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As the war on Islamic State reaches Turkey's border, its victims
include Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's vision of a Turkish-led Sunni
world.
By AMOTZ ASA-EL - 10/25/2014 15:28
KURDISH PROTESTERS set fire to a barricade set up to block the street
as they fight with riot police in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey.
(photo credit:REUTERS)
By sheer coincidence, the Syrian town of Kobani - where Kurdish and
Islamic State fighters have been squaring off in recent weeks -
happens to be tucked just west of Haran, the Turkish spot from which
Abraham disembarked on his journey to the Promised Land.
The current confrontation's many protagonists may have different ideas
about their own promised land, but they all know its location and all
carry a road map leading there.
The Kurds want a state that will weld slivers of Turkey, Syria and
Iraq; President Bashar Assad wants a Syria that will sprawl from the
Anti-Lebanon to the Tigris; Iran wants to suspend a Shi'ite bridge
between the thresholds of Afghanistan and Egypt; Saudi Arabia wants
quiet outside its palaces' gilded windows; and Islamic State's
jihadists want to drown the Middle East in blood and then, as their
leader put it, march on Rome.
One actor, however, seems increasingly disoriented and indecipherable: Turkey.
Hardly a mile from kobani, Turkish officers were seen in recent weeks
surveying pillars of smoke and listening to machine-gun staccatos from
atop their American- made tanks this side of the border. Their failure
to come to the rescue of the predominantly Kurdish town has brought to
mind the Red Army's two-week wait before storming Warsaw, a choice
Poles say was designed to let the Nazis kill more Poles; as well as
the Allies' delay in launching D-Day, which Stalin saw as an
Anglo-American ploy to let the Germans kill yet more Soviets before
Germany's defeat.
The stakes in Kobani are different, as even on the eve of the Syrian
civil war, the dusty town was inhabited by just 50,000; unlike Warsaw,
it is a godforsaken frontier town. Even so, this is where the war on
Islamic State reached Turkey's doorstep, and where the Turkish
response kept the whole world guessing just where Ankara stands, and
what its war aims might be.
The analogies to wartime Germany and Russia have come to mind because
of Turkey's apparent abandonment of Syria's Kurds to Islamic State's
devices. Like the Red Army at Warsaw's gates, the mighty Turkish army,
the world's eighth-largest, can roll ahead and effortlessly scatter
Islamic State's black-clad fighters under a hailstorm of artillery,
armor and fighter jet bombs.
Convinced that Turkey was deliberately abandoning their brethren,
Kurdish rioters took to the streets in early October in cities
throughout Turkey, where police confronted them forcefully, leaving at
least 30 dead and dozens wounded.
The Kurdish aspect of the situation is particularly confusing because
a mere 20 months ago, Turkey launched a peace process with the PKK
(Kurdistan Workers Party), its nemesis of 40 years, which in turn
formally announced a ceasefire and also ordered its fighters to
retreat beyond Turkish borders.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government saw in this
deal a major accomplishment, leaving the impression that such a spirit
of appeasement came more easily to a religious leadership that cared
for nationalism less than its secular predecessors. Now, all this has
unraveled. The Kurds canceled the cease-fire, and many among Turkey's
20-percent Kurdish minority are ready to renew their struggle for
independence.
Yet the Turks not only provoked the same Kurds they had previously
courted and placated, they also thumbed their nose at US President
Barack Obama - by refusing to allow US bombers to take off from
Turkish airfields at Syria's backdoor, compelling them to instead fly
almost 2,000 km. from Arab bases in the Gulf.
Subsequent reports that Ankara was retreating from its refusal to
allow Kurdish units to cross into the battlefields, and ongoing
complaints that Turkey was enabling foreigners' entry into Syria along
the so-called "jihadist highway," intensified confusion over Turkey's
stance.
Pundits and diplomats the world over scratched their heads: Is Turkey
with the Kurds or against them? Is it with America or against it, with
the jihadists or against them?
TURKEY'S ATTITUDE toward the Arab world's four-year period of turmoil
has been driven by three sometimes contradictory sentiments: military
caution, historic pretension and regional frustration.
Thrusting the Turkish military into battle is not as simple as it
sounds, for three reasons: First, the Turkish army has not fought a
war since invading Cyprus 40 years ago. Second, following the entire
general staff's forced resignation three years ago in the wake of
Erdogan's assault on it, the army's new leadership is not as confident
and battle hungry as their predecessors might have been. And lastly, a
fighting, and potentially victorious and glorified, army would
constitute a political threat to Erdogan and his Islamist
administration.
Since modern Turkey's foundation 90 years ago, its generals'
involvement in politics had been blunt and at times violent,
particularly when it came to imposing secularism - until the last
decade, when Erdogan boxed the military and brought its politicking to
an end. Turkish generals now won't touch politics with a 10-foot pole,
but they remain suspected closet secularists. War would empower them -
and empowered generals would be, from Erdogan's viewpoint,
unpredictable.
This caution also explains Erdogan's demand that the US impose a
no-fly zone on Syria, and support him in creating a buffer zone in
northern Syria. Such measures would mean military impact, without
military heroism.
Beside its lack of appetite for military invasion, Turkey has
ideological reasons to avoid the war on Islamic State.
Erdogan, and even more so Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, are driven
by a sense of historic mission that does not sit well with joining a
Western-led assault on Muslims.
Turkish scholars now call the pair's platform "pan-Islamism," as
opposed to the previously used "neo-Ottomanism." One such scholar,
Marmara University's Behlul Ozkan, has studied some 300 articles
Davutoglu penned as an academic before the Islamists' rise to power,
most of which have never been translated. His findings indicate that
Davutoglu believes Turkey has a historic mission to revive and lead a
Sunni triangle that would stretch from North Africa through the
Balkans to Central Asia. In a sense, Islamic State's vision of a
caliphate has stolen Davutoglu's thunder.
Emotionally, Davutoglu's quest for a "New Turkey" is understandable.
Its 27-year-old bid to join the European Union has been an
embarrassment and cause for frustration, as part of pre-Erdogan
Turkey's push to become part of the West. Politically, however,
Turkish pan-Islamism is a non-starter.
It was one thing to join Brazil in an anti-US bid to preserve Iran's
nuclear program, as Ankara did in spring 2010. Such broadsides, while
unthinkable in pre-Erdogan Turkey, are not about who the New Turkey
wants to lead, but about who it does not want to follow. While that
move alarmed many in Washington, it cost the country little in the
Middle East, where later that spring Turkey dispatched the Mavi
Marmara flotilla to Gaza, to much regional applause.
At that point, to the majority of Arabs, Turkey appeared to be merely
seeking to assert itself as an emerging power between East and West.
That is also how Ankara's "zero problems with neighbors" policy
appeared at the time, when it seemed to be seeking rapprochements with
its many antagonistic neighbors, from Greece and Cyprus to Syria and
Armenia.
The Arab upheaval, which began half a year after the Mavi Marmara,
exposed Turkey's designs and unsettled its pan-Islamist plan's
would-be partners. Erdogan's embrace of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
made other Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, recall its Ottoman past
and resolve to prevent what they saw as its possible return.
Now, with the Brotherhood fallen, Erdogan is in an open conflict with
the largest Arab country, Egypt, where politicians this month demanded
a boycott of Turkish goods. This is besides his open conflicts with
Syria and Israel, and the proxy war in which he is embroiled with Iran
in Syria.
Add to this his failed bids to appease the Armenians, Cypriots and now
also the Kurds, and you get a frustrated statesman who, like a
serially dumped lover living in delusion, wonders, "Why doesn't anyone
love me?" Turkey's diplomatic conduct during the Erdogan era, which
began as a plan to make everyone happy, has achieved the exact
opposite, making everyone suspicious - not only from Cairo to Tehran,
but also from Washington to Moscow.
For Russia, Turkey is a historic rival with whom it fought 12 wars in
recent centuries. That alone is cause for Moscow to continuously treat
Ankara with suspicion, but its current pan-Islamist designs make
things even worse - because a Turkish-led, tri-continental Sunni
juggernaut would potentially unsettle Russia's own 20 million, mostly
Sunni.
This is besides a seemingly expansionist Turkey alarming former
Ottoman vassals like Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, not to mention
Greece.
It was against this backdrop that Turkey failed in its recent bid to
join the UN Security Council, losing the vote to Spain. Ankara's
12-year search for a new status as an intercontinental power, it
turned out, produced universal suspicion - and it is against this
backdrop that Turkey now stands at Kobani, unsure what to do.
Openly joining Islamic State is unthinkable, but joining its enemies
would imply a return to the old order, one whereby distant powers
drive across the Middle East using Turkey as their fifth wheel.
Turkey's understanding of the Middle East should never be
underestimated, and it may yet manage to salvage from the current
war's jaws, puppet regimes in Syria and Iraq alongside a limited and
obedient Kurdistan.
Until then, however, Ankara will have to contend with hostile Arab
regimes, distrustful world powers and a Kurdish resurgence it has so
clumsily provoked.
Davutoglu's promised land will remain what it has been from the onset: a dream.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
http://www.jpost.com/International/Foreign-Affairs-Turkeys-elusive-promised-land-379684
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
include Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's vision of a Turkish-led Sunni
world.
By AMOTZ ASA-EL - 10/25/2014 15:28
KURDISH PROTESTERS set fire to a barricade set up to block the street
as they fight with riot police in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey.
(photo credit:REUTERS)
By sheer coincidence, the Syrian town of Kobani - where Kurdish and
Islamic State fighters have been squaring off in recent weeks -
happens to be tucked just west of Haran, the Turkish spot from which
Abraham disembarked on his journey to the Promised Land.
The current confrontation's many protagonists may have different ideas
about their own promised land, but they all know its location and all
carry a road map leading there.
The Kurds want a state that will weld slivers of Turkey, Syria and
Iraq; President Bashar Assad wants a Syria that will sprawl from the
Anti-Lebanon to the Tigris; Iran wants to suspend a Shi'ite bridge
between the thresholds of Afghanistan and Egypt; Saudi Arabia wants
quiet outside its palaces' gilded windows; and Islamic State's
jihadists want to drown the Middle East in blood and then, as their
leader put it, march on Rome.
One actor, however, seems increasingly disoriented and indecipherable: Turkey.
Hardly a mile from kobani, Turkish officers were seen in recent weeks
surveying pillars of smoke and listening to machine-gun staccatos from
atop their American- made tanks this side of the border. Their failure
to come to the rescue of the predominantly Kurdish town has brought to
mind the Red Army's two-week wait before storming Warsaw, a choice
Poles say was designed to let the Nazis kill more Poles; as well as
the Allies' delay in launching D-Day, which Stalin saw as an
Anglo-American ploy to let the Germans kill yet more Soviets before
Germany's defeat.
The stakes in Kobani are different, as even on the eve of the Syrian
civil war, the dusty town was inhabited by just 50,000; unlike Warsaw,
it is a godforsaken frontier town. Even so, this is where the war on
Islamic State reached Turkey's doorstep, and where the Turkish
response kept the whole world guessing just where Ankara stands, and
what its war aims might be.
The analogies to wartime Germany and Russia have come to mind because
of Turkey's apparent abandonment of Syria's Kurds to Islamic State's
devices. Like the Red Army at Warsaw's gates, the mighty Turkish army,
the world's eighth-largest, can roll ahead and effortlessly scatter
Islamic State's black-clad fighters under a hailstorm of artillery,
armor and fighter jet bombs.
Convinced that Turkey was deliberately abandoning their brethren,
Kurdish rioters took to the streets in early October in cities
throughout Turkey, where police confronted them forcefully, leaving at
least 30 dead and dozens wounded.
The Kurdish aspect of the situation is particularly confusing because
a mere 20 months ago, Turkey launched a peace process with the PKK
(Kurdistan Workers Party), its nemesis of 40 years, which in turn
formally announced a ceasefire and also ordered its fighters to
retreat beyond Turkish borders.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government saw in this
deal a major accomplishment, leaving the impression that such a spirit
of appeasement came more easily to a religious leadership that cared
for nationalism less than its secular predecessors. Now, all this has
unraveled. The Kurds canceled the cease-fire, and many among Turkey's
20-percent Kurdish minority are ready to renew their struggle for
independence.
Yet the Turks not only provoked the same Kurds they had previously
courted and placated, they also thumbed their nose at US President
Barack Obama - by refusing to allow US bombers to take off from
Turkish airfields at Syria's backdoor, compelling them to instead fly
almost 2,000 km. from Arab bases in the Gulf.
Subsequent reports that Ankara was retreating from its refusal to
allow Kurdish units to cross into the battlefields, and ongoing
complaints that Turkey was enabling foreigners' entry into Syria along
the so-called "jihadist highway," intensified confusion over Turkey's
stance.
Pundits and diplomats the world over scratched their heads: Is Turkey
with the Kurds or against them? Is it with America or against it, with
the jihadists or against them?
TURKEY'S ATTITUDE toward the Arab world's four-year period of turmoil
has been driven by three sometimes contradictory sentiments: military
caution, historic pretension and regional frustration.
Thrusting the Turkish military into battle is not as simple as it
sounds, for three reasons: First, the Turkish army has not fought a
war since invading Cyprus 40 years ago. Second, following the entire
general staff's forced resignation three years ago in the wake of
Erdogan's assault on it, the army's new leadership is not as confident
and battle hungry as their predecessors might have been. And lastly, a
fighting, and potentially victorious and glorified, army would
constitute a political threat to Erdogan and his Islamist
administration.
Since modern Turkey's foundation 90 years ago, its generals'
involvement in politics had been blunt and at times violent,
particularly when it came to imposing secularism - until the last
decade, when Erdogan boxed the military and brought its politicking to
an end. Turkish generals now won't touch politics with a 10-foot pole,
but they remain suspected closet secularists. War would empower them -
and empowered generals would be, from Erdogan's viewpoint,
unpredictable.
This caution also explains Erdogan's demand that the US impose a
no-fly zone on Syria, and support him in creating a buffer zone in
northern Syria. Such measures would mean military impact, without
military heroism.
Beside its lack of appetite for military invasion, Turkey has
ideological reasons to avoid the war on Islamic State.
Erdogan, and even more so Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, are driven
by a sense of historic mission that does not sit well with joining a
Western-led assault on Muslims.
Turkish scholars now call the pair's platform "pan-Islamism," as
opposed to the previously used "neo-Ottomanism." One such scholar,
Marmara University's Behlul Ozkan, has studied some 300 articles
Davutoglu penned as an academic before the Islamists' rise to power,
most of which have never been translated. His findings indicate that
Davutoglu believes Turkey has a historic mission to revive and lead a
Sunni triangle that would stretch from North Africa through the
Balkans to Central Asia. In a sense, Islamic State's vision of a
caliphate has stolen Davutoglu's thunder.
Emotionally, Davutoglu's quest for a "New Turkey" is understandable.
Its 27-year-old bid to join the European Union has been an
embarrassment and cause for frustration, as part of pre-Erdogan
Turkey's push to become part of the West. Politically, however,
Turkish pan-Islamism is a non-starter.
It was one thing to join Brazil in an anti-US bid to preserve Iran's
nuclear program, as Ankara did in spring 2010. Such broadsides, while
unthinkable in pre-Erdogan Turkey, are not about who the New Turkey
wants to lead, but about who it does not want to follow. While that
move alarmed many in Washington, it cost the country little in the
Middle East, where later that spring Turkey dispatched the Mavi
Marmara flotilla to Gaza, to much regional applause.
At that point, to the majority of Arabs, Turkey appeared to be merely
seeking to assert itself as an emerging power between East and West.
That is also how Ankara's "zero problems with neighbors" policy
appeared at the time, when it seemed to be seeking rapprochements with
its many antagonistic neighbors, from Greece and Cyprus to Syria and
Armenia.
The Arab upheaval, which began half a year after the Mavi Marmara,
exposed Turkey's designs and unsettled its pan-Islamist plan's
would-be partners. Erdogan's embrace of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
made other Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, recall its Ottoman past
and resolve to prevent what they saw as its possible return.
Now, with the Brotherhood fallen, Erdogan is in an open conflict with
the largest Arab country, Egypt, where politicians this month demanded
a boycott of Turkish goods. This is besides his open conflicts with
Syria and Israel, and the proxy war in which he is embroiled with Iran
in Syria.
Add to this his failed bids to appease the Armenians, Cypriots and now
also the Kurds, and you get a frustrated statesman who, like a
serially dumped lover living in delusion, wonders, "Why doesn't anyone
love me?" Turkey's diplomatic conduct during the Erdogan era, which
began as a plan to make everyone happy, has achieved the exact
opposite, making everyone suspicious - not only from Cairo to Tehran,
but also from Washington to Moscow.
For Russia, Turkey is a historic rival with whom it fought 12 wars in
recent centuries. That alone is cause for Moscow to continuously treat
Ankara with suspicion, but its current pan-Islamist designs make
things even worse - because a Turkish-led, tri-continental Sunni
juggernaut would potentially unsettle Russia's own 20 million, mostly
Sunni.
This is besides a seemingly expansionist Turkey alarming former
Ottoman vassals like Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, not to mention
Greece.
It was against this backdrop that Turkey failed in its recent bid to
join the UN Security Council, losing the vote to Spain. Ankara's
12-year search for a new status as an intercontinental power, it
turned out, produced universal suspicion - and it is against this
backdrop that Turkey now stands at Kobani, unsure what to do.
Openly joining Islamic State is unthinkable, but joining its enemies
would imply a return to the old order, one whereby distant powers
drive across the Middle East using Turkey as their fifth wheel.
Turkey's understanding of the Middle East should never be
underestimated, and it may yet manage to salvage from the current
war's jaws, puppet regimes in Syria and Iraq alongside a limited and
obedient Kurdistan.
Until then, however, Ankara will have to contend with hostile Arab
regimes, distrustful world powers and a Kurdish resurgence it has so
clumsily provoked.
Davutoglu's promised land will remain what it has been from the onset: a dream.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
http://www.jpost.com/International/Foreign-Affairs-Turkeys-elusive-promised-land-379684
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress