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| The Grand Turk |
| Empire and Identity - a letter to a Chinese friend |
| 2015-08-14 |
| by David P. Goldman, aka Spengler [AsiaTimes] Erdogan is stupid to believe that he can support ISIS against the Syrian regime and contain it later, you observed when we last met. He is even stupider to believe that he can support ISIS against the Kurds, which is what he is doing at present. The Turkish analyst Burak Bekdil notes that ISIS terrorist attacks on Turkish soil have "so far mainly targeted President Erdogan's ideological/political foes: Alevis in the Reyhanli bombing, and the Kurdish political movement in four separate bomb attacks...Erdogan is hostage to jihadists of his own making." A war with the Kurds will tear Turkey apart. Nothing can stop the demographic ascendancy of the Kurds, and it would seem an extreme of folly to ally with ISIS in order to stop the Kurds. But Erdogan cannot help himself. It is in his nature to do so. Turkey's attempt to construct a secular national identity under Kemal Ataturk and his successors failed, most of all because it ignored the Muslim hinterland of Anatolia, the so-called "black Turks" (as Erdogan describes himself). Erdogan and his party offered a different, "neo-Ottoman" identity for Turkey, blending with the assertion of Turkish leadership in the Muslim world. Turkey embraced Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian military expelled with overwhelming popular approval in July 2013 after the Brotherhood government brought Egypt's economy to the brink of collapse. Turkey embraced the Gazan terrorist group Hamas just before Hamas was humiliated in the 2014 rocket war with Israel. Turkey intervened unsuccessfully in Syria's civil war. At the same time Turkey helped Iran launder billions of dollars to circumvent international sanctions. Erdogan courted Russia for years, but an exasperated Vladimir Putin warned Erdogan last week that his support for ISIS would lead to war. "Turkey has gone from 'zero problems' to 'zero friends,'" wrote Piotr Zalewski in Foreign Policy. To make matters worse, Turkey's debt-fueled economic boom has left Erdogan with a collapsing currency and stock market and a stagnant economy. Nonethless, Erdogan seems to be doubling down on the same failed policy, using ISIS not only as a bludgeon against foreign enemies like Syria's Bashir al-Assad, but against domestic opponents as well. With ISIS in a full-scale war against Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iraq, Turkey's support for the extremist Sunni organization brings Turkey's imperial fantasy into direct conflict with Iran's imperial fantasy. It is in Erdogan's nature to do so. Like Persia, the rump of another failed empire, Turkey could choose to accept a gradual decline, and achieve a modest degree of prosperity as one Western terminus in the One Belt/One Road project. It could dispense with the Kurdish problem easily by encouraging the Kurdish southeast--an economically depressed and strategically irrelevant spur of the country--to secede and form part of a Kurdish state. That would require a different kind of Turkish identity, as different fron the Kemalist nationalism of the past as from the Islamic expansionism of the present. This is not impossible; Turkey has an outward-looking, educated elite that has chafed under the brutal, reckless rule of the Anatolian hinterland. Egypt seemed lost to Islamic extremism under the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi, but now is governed by Gen. Fatah al-Sisi, who believes in reform of Islam to separate religion and state. Egypt's pan-Arabist ambitions of the 1960s were the main cause of instability in the region during the 1960s; Egypt has become a leading force for regional stability. Western Asia needs more leaders like al-Sisi, who can put national prosperity and security ahead of the imperial fantasies of failed empires. Turkey and Iran, by contrast, have undermined their international position and damaged their economies by devoting their policy to imperial delusions rather than national self-interest. Their present governments cannot change their nature, but the countries can. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #2 Erd seems to think he can both hand-feed and train a shark. Good luck with that. |
| Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 2015-08-14 17:11 |
| #1 Excised from a much longer essay that is well worth the read. |
| Posted by: Clomp Omagum5939 2015-08-14 11:47 |