Turkey/Iraq: Turkey yesterday won parliamentary approval for sending troops to Iraq, hours after Iraq's Governing Council repeated that it did not want them.
At the same time in Baghdad the fragile security situation that has prompted the US to seek military support from allies was underlined when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the Foreign Ministry and American officials announced that three US soldiers and an Iraqi translator had been killed in separate attacks on Monday night.
Despite strong opposition in Turkey, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) used its huge parliamentary majority to push through the bill permitting the deployment of troops.
The Bush administration said it was confident it could bring reluctant Iraqi leaders around to the idea of accepting Turkish troops. "Turkish troops would contribute to stability in Iraq and we will be consulting closely with the Turkish government over the details of Turkish participation," said State Department spokesman Mr Richard Boucher.
A similar bill, that would also have permitted US troops to use Turkey as a base for operations in Iraq, was narrowly rejected by parliament in March, up-ending Washington's war plans and severely damaging the two countries' long-standing alliance.
The margin of today's victory, 358 votes to 183, is partially the result of an AKP crackdown on the dissenting MPs who sabotaged March's vote.
Harshly criticised by Pentagon hawks for its failure to back earlier government efforts to allow US troops deployment, Turkey's military has also been more expansive this time, with its chief-of-staff, Gen Hilmi Ozkok, labelling Turkish intervention "the better of two evils".
"Sending troops is risky," he said last weekend. "The effects of not sending them could be even more so." But the US has also done its best in recent weeks to sweeten the pill, promising late in September to set aside $8.5 billion in loans for Turkey.
Far more importantly, Washington and Ankara seem to have reached an understanding on the issue of the PKK, the Turkish Kurdish separatist group which has been based in northern Iraq since its 15-year war with Ankara petered out in 1999.
After months of Turkish pressure, Washington last week sent State Department its counterintelligence chief, Mr Coffer Black, to Ankara. "The PKK has no future in Iraq," he said after three days of high-level talks.
The two soldiers and their translator who were killed on Monday died when a roadside bomb exploded 20 miles to the west of the capital, a US military statement said. An hour earlier one US soldier was killed and another wounded in a separate bomb attack in the town of Ramadi.
A mortar round fired yesterday at the Foreign Ministry was blamed on forces still loyal to Saddam Hussein's regime. There were no casualties. The blast was the latest in a string of attacks in recent months aimed at non-military targets.
Iraqi police headquarters have since been targeted, and two weeks ago an explosion outside the hotel of the television network NBC killed a Somali security guard.
The White House would take a stronger role in overseeing the struggling effort to rebuild Iraq through a new group intended to speed the flow of money and staff to Baghdad and streamline decision-making in Washington.
The purpose of the new Iraq Stabilisation Group is to "crack the whip, frankly," said a senior administration official, who described a sense of urgency amid persistent trouble in Iraq and polls showing declining confidence in President Bush.
The new group, to be led by the national security adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, and drawn from more than a half-dozen cabinet agencies, is intended to remove a bottleneck in decision-making by identifying and resolving problems faced by the US-led occupation.
The creation of the group signals a shift away from Pentagon dominance over the running of Iraq.