We talked to some Turkish friends today and they say this is right:

[Turkish Parliament member] Ozal and other senior party members urged patience, arguing that the Turkish government could seek another vote in parliament well before U.S. ships now in Turkish waters could reach Kuwait.....

Special elections scheduled for Sunday could also help the measure. [Turkey's Justice and Development Party leader, Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is seeking a vacant parliament seat in that vote, and if he wins, political analysts predict that Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, an ally of Erdogan's, will step aside and let him form a new government. Erdogan was banned from running in the November elections that put his party in power because of a 1998 conviction for reciting a poem with Islamic overtones at a rally. Parliament has since lifted that ban.

If Erdogan becomes prime minister, he could purge the cabinet of several ministers who have opposed the U.S. deployment, an important step because the cabinet's unanimous approval is required to submit a proposal to parliament.

...."The government is not going to let this go down," said Nevzat Yacintas, a Justice and Development Party legislator. "They will do something, I am sure, because the friendship of the United States is very important to us."

According to our friends, Erdogan is a sure bet. They say Abdullah Gul has just been standing in for Erdogan during his "time out" which ends Sunday. One caveat: Our Turkish friends don't speak much English, and we don't speak Turkish. Their six year old bi-lingual child did most of the translating. What we understood from him is that Erdogan was the leader, he said something bad, and got put in "time out", and his friend took over, but his "time out" is up this weekend and he will come back and America will get the support from Turkey it wants. We weren't sure we understood any of it, until we read the Washington Post article quoted above, and then it kind of fell into place. We think. Anyway, it's probably as good a basic "International Relations 101" course as we're likely to get.