Undoubtedly, House Democrats made a poorly timed diplomatic blunder when they sponsored a resolution condemning Turkey's murderous displacement of Armenians from 1915 to 1917. But in the Washington Post today, Richard Cohen articulates my own discomfort with condemnations of the resolution, writing, "Call it genocide or call it something else, but there is only one thing to call Turkey's insistence that it and its power will determine the truth: unacceptable." I was working for the World Association of Newspapers in the summer of 2004 as the international body of editors and publishers held its annual conference in Istanbul. The hope then was that Turkey's invitation to the staunchly anti-censorship group signaled a new respect for press freedoms. But a year later, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk was arrested for acknowledging the Armenian genocide in an interview with a Swiss newspaper. Pamuk's prosecution was the project of an overzealous, conservative local government, and was condemned by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But it was not an isolated incident. Also in 2005, a court order canceled an Istanbul academic conference set to explore the massacre of Armenians. We can and should expect more from Turkey. The fact that we're not in a position to do so reminds us just how disastrously off-kilter our Middle East policy has become under the Bush administration. --Dana Goldstein
