as younger people in a very complex and integrated world , the challenge for all of us, really, is to sift through and distinguish, as the Ethiopians say in their tradition, what is wax and what is gold? The wax is something that looks so real that it appears to be true. But the gold is real truth. And your challenge in life is to make those distinctions, to discover where the real meaning is. At the same time you have a responsibility, I believe. At least I hope you feel a calling or desire to give structure to the world as well. Because if we don’t, who will? I know there are some people who believe that there is a hidden, inherent structure to the universe, just waiting for us to uncover and reveal it, but my own sense in looking over history is that this is not necessarily the case. I believe that our task in life -- whether it is as parents; whether it is as partners; whether it is as diplomats; whether it is as politicians -- is to create a vision and make it true, to create a “moral order,” if you will, by the way we live it and by the truth we bring to it.

We were talking a little bit before about why one goes into diplomacy when there are so many things going on, so many other options? Well, because we know, number one, that it is going to be steady work! I mean, how long have we been working on the peace process in the Middle East?! For the duration of my career. Of course you need to have an unjustifiable sense of optimism about things. You have to have an unjustified sense of optimism; that is what a leader brings, and that is what a diplomat needs to persevere in the face of setbacks. Because there is no alternative to it right now. And that’s what I am hoping to do tonight: encourage you in that sense of optimism and your own desire to contribute to structuring our world.

I referred earlier to Cicero, who talked about the creation and order of civil society, the city. In fact, everyone (Moses, Jesus, Mohamed) was talking about the creation of civil society; that is what all religions have tried to do. And that’s what governments, which actually evolved in some ways from religions, whether pagan or otherwise, still try to do--bring order to society through words, through laws. So what we do as civil servants is powerful and important.

Let me shift now into talking a little bit about the U.S.-Turkish relationship and then open it up for a lot of questions, which I suspect will be more interesting for you. And please feel free to ask me about any topic. I know that there are a lot of topics and a lot of things on people’s minds right now. And I am happy to try to address these topics as I may.

Obviously the U.S.–Turkish relationship goes way back. It goes back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, when the U.S. actually had more consular and diplomatic assignments --people who were accredited to the Ottoman Empire -- than we have ever had with any other country in a bilateral relationship. Because of course the Empire was vast. In 1830 we signed a Treaty of Commerce with what was then the Ottoman Empire; interestingly enough, the relationship began on a foundation of combating terrorism because this was all about dealing with piracy in the Ottoman holdings and elsewhere. But since that time the relationship has evolved, of course, first with the Truman doctrine, which undertook to support countries who were fighting, or who were trying to defend themselves against being dominated by other countries against their will. And in this case it was the Soviet Union attempting to influence Turkey, which became a NATO partner in 1952. Something I remind people of frequently is that the relationship between the United States and Turkey is not a relationship of convenience; it is an alliance. It is a marriage. It is a partnership in which we may not always agree with everything that the other does, but it is a partnership based on shared fundamental beliefs and values about liberty, about human rights -- and to some extent we work on that still -- about free markets, and about democracy. We are two secular democracies who share these values.

Turkey has always been important because of where it is, geographically. It finds itself in a very volatile neighborhood, and always has, because it is in an important crossroads for several regions. But it is also important because of what it is. It is a secular democracy with a Muslim majority population in an area of the world where it really does straddle the traditional and the new. I would like to underscore something here. I am not one of these people -- and I’ve spent most of my career in the Middle East and in the Muslim world -- who believes there is a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, per se, or Islam or Christianity. My personal belief is that in all societies right now, whether in the United States, in Europe, in Turkey, in parts further East, there is a tension between orthodoxies, extreme orthodoxies-- which sometimes, in my view, can disregard our humanity in the name of structure and order, or so-called “morality,” or perhaps more accurately, “traditional values”-- and extreme interpretations of so-called “Western secular liberalism,” where people sometimes, at its very extreme points, disregard spirituality or reject traditional interpretations of “morality” in the name of personal freedom. I suspect most people fall in the middle of those two extremes, but within every society you will find people at one extreme or the other.

Interestingly, I was told by some Western orthodox clerics here that they find more in common, more sympathy of viewpoints within Orthodox Islam or Orthodox Judaism than with Liberal Western Protestants, certainly in terms of behaviors and world views. And if you look at some of the external religious practices and traditional behaviors – and I am not saying this by way of criticism, just by way of observation – they do share certain elements that many in the West would label hierarchical, non-democratic and non-inclusive by comparison to liberal Western society. So my sense is that, in all societies right now, people are struggling to find a balance between those two extremes. Turkey – being smack dab between a very traditional world and a very modern world -- gets caught up perhaps more than others in this dynamic. I also think a lot of the process of examining its self-identity that is going on right now in Turkey is reflected in many societies throughout the world. And there are many factors that contribute to the stresses, such as the tremendous economic growth that has brought a lot of immigration into Turkey’s cities, and Istanbul, in particular. There have been major transformations in society. Because you live in it, many times you won’t see it as dramatically, but I can assure you that people who were last in Turkey in the 70’s are astounded by the economic and demographic and sociological changes here. It is really quite something; it is really quite impressive to see what is going on here. But with these kinds of transitions comes the potential for disruption.

But let’s move back to the relationship and the importance of it. Obviously Turkey and the United States share interests in a number of areas, and in a number of areas we find great cohesiveness and coherence in our policy objectives. First of all, there’s Iraq. For obvious reasons, Iraq is the United States’ number one policy concern in the region and Turkey is extremely important to our success there. Turkey provides all kinds of logistical support to coalition efforts there. Of course, there was a bump in March 2003, when the Turkish parliament voted not to allow U.S. troops to enter Iraq through Turkey, but the relationship has moved way beyond that now. And Turkish businessmen, Turkish investment in Iraq, Turkey’s supply of basic food stuffs, logistical support, and fuels and other things, this is all critical and essential to the effort to stabilize Iraq, and get things going there again.

Obviously, the PKK is huge a problem for Turkey. It’s a problem we recognize and sympathize with. It is a difficult issue. Why is it such a difficult issue? It is difficult because for anyone who has been in a war zone, it is not possible to easily identify – in what Clausewitz, the famous war theoretician called “the fog of war” – who is who. If anyone thinks that you go into a war zone and it is like two football teams, like Besiktas and Fenerbahce, one team wearing black and white, one team wearing blue and yellow, and that you can go and easily pick out who is who, then that person has never been on a battlefield. And the risk of having something go terribly wrong, that would cause the kind of consternation or disruption between two very important allies, Turkey and the United States, such as happened in Suleymaniye back in July 2003, is very high. Suleymaniye had repercussions that went far beyond the actual size of the incident, which involved 11 Turkish soldiers. But it was a terrible incident that caused great humiliation and a lot of unhappiness that is still reflected in movies and literature. And this resulted because of the confusion that naturally exists in a war zone.

Turks often ask, “Wait a minute: how come when Al Qaeda attacked the United States you felt it was perfectly acceptable to go and attack Taliban, and in fact invoked United Nations or NATO rules – that an attack on one is an attack on all? Or how come when Hizbullah was attacking Israel out of Lebanon, and the Israelis then smacked Lebanon, how come that was acceptable for you? But it is not acceptable for us when we have lost over 30,000 people in the last thirty years, including over 600 people in 2006 alone?” Those are good questions, but there are some differences in circumstances, one being that it is not a hostile government in Iraq. We are working very closely with the government of Iraq to address this and other issues. Our new Ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has already been in dialogue with leaders on this issue. As you know, General Baser, on your side, and General Joe Ralston, from our side, are working diligently on this. There is a very serious effort, through a variety of means, to try to stop these attacks. At the same time we have said, and you no doubt have read what the Ambassador has said about this, that we recognize and accept that a country has the sovereign responsibility to protect its people and its borders. That doesn’t mean we are giving a wink and a nod to a cross border operation. We have already said what we think about that, that it would create more problems than it would solve. It also happens to be a fact that for at least, well, let me see, I was in Baghdad in 1984-1985, and at that time the government of Turkey was working very closely with Saddam Hussein’s government and undertaking numerous operations in Northern Iraq. And it didn’t solve the problem then. And you have one of the most competent militaries in the world, who know very well the enemy they are dealing with. So, clearly, the problem is a larger problem, and is a more complex problem that needs a number of different approaches to resolve it. It is a difficult problem and we are not saying that Turks should ignore it. On the contrary, we are trying to deal with it in a variety of ways.

So that is Iraq. And contrary to what you may have read in the paper, we believe in a unified Iraq. A federal Iraq. An Iraq where Kurds, Sunni, Shia, all live together, in peace with each other and with their neighbors. Many people say “Oh but they won’t get along, historically.” In fact, they are very intermixed. I often remind people that when I was there during Iraq’s war with Iran, nearly 70% of Iraq’s infantry were Shi’a Arab, reflecting very much the overall demographics of Iraq. And they were being flung against the Iranians in a World War I type of masse en masse attacks in the South. In not one instance did you have a platoon or a brigade or anything going over to the other side, saying, “Oh we identify with the Iranian Shi’a.” I often say to people, think about World War II. You had a lot of good Italian-American Catholics, Roman Catholics, fighting in the U.S. Army in Italy, against Roman–Catholic Italian fascists. And they didn’t change sides on basis of religious belief. Because there was an overriding sense of nationalism. And I can’t help but mention here, for those of you who may watch or may not, in the Arab world they have something similar to a rather silly but very popular show in the U.S. called “American Idol.” I understand it is the most widely watched program in the States. But you know what this is: people come in, some are very wretched singers, and they all perform and then everyone watching votes, and the one who is least wretched wins, I guess. But in any case they have a similar program in the Arab world, broadcast out of Beirut. It’s called “Arab Idol.” The winner of this program from the competition of 22 countries was actually an Iraqi girl, about two or three weeks ago, named “Shada,” and you cannot believe the outpouring of joy from all Iraqis of all stripes -- Sunni, Shia, Kurd -- because they had something to feel happy about. They had something to feel proud about. They had the vision, they had the thought. Again, let me go back to that unjustifiable sense of optimism. That comes from that.

But I’m digressing now. Let’s get back to the bilateral agenda. Iran. Turkey has been extremely supportive of UN positions and resolutions on Iran, and shares the U.S. and European view on this, about the dangers of Iran developing nuclear weapons. There occasionally may be differences in our approaches to these issues, but not differences in our desired outcomes. And that is perhaps as it should be, because allies can benefit from the differences we bring when we come together. But we find agreement within the same words, in seeking our common goals. And in fact Turkey has been extraordinarily helpful – going back to Iraq and Iran, as this ties in -- in bringing together regional parties, or bringing together within Iraq the Sunni opposition to have them participate in Iraqi elections, in bringing Iran into the next “Iraq Neighbors” meetings. One took place previously in Iraq, and one is going take place in Egypt on the 3rd of May.

Moving on to Mideast Peace: no doubt a lot of people delight in picking out the differences, because it is more interesting-- if you are writing for the press – to report that someone died rather than that someone breathed, there have been differences of approach. And we have to acknowledge that yes, when Turkey invited Hamas leader Khalid Mishal to come for talks, many in the U.S. jumped all over that. But the reality is that Turkey shares our vision and our goal of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace. Turkey has always been a very active and supportive player in the peace process. And again, there is no difference in the desired goal, and Turkey, in fact, is able to play a role that no one else can play.

You would be amazed perhaps, maybe not, at the number of regional conferences and other meetings that take place in Istanbul, precisely because Turkey is such a welcoming environment for everybody, and because everyone can travel here. That is why Turkey was able to bring together Pakistan’s Foreign Minister with Israel’s Foreign Minister for the first time, in Istanbul. It is also a large enough city that you can hide what is going on and you don’t have to make a lot of noise about it, which is sometimes important in diplomacy. But nonetheless, these meetings take place all the time between people, and historically Istanbul has been the crosswords for those kinds of dialogues and interactions. And that is one of Turkey’s strengths.

Another area where Turkey and the U.S. share many interests is in the diversification of energy routes and resources, in ensuring that there is a multiplicity of resources and routes for energy to reach Europe or other places, or Turkey itself, and that certain countries don’t maintain a chokehold on supplies of energy to Europe or elsewhere. I would underscore here the recent completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which literally began as a pipe dream in many people’s minds. Many people said this would never happen, that it was impossible, both politically and in terms of the engineering. But with a lot of political support, from the United States and others, and with some brilliant engineering from the oil majors, it happened. And it’s now working. This kind of project creates greater energy security in the region. And Turkey is very committed to that. And I think this is going to be an area of real growth.

Afghanistan. Turkey has been a major player in Afghanistan. With ISAF, working with the security forces there. In Lebanon, Turkey has been a great supporter of peacekeeping. Despite some initial reluctance on the part of Turks, the Prime Minister had the courage to pursue that important goal. In Nagorno- Karabagh, Turkey has brought to the table experience in dealing with the Turkic-speaking, former Soviet Republics that we simply don’t have. That is useful in resolving issues there, where we can work together with great synergies. The list could go on and on.

Obviously, we work very closely, we have great support for Turkey’s EU accession. And that is a continuing support. We think it is good for Turkey, we think it is good for the EU. And we think it is good for the United States, because it brings us all more in a line with the common way of doing business, of thinking. In this connection, we have been supportive of Turkish reforms in civil society. We believe Turkey has been on the right path, if sometimes a little slow, for example in areas like dealing with Article 301. But we recognize this is a very sensitive period in Turkish politics, it is an election year. We know as a democracy ourselves, and as a vibrant democracy -- and Turkey also has a very active and vibrant democracy -- that election years can be very noisy years. And sometimes -- how shall I say this? -- for outside observers, there is an internal logic in democracies that doesn’t always make sense to the outside observer. How’s that for diplomatic way of putting it? That is how we twist words, that is my missile going around like this.

Similarly we support the economic reforms and related steps Turkey has taken. The fact is that in the past four or five years Turkey has seen more economic stability and consistent, steady growth, than it has seen in the previous three or four decades. And that is not a small thing. That is a tremendously important thing. Why is that so important? To my mind, it is important because when Turkey is prosperous, when people have jobs, when people have something to look forward to, when Turkey can invite external participation, when Turkey is the cultural capital of Europe in 2010, these kinds of interactions and exchanges serve as the yeast in the dough of civil society. It leavens the whole of society; everyone is increased by it and moderated by it, as well.

I know we should probably stay away from all kinds of issues, as outside observers, but I can’t help but mention the various surveys here and there about headscarves. Are more women wearing headscarves or less? At least two different “think tank” surveys will tell you fewer women are wearing headscarves in Turkey than before, but that what has happened is more women who wear headscarves are actually engaging in society in ways they hadn’t before. When I first came to Istanbul in August of 2005, people would say to me, “You know, that never used to happen here. It wasn’t like that here. People weren’t like that here.” And I would ask, “Were people not like that here, or did you not see it before?” Because there has been so much internal movement and migration into the city of Istanbul in particular, and into the urban centers of Turkey, in general, that there is new exposure in both directions. So again, how do you look at that? Are you optimistic about it? Are you pessimistic about it? Where do you take these issues? Where is the “art” that you use, whether politics or diplomacy, to take these issues and Turkey’s society in the direction you want it to go?

Again, I’ve digressed, but I think I’ve shared with you the broad base of our relationship, where it is, where it goes. I have tried to speak honestly and frankly, which we do from time to time. I was explaining to your faculty earlier that we have a wonderful phrase that we use when we don’t want to share with the press what we know. So when a reporter asks “Well did this happen or what can you tell me about that?” the answer is, “I am sorry, I have nothing for you on that.” Think about it; it is a great answer. Use it with your children.

Let me wrap up by saying that when Ambassador Wilson arrived in 2005, toward the end of the year, there was recognition on both sides that damage had probably occurred unintentionally in the relationship, because as in any partnership when the partners stop speaking to each other frankly and honestly, they are going to start going off in different directions -- whether it is a marriage, whether it is a business, and certainly if it is an alliance. So one of the things that the Ambassador set out to do and accomplished, together with our Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, and Foreign Minister Gul, was to have our Foreign Ministers sign last year a “Shared Vision and Strategic Dialogue” document, that basically said, “These are the goals that we share. These are the beliefs that we share. And these are the things that we are going to do to work toward those goals together.” So that we know what the other one is doing. We know where we’re coming from and we know where we want to go together. And part of that has meant an up tick, an increase in the number of high level visitors in both directions, back and forth, in maintaining the dialogue. If you look, over the past year and a half, at the number of senior U.S. officials who have come to Turkey for talks, and at the number of senior Turkish officials who have gone to the United States for senior level talks, and even on down through the bureaucracy, you will see that there has been a strengthening of dialogue, and a concerted effort to coordinate more, to communicate more as friends and allies as people who share the same objectives in the area. Using words to structure our world.

With that I will stop and let people raise any questions they may have. Thank you very much.

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