A congressional resolution recognizing as “genocide” the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 collapsed on October 25, when its sponsors—led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)—asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to set the matter aside until “the timing is more favorable.”  The nonbinding resolution passed the Foreign Affairs Committee two weeks earlier, but the Bush administration and the government of Turkey successfully combined lobbying efforts to make its passage in the full House unlikely.  Schiff promised to bring it up at a later date, once the resolution’s supporters are “absolutely confident” they have the votes.  This means that the issue is off the table indefinitely.

The losers in the affair are congressional Democrats.  Initially, 225 supported the bill, but many started having second thoughts when General Petraeus, among others, warned of the adverse effect of its passage on our relations with Turkey at a critical time for U.S. troops in Iraq.  Pelosi’s early support of the resolution, her subsequent wavering, and her final volte face are seen on both sides of the aisle as the major gaffe of her tenure (thus far).

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was quick to assert that the affair reflected flawed judgment on the part of Democratic leaders and undermined U.S. national security.  “Given Turkey’s importance in the war on terror,” Boehner said, “attempting to force a vote on this resolution in the first place was just plain reckless.”  Some Democrats—notably, influential Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, Pelosi’s close ally—privately agree that this was a potentially costly mistake; Murtha had been warning her about the bill since last February.

The Turks played their hand impeccably.  Their furious rejection of the “genocide” designation provided Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with an issue around which he could rally the nation as a whole, including pro-Westerners, secularists, and army leaders who are otherwise uneasy about the government’s Islamic agenda.  But while the Turks routinely deny the magnitude and gravity of Ottoman crimes against Armenians and other Christians in their domestic discourse, the focus of their counteroffensive in Washington was on the consequences of alienating “a key U.S. ally.”  Their lobbyists stressed the importance of U.S. access to military facilities in eastern Turkey, such as the Incirlik Air Force base near the Syrian border, which are vital to supplying 160,000 American troops in Iraq.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates echoed this by warning that U.S. access to Turkish airfields and roads “would very much be put at risk.”

By refusing to be drawn into the debate over what actually happened to the Armenians and framing the issue in terms of “supporting the troops,” the Turks made the espousal of their position by prominent Americans legitimate—even respectable—which it would not have been had they tried to argue the gory details of late-Ottoman history.  This became obvious on September 25, when eight former secretaries of state wrote to Pelosi asking her to kill the resolution, which “could endanger our national security interests in the region.”  President Bush warned that its passage “would do great harm to our relations with a key ally.”

The administration’s opposition to the resolution received an unexpected boost when Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq crossed the border and killed 13 Turkish soldiers on October 7.  The raid enraged Turkish public opinion and enabled Erdogan’s government to seek, and obtain, parliamentary authorization for retaliatory raids inside Iraq.  That vote, which proved useful as a tool of Ankara’s pressure on Washington, has additional domestic consequences.  It strengthens Erdogan’s position vis-à-vis the military by reducing the generals’ autonomy of action and asserting the primacy of Turkey’s parliament, in which the Islamists have a majority.  This may have a significant long-term effect on the army’s ability to curtail Erdogan’s systematic shift away from the Kemalist legacy of secularism.

On October 11, Turkey upped the ante by recalling her ambassador from Washington.  Turkey’s top military leader, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, warned that, if the House passed the resolution, “our military relations with the United States can never be the same.”  The Bush administration, desperate to prevent an escalation that would make the Iraqi quagmire even more intractable, used the threat of Turkish retaliation as a key additional argument for appeasing Ankara.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the consequences of the genocide resolution on the war in Iraq would be “quite dire.”  On October 11, several House members withdrew their support, leaving the resolution short of a majority.  A few days later, three more early sponsors joined them, sealing its fate.

The moral of this story is not that foreign interventions make America vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by her uncertain “allies” in the Muslim world; we knew that already.  It is, rather, that American legislators have no business adjudicating the historical rights and wrongs of faraway peoples of whom they know little.  Their patent inability to rein in a President who persists on his road to nowhere in Iraq today makes their pretense to pass verdicts on the Asia Minor of yesterday ridiculous.  Their stamp of approval on the phrase “Armenian genocide”—and what happened in 1915 was a genocide by any meaningful definition of that otherwise overused term—would not have carried any more weight than their failure to approve that designation for what happened to a similar number of Pontic Greeks during the same period, or to the Serbs in Nazi satellite Croatia in 1941-45, or to various minority communities all over the Muslim world over the past 14 centuries.

Our elected representatives should stick to raising money for their next election campaign and making sure that our great-grandchildren remain burdened with the fruits of their current labors.