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WASHINGTON - The Bush Administration urged Turkey not to take any "concrete" action after a United States congressional committee angered Ankara by passing a resolution calling 1915 massacres of Armenians genocide.
The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resolution and it will now go to the
House floor for passage, a move Nato ally Turkey says will damage ties with Washington.
There, 226 members, more than a majority, have already signed up as co-sponsors.
US Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said the Administration was "deeply disappointed" by the vote but hoped Turkey, "one of our most valued and important allies worldwide," would not retaliate.
"We hope very much that the disappointment can be limited to statements and not extend to anything concrete that would interfere with the very good way that we have been working with the Turks for many years," he told reporters.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul called the committee's approval of the resolution "unacceptable".
"Unfortunately some politicians in the United States of America have closed their ears to calls to be reasonable and once again sought to sacrifice big problems for small domestic political games," Gul was quoted as saying by the state news agency Anatolian.
Turkey is of strategic importance to the US, particularly in Iraq. The bulk of supplies for troops in Iraq pass through Turkey's Incirlik air base.
"We need to continue to be able to work together effectively," said Burns, adding that Turkey had not made any specific threats before the vote over Incirlik or other areas of co-operation between the two countries.
Top officials in the US Government, from the President down, tried to convince legislators not to pass the resolution while at the same time trying to soothe Turkish fears by making clear if it went through this was not US Government policy.
"The Administration continues strongly to oppose this resolution, passage of which may do grave harm to US-Turkish relations," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
Eight former Secretaries of State wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing the non-binding resolution and warning it would endanger US national security interests.
"This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings," President George W. Bush told reporters, hours before the vote.
The showdown, in one sense, is a replay of an issue that has periodically endangered ties between Washington and Ankara. But as the joint letters from all eight living former Secretaries of State and three former Defence Secretaries testify, rarely have the diplomatic stakes been higher, and never have the prospects of passage been greater.
The fight between the White House and Congress comes as the Government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is close to authorising an incursion into northern Iraq to strike at Kurdish rebels, after 15 Turkish soldiers were killed in recent fighting.
Parliament, where Erdogan's ruling centre-right AK Party has a big majority, would have to grant permission for troops to cross the border into Iraq. Passing the measure would not automatically mean Turkish troops would go into northern Iraq.
A Turkish minister said intervention was not likely right away.
"We do not want to go into Iraq ... What happens in northern Iraq is not of interest right away. We are fighting against militants within Turkey," Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay said.
Last week, Erdogan telephoned Bush to complain about the Armenian resolution, and warn that, if it is passed, Turkey would retaliate.
Reprisals could bring a slowdown or even halt to crucial supplies to US forces in Iraq shipped through the Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey, and possibly see the withdrawal of Turkish workers and support staff in Iraq.
For its part, the US is pleading with Erdogan not to send troops into northern Iraq, and risk destabilising the country's most peaceful region.
Passage of the resolution would inflict "great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror," Bush stressed.
Ankara has spared no effort either. A high-level delegation from its Parliament has been on Capitol Hill this week, warning that military co-operation would be jeopardised if the resolution was not dropped.
The Turkish Embassy is paying more than US$300,000 ($393,730) a month to lobbying firms to achieve that end.
The key language in the resolution calls on Bush, in his traditional annual presidential message delivered every April 24 on the events of 90 years ago, to "accurately characterise the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide".
The Turks reject such a description, claiming that although hundreds of thousands of Armenians may have perished, the deaths resulted from forced movements of population and fighting as the Ottoman Empire collapsed during World War I. Vast numbers of Turks also died, they maintain.
Genocide, says Nabi Sensoy, Turkey's Ambassador to the US, "is the greatest accusation of all against humanity. You cannot expect any nation to accept that kind of label."
Polls moreover suggest more than 80 per cent of Turks would favour an end to Ankara's support of the US over Iraq, if the resolution is passed.
The sensitivity of the genocide issue has already forced Bush to eat past words. On the campaign trail in 2000, he referred to "a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension".
But once confronted in office with the realities of power, he has refused to use those words in the annual message - following the example of his father and Bill Clinton before him.
- Independent, Reuters