Recent Letters and Turkey

In Backtalk:

Steve Vinson: the real Bush plan for the Mideast can be found in “Securing the Realm” — which doesn’t mention democracy.

Tom Harper: no one spit on Vietnam vets.

Leon Hadar: Britain would fail Rice’s “town-square test.”

Cheryl Hutchinson: (Ex-communist) David Horowitz has included Justin Raimondo — & Ayatollah Khomeni — in his Guide to the Political Left. Wrong. (The left/right polarity should be fine-tuned or ignored, not abused.)

Former US ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, uses the f word.

And more

I was in Britain last year and couldn’t believe how unpopular the Iraq invasion/ occupation is there — and unpopular with the old, rural and conservative, not just the usual suspects. No wonder, as Tom Engelhardt describes in “The Emperor’s Potemkin Visits,” when the president goes abroad he brings a courtier bubble. Robert L. Pollock, senior editorial page writer at the WSJ, couldn’t avoid public opinion when he recently visited Turkey, though (“The Sick Man of Europe — Again“):

… Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged.

…Turkish parliamentarians themselves have accused the U.S. of “genocide” in Iraq, while Mr. Erdogan (who we once hoped would set for the Muslim world an example of democracy) was among the few world leaders to question the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. When confronted, Turkish pols claim they can’t risk going against “public opinion.” …

But the only opposition now is a moribund People’s Republican Party, or CHP, once the party of Ataturk. At a recent party congress, its leader accused his main challenger of having been part of a CIA plot against him. That’s not to say there aren’t a few comparatively pro-U.S. officials left in the current government and the state bureaucracies. But they’re afraid to say anything in public. In private, they whine endlessly about trivial things the U.S. “could have done differently.”

Entirely forgotten is that President Bush was among the first world leaders to recognize Prime Minister Erdogan, while Turkey’s own legal system was still weighing whether he was secular enough for the job. Forgotten have been decades of U.S. military assistance. Forgotten have been years of American efforts to secure a pipeline route for Caspian oil that terminates at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Forgotten has been the fact that U.S. administrations continue to fight annual attempts in Congress to pass a resolution condemning modern Turkey for the long-ago Armenian genocide. Forgotten has been America’s persistent lobbying for Turkish membership in the European Union.

Forgotten, above all, has been America’s help against the PKK. Its now-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was expelled from Syria in 1998 after the Turks threatened military action. He was then passed like a hot potato between European governments, who refused to extradite him to Turkey because — gasp! — he might face the death penalty. He was eventually caught — with the help of U.S. intelligence — sheltered in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. "They gave us Ocalan. What could be bigger than that?" says one of a handful of unapologetically pro-U.S. Turks I still know.

And why has the US’s reputation recently plummeted in Turkey (and just about everywhere else)?:

…[A] 50-year special relationship, between longtime NATO allies who fought Soviet expansionism together starting in Korea, has long had to weather the ideological hostility and intellectual decadence of much of Istanbul’s elite. And at the 2002 election, the increasingly corrupt mainstream parties that had championed Turkish-American ties self-destructed, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the subtle yet insidious Islamism of the Justice and Development (AK) Party. It’s this combination of old leftism and new Islamism — much more than any mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq war — that explains the collapse in relations.

Mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq”? Meaning that the Turks feel pique over their government’s refusal to help the US military invade Iraq?

Even for WSJ‘s editorial page, this analysis is an embarrassment. For the real story see William S. Lind’s “Turkey Imagines the Unimaginable.”

Author: Sam Koritz

I like cheese.