GOING COLD TURKEY
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
One of the major questions confronting Western strategists and
politicians today has to do with the political direction in
which Turkey, a presumed ally and Western lynchpin in the Middle
East, seems to be heading. Is it the beacon nation it has long
been assumed to be, a stalwart democracy firmly rooted in Islamic
soil? Or is it, on the contrary, a fundamentally Islamic nation
now shaking off its Western trappings and faux identity to re-enter
the theological orbit of the past? Who are we treating with,
the Young Turks or the old Ottomans?
As
Dinesh D’Souza writes in The Enemy at Home, it
is time “to retire the tiresome invocation of Turkey as
a model for Islamic society. No Muslim country is going the
way of Turkey, and even Turkey is no longer going the way of
Turkey.” But is not Turkey an electoral democracy and
does it not therefore merit our approval and support? We in
the West appear to have forgotten that elections in themselves
do not constitute democracy. In the Muslim world, elections
are only mechanisms for regulating the balance between competing
tribal, ethnic and religious blocs intent on political domination,
social coercion and economic exploitation—to be suspended
the moment it seems opportune to do so. They are pretexts for
structures of autocratic or theocratic control. It should come
as no surprise that under the auspices of an ostensible democratic
apparatus, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice
and Development Party (AKP) is steering Turkey towards ever
closer ties with the totalitarian regimes of Iran, Syria and
Sudan and re-introducing Islamic norms of behavior.
The
unpleasant fact of the matter is that in an Islamic context,
democracy as we understand it does not work very well, if, indeed,
it works at all. It is not a reliable or enduring phenomenon.
Secular institutions in such a cultural and historical framework
can survive only if they are imposed and backed by a strong
military determined to check the influence of the clerical establishment
and suppress the circulation of Islamic doctrine and extremist
sentiment among the laity. Thus the folly of The European Commission’s
2005 report which declares that the Turkish army should concern
itself exclusively with “military, defense and security
matters…under the authority of the government,”
ignoring the fact that the secular aspects of the state were
achieved and protected only by internal military interventions.
The
unwillingness of the West to recognize the true state of affairs
regarding Turkey is encapsulated in an AP report on the recent
arrest by the government of fifty Turkish commanders alleged
to have planned a coup d’état. The article
states: “Erdogan also has dramatically curtailed the military’s
power, under EU pressure, and reinforced civilian rule while
bolstering democratic institutions.” Apart from the reference
to (typically misguided) EU pressure, the reality is very different.
By
all reputable accounts, Turkey is inexorably being Islamized,
which was already evident when it refused to permit American
flyovers and the use of military bases and staging grounds during
the second Iraq war. As noted above, political and economic
relations with Iran are growing ever more intimate; a $3.5 billion
natural gas deal has recently been confirmed. There has been
a rapprochement with Syria and the principal bone of contention
between the two countries, the status of the Turkish province
of Hatay claimed by Syria as the historical Iskandaron, has
been quietly buried. Turkey launched a venomous propaganda campaign
against Israel over Operation Cast Lead in the terrorist statelet
of Gaza and refused to cooperate with Israel in long-planned
war games, leading to the U.S. dropping out as well. Erdogan
boasts that Turkey has “opened a new approach to foreign
relations…We have a philosophy of strength.”
Domestically,
the Turkish parliament has cancelled the ban on the hijab, prompting
even the Russian journal RiaNovosti to speculate on
the danger of radical change in the country. As RiaNovosti wryly
points out, “the [pro-hijab] bill will burnish Turkey’s
democratic credentials, hastening its accession to the European
Union”—a clever move, no doubt, given Eurabian sympathies.
Turkey has recently attempted to pass a law criminalizing adultery
in order, according to Erdogan, to preserve the family. The
law did not carry but the current atmosphere in the country
suggests it will be proposed once again. The fact that Mein
Kampf has become a bestseller in Turkey is equally worrying.
For
a sense of what to expect in the future, Turkey’s premier
novelist Orhan Pamuk furnishes a rather disturbing speculum
in his novel, Snow, which anyone interested in taking
the pulse of the country should consult. The snowstorm which
cuts off the town, where the central action occurs, from the
secular West is more than meteorology; it is an emblem and parable
of the gradually closing mindset that prevails in the country.
We
should no longer delude ourselves about Turkey. Barring a successful
military insurrection and a Kemalist revival, it is arguably
lost to the West, or soon will be. Turkey should be met with
forceful economic and diplomatic measures if we wish to prevent
or at least defer a deteriorating situation. It would have to
be made to realize that joining the Islamist axis is not to
its long-term advantage. Significant countervailing pressure
needs to be brought to bear and the secular command of the country’s
military should be effectively supported.
But
the problem, of course, is not only Turkey—or Iran for
that matter, or Russia or any other nation against which we
refuse to exercise leverage. The problem is us. We are addicted
to the drug of appeasement. It is high time we showed a little
character and took steps to bring about our long-overdue political
and moral detoxification. For the reflex posture the West adopts
of conciliation and procrastination, which in the case we are
examining entails indifference to or even complicity with Turkey’s
current domestic and foreign policies, will only hasten its
departure from the fraying nexus of the Western alliance.
