Can Turkey–Iraq relations normalize quickly?

After a long hiatus, Turkey is attempting to normalize its relations with Iraq through recent steps it has taken. To this end, Turkey has brought the Development Road project to the agenda, highlighting the significant contribution the project will make to the Iraqi economy. While these steps are overdue, they are positive. However, the primary steps Turkey expects from Iraq relate to cooperation against terrorism. For this, one must look at implementation, not just promises. 

For many years, it was a mistake for Turkey to ignore and bypass the central government in Baghdad, instead dealing directly with the regional administration in northern Iraq and developing relations with it. Promoting Barzani against Talabani, encouraging him toward independence, and developing commercial relations with him—especially in energy—only to criticize him with harsh words and condemn him without taking deterrent steps when Barzani held an independence referendum, did not benefit Turkey. 

At that time, we frequently emphasized: It is just as contradictory to openly support Barzani in Iraq while claiming to defend Iraq's territorial integrity as it is to claim to defend Syria's territorial integrity while supporting those who want to overthrow Assad. Supporting the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq while opposing the Kurdish autonomous region in Syria is both inconsistent and neither realistic nor sustainable. 

The Kurdish regional administration in northern Iraq never hid its demand for independence, nor its intention to expand a Kurdish state alongside the division of other countries in the region by the US. Barzani never hid that he shared a consensus with Kurdish organizations in Syria toward this goal.

The whole world knows that all four regional countries are targeted for division by the US and that all four are fighting against US-backed terrorist organizations. It is known that the Kurdish state to be established through the division of these four regional countries—that is, the puppet state, the garrison state—is highly desired by Israel as well as the US. Given this situation, it is better understood now that Turkey's support for regime opponents in Iraq (for example, Tariq al-Hashimi) and regime opponents in Syria did not strengthen Turkey's hand, but rather weakened it.  

Therefore, it is necessary to never forget that in the past, the central government in Baghdad blacklisted Turkish firms operating in northern Iraq that were not headquartered in Baghdad, created difficulties in payments made to them, declared that oil agreements made by the regional administration in the north were illegal, and that Turkey had to pay 1.4 billion dollars to Iraq after losing the case filed within the scope of arbitration. 

In short, for Turkey, which wants to normalize relations with Iraq, it is essential to first learn lessons from the mistakes we have tried to list above and to understand what kind of problems deviating from the region-centered foreign policy of our great leader Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has caused.