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THE DANGERS OF REJECTING TURKEY
Melik Kaylan
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/02/er dogan-turkey-nato-opinions-columnists_0203_melik_k aylan.html
Jan 3 2009
NY
Erdogan's exclamations are the least of it.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of Davos in
a huff last week during a discussion about Gaza in which he berated
Israel and was greeted--like some gold medalist returning home--at
Istanbul airport by banner-waving supporters. For a moment, the rift
between Islam and the West appeared once again to begin at the border
between Turkey and Europe, just as it did for so many centuries.
Nothing could be further from the truth--for now. Most Turks value
their Western secular institutions, and anyway the fault-line begins
deep inside Europe itself, where insular blocs of immigrant Muslims,
from Bradford to Copenhagen, show no inclination to Westernize their
values. They are a good deal more Islamist than Turks in Turkey.
But who knows what the future holds? Every time Erdogan makes a
populist gesture against the West or Israel, he generates a Putinesque
flurry of support for himself in his country--not just among Islamists
but among Turks who resent the West for any number of grievances,
real or imagined.
These days, at a time when Muslims worldwide are in the habit
of conjuring up grievances to suit any occasion, it seems rather
unrewarding to enumerate Turkey's. But Turkey is a hugely strategic
country, a NATO ally and a longstanding friend to the West. What Turks
do and think affects the balance of power in the world, positioned as
they are between the Middle East and Europe, between Russia and the
Arab-Islamic bloc, while serving as a conduit for trade and supplies
to Iraq in the south and Georgia in the north.
So let us consider Turkey's perspective. To start with Erdogan's
personal motives, the first and most important: As the global economy
tanks and brings Turkey with it, he needs to distract attention from
the bottom line.
The Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas noted in this section
recently that Erdogan has acquired a reputation within Turkey for
brutal and bullying flashes of temper, which he doesn't bother to
curb even on camera. One might argue that he felt some personal
resentment toward Israelis for attacking Gaza and thereby spoiling
his painstaking efforts at peacemaking between Israel and Syria
for upward of two years. But publicly accusing Israel's president
of being a child-murderer, as Erdogan did at Davos, does not much
advance the cause of peace, especially as, during public visits to
Turkey by the presidents of Iran and Sudan, Erdogan didn't see fit
to mention suicide bombings or the genocide in Darfur.
No, the fact of the matter is that Erdogan was playing to the
gallery. The gallery he sees in his mind's eye is packed with Arabs
deploying oil money, interspersed with excitable Turks aching over
Turkey's post-Imperial powerlessness, who will sympathize with him
for venting before the world's news media. Politically, he needs Arab
oil money to fund his Islamic political party, the AKP, and a cross
section of domestic public opinion to support his internal struggle
against the secularist military.
Comment On This Story
Since Turkey's military has in past years made strategic alliances
with Israel, Erdogan is striking a shrewd blow against the generals
in rabble-rousing anti-Israeli sentiment. Currently, at the behest of
Erdogan's party, Turkey's judiciary is conducting a witch hunt against
an ever-growing number of pro-secular journalists, intellectuals
and ex-soldiers, who are accused of a highly nebulous "conspiracy"
to overthrow the constitution. No doubt, some of them will soon be
tarred with evidence of having worked too closely with Israel.
The larger issue, though, revolves not around Israel but around
Turkey's disillusion with its friends in the West. Turkey has learned
the hard way that you cannot depend on friends if they don't need
you, and for a while, as the Russian threat diminished, it seemed
like Turkey could be ignored. When push came to shove, decades of
membership in NATO didn't count for much as Turks watched the 1990s
slaughter of former Ottoman-Empire cousins in the Caucasus and Balkans.
In the meantime, the U.S. didn't fulfill its pledge to reimburse
the $100 billion the first Iraq war cost Turkey (from which war,
it should be remembered, the U.S. treasury ultimately made a
profit). Some 500,000 Kurdish refugees entered Turkey at that time,
and pretty soon the Kurdish insurgency within Turkey spiked to new
heights. Then the U.S. wanted another go-around in 2003. This time
the younger Bush administration hadn't even bothered to consult the
Turks on the operation, while the Turkish military was perfectly
aware of clandestine U.S. co-planning with the Iraqi Kurds.
In the meantime, the E.U. clearly didn't intend ever to accept Turkish
membership, and all over the West national assemblies kept up the
threat of Armenian Genocide bills.
Prime Minister Erdogan knows that when he plays the Islamic card,
he is also playing to the anti-Western sentiments of large numbers of
non-Islamist patriotic Turks, even leftist ones. They sense that even
after Turks have embraced the West culturally and politically for nigh
on a century, the West thinks nothing of spurning their embrace. The
Arabs, however, are delighted, as are the Iranians and the Russians.
In all of this, it doesn't matter whether the Turks are right or
wrong, wise or ill-advised in their sense of grievance. What matters
is what happens if the West loses Turkey. The generals could step
in with a coup to right things, but they're not feeling particularly
pro-Western either as Kurdish PKK terrorists continue to operate out
of Iraqi Kurdistan under the noses of American observers.
Iran, Russia and Syria would feel instantly emboldened at having
a flanking threat go neutral on their borders. Up north, Central
Asia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, hemmed in by Russia and Iran, would
become fully isolated. Down south Lebanon would be re-swallowed by
Syria. Mideast oil states would feel the pull of a renewed pan-Islamic
momentum, and Israel's security would suffer directly.
That's just for starters. In the long term, Europe would find that
it has allowed an Islamic state to burgeon again on its frontiers,
adding an external threat to its internal security woes. Imagine a
dominant country like Turkey, a Sunni one at that, adding its weight to
the nuke-swapping, jihad-spewing, crusade-invoking mentality already
at large in the region. Now imagine if the country got destabilized,
creating a kind of Pakistan as a geographical arrowhead into Europe.
Erdogan is certainly playing a dangerous game, but the West is not
in the game at all. While Russia has become Turkey's main trading
partner, Iran a partner in the struggle to contain Kurdish separatism,
Syria ditto, and Arab oil money a major investor, the West keeps not
turning up to the dance while Turkey waits, publicly humiliated.
It won't last. With the likes of Erdogan at the helm, the West's loss
will be its enemies gain.
Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for
Forbes.com. His story "Georgia in the Time of Misha" is featured in
The Best American Travel Writing 2008
Melik Kaylan
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/02/er dogan-turkey-nato-opinions-columnists_0203_melik_k aylan.html
Jan 3 2009
NY
Erdogan's exclamations are the least of it.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of Davos in
a huff last week during a discussion about Gaza in which he berated
Israel and was greeted--like some gold medalist returning home--at
Istanbul airport by banner-waving supporters. For a moment, the rift
between Islam and the West appeared once again to begin at the border
between Turkey and Europe, just as it did for so many centuries.
Nothing could be further from the truth--for now. Most Turks value
their Western secular institutions, and anyway the fault-line begins
deep inside Europe itself, where insular blocs of immigrant Muslims,
from Bradford to Copenhagen, show no inclination to Westernize their
values. They are a good deal more Islamist than Turks in Turkey.
But who knows what the future holds? Every time Erdogan makes a
populist gesture against the West or Israel, he generates a Putinesque
flurry of support for himself in his country--not just among Islamists
but among Turks who resent the West for any number of grievances,
real or imagined.
These days, at a time when Muslims worldwide are in the habit
of conjuring up grievances to suit any occasion, it seems rather
unrewarding to enumerate Turkey's. But Turkey is a hugely strategic
country, a NATO ally and a longstanding friend to the West. What Turks
do and think affects the balance of power in the world, positioned as
they are between the Middle East and Europe, between Russia and the
Arab-Islamic bloc, while serving as a conduit for trade and supplies
to Iraq in the south and Georgia in the north.
So let us consider Turkey's perspective. To start with Erdogan's
personal motives, the first and most important: As the global economy
tanks and brings Turkey with it, he needs to distract attention from
the bottom line.
The Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas noted in this section
recently that Erdogan has acquired a reputation within Turkey for
brutal and bullying flashes of temper, which he doesn't bother to
curb even on camera. One might argue that he felt some personal
resentment toward Israelis for attacking Gaza and thereby spoiling
his painstaking efforts at peacemaking between Israel and Syria
for upward of two years. But publicly accusing Israel's president
of being a child-murderer, as Erdogan did at Davos, does not much
advance the cause of peace, especially as, during public visits to
Turkey by the presidents of Iran and Sudan, Erdogan didn't see fit
to mention suicide bombings or the genocide in Darfur.
No, the fact of the matter is that Erdogan was playing to the
gallery. The gallery he sees in his mind's eye is packed with Arabs
deploying oil money, interspersed with excitable Turks aching over
Turkey's post-Imperial powerlessness, who will sympathize with him
for venting before the world's news media. Politically, he needs Arab
oil money to fund his Islamic political party, the AKP, and a cross
section of domestic public opinion to support his internal struggle
against the secularist military.
Comment On This Story
Since Turkey's military has in past years made strategic alliances
with Israel, Erdogan is striking a shrewd blow against the generals
in rabble-rousing anti-Israeli sentiment. Currently, at the behest of
Erdogan's party, Turkey's judiciary is conducting a witch hunt against
an ever-growing number of pro-secular journalists, intellectuals
and ex-soldiers, who are accused of a highly nebulous "conspiracy"
to overthrow the constitution. No doubt, some of them will soon be
tarred with evidence of having worked too closely with Israel.
The larger issue, though, revolves not around Israel but around
Turkey's disillusion with its friends in the West. Turkey has learned
the hard way that you cannot depend on friends if they don't need
you, and for a while, as the Russian threat diminished, it seemed
like Turkey could be ignored. When push came to shove, decades of
membership in NATO didn't count for much as Turks watched the 1990s
slaughter of former Ottoman-Empire cousins in the Caucasus and Balkans.
In the meantime, the U.S. didn't fulfill its pledge to reimburse
the $100 billion the first Iraq war cost Turkey (from which war,
it should be remembered, the U.S. treasury ultimately made a
profit). Some 500,000 Kurdish refugees entered Turkey at that time,
and pretty soon the Kurdish insurgency within Turkey spiked to new
heights. Then the U.S. wanted another go-around in 2003. This time
the younger Bush administration hadn't even bothered to consult the
Turks on the operation, while the Turkish military was perfectly
aware of clandestine U.S. co-planning with the Iraqi Kurds.
In the meantime, the E.U. clearly didn't intend ever to accept Turkish
membership, and all over the West national assemblies kept up the
threat of Armenian Genocide bills.
Prime Minister Erdogan knows that when he plays the Islamic card,
he is also playing to the anti-Western sentiments of large numbers of
non-Islamist patriotic Turks, even leftist ones. They sense that even
after Turks have embraced the West culturally and politically for nigh
on a century, the West thinks nothing of spurning their embrace. The
Arabs, however, are delighted, as are the Iranians and the Russians.
In all of this, it doesn't matter whether the Turks are right or
wrong, wise or ill-advised in their sense of grievance. What matters
is what happens if the West loses Turkey. The generals could step
in with a coup to right things, but they're not feeling particularly
pro-Western either as Kurdish PKK terrorists continue to operate out
of Iraqi Kurdistan under the noses of American observers.
Iran, Russia and Syria would feel instantly emboldened at having
a flanking threat go neutral on their borders. Up north, Central
Asia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, hemmed in by Russia and Iran, would
become fully isolated. Down south Lebanon would be re-swallowed by
Syria. Mideast oil states would feel the pull of a renewed pan-Islamic
momentum, and Israel's security would suffer directly.
That's just for starters. In the long term, Europe would find that
it has allowed an Islamic state to burgeon again on its frontiers,
adding an external threat to its internal security woes. Imagine a
dominant country like Turkey, a Sunni one at that, adding its weight to
the nuke-swapping, jihad-spewing, crusade-invoking mentality already
at large in the region. Now imagine if the country got destabilized,
creating a kind of Pakistan as a geographical arrowhead into Europe.
Erdogan is certainly playing a dangerous game, but the West is not
in the game at all. While Russia has become Turkey's main trading
partner, Iran a partner in the struggle to contain Kurdish separatism,
Syria ditto, and Arab oil money a major investor, the West keeps not
turning up to the dance while Turkey waits, publicly humiliated.
It won't last. With the likes of Erdogan at the helm, the West's loss
will be its enemies gain.
Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for
Forbes.com. His story "Georgia in the Time of Misha" is featured in
The Best American Travel Writing 2008