Airspace rights are crucial. One insider privy to the war-planning said: “If we don’t get [the] airspace, the military are telling us it’s not a showstopper, but it’s certainly a big impediment.” NEWSWEEK has learned that the United States asked for 11 air corridors over Turkey and also requested use of Hakkari air base as a pit stop for KC-135 tankers, plus the right to run airstrikes out of Incirlik air base. An air campaign out of Turkey is so crucial that President Bush and Vice President Cheney both phoned Erdogan last week to press the request, and Bush wrote him a personal letter. But NEWSWEEK has learned that Erdogan has decided that there will be no deal without parliamentary approval. Erdogan suggested, sources say, that it might be a week or more before he put the issue to Parliament.
U.S. military sources say that about 70 F-16s were slated to fly strikes against northern Iraq from Turkish air bases. Their primary mission: provide air cover for the lightly armed forces now set to go into northern Iraq to secure the vital oilfields around Kirkuk and Mosul. When Turkey rejected the initial U.S. plan to launch a tank division south from Turkey, CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks’s fallback plan–insert light forces by air–assumed intensive air cover to provide the firepower those forces would lack. Without Turkish bases, one source said, that air cover would have to be provided by long-range B-1 and B-52 bombers.
