Between East and West; Turkey is perfectly poised to spearhead America's attempts to reform the Middle East. But Ankara has good reasons not to.

Byline: Owen Matthews, With Sami Kohen in Istanbul

Turkey's place at center stage for this week's NATO summit is more than symbolic. Beyond Iraq, both the United States and Europe have one dominant policy mission--to break the logjam of political dysfunction in the Middle East. Turkey seems the perfect broker: the country is Islamic but secular; despite ongoing bombings like the ones last week that killed four people, it's relatively peaceful; it has abandoned its police-state past, and it's run by a moderate, Islamic-leaning government that has shown a strong interest in reforming the wider Muslim world.

But when U.S. President George W. Bush presses Ankara to get onboard with Washington's so-called Greater Middle East Project, he's likely to be gently rebuffed. Turkey has long seen itself as a bridge between East and West, and has been engaging with its Islamic neighbors more than it has for a generation. But Ankara policymakers say the country is not going to do so on Washington's terms. Turkey favors Europe's softly-softly approach to the Middle East. That's not just because the country wants to join the EU, but because the Turks are convinced that any project carrying a U.S. stamp is a nonstarter in the region. (On Saturday, in fact, three Turks were taken hostage in Iraq and threatened with beheading unless their countrymen stopped cooperating with U.S.-led forces in Iraq.)

Sources at NATO headquarters say that Bush's radical plans for reforming the Middle East have so little support that they aren't even going to be mentioned in the end-of-summit communique. Instead the project, now renamed the Istanbul Cooperative Initative, may be tackled in a separate document, and even that "will be an expression of support, but not engagement," says one European ambassador to NATO.

So how come Turkey, for decades a closer ally of Washington than of Brussels, is siding with the Bush skeptics? Domestic opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq remains strong. "Being an ally does not mean that you accept everything," warned Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as he cold-shouldered a recent U.S. request for access to Turkish military bases. Ankara's top foreign-policy objective is ...