{"id":805,"date":"2010-06-04T01:01:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-04T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=805"},"modified":"2015-10-19T09:45:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T13:45:50","slug":"deeply-troubling-development-on-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=805","title":{"rendered":"A deeply troubling development on the world scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral legitimacy or political capital, there was no one to stand up to or counterbalance the radicals. The consequences are becoming increasingly dire<\/a>:<\/p>\n

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given this, the fact that Turkey was behind the deliberate provocation<\/a> that was the Gaza flotilla is an ominous sign<\/a> (though the fact that the administration, in the person of Joe Biden<\/a>, was willing to stand up to them on Israel’s behalf<\/a> is an encouraging one); a country that was for many years a key ally of the US in the region is now well on its way to becoming another Iran\u2014and while the Turks lack the mullahs’ oil money, they are in all other ways in a far better position to damage us and our allies. If their current moves toward Iran turn into a long-term alliance, that would be an extremely difficult radical Islamic power bloc to counter; if they end up as rivals with Iran, the resulting conflict could be even worse. It’s hard to see a way this turns out well.<\/p>\n

For lack of better options, if Turkey continues to swing in an Islamist direction, maybe the US and Iraqi governments need to get together and figure out a way to strike a deal with the Kurds\u2014see if they would be willing to make concessions to the Iraqis in exchange for all-out assistance against the governments of Iran, Turkey and Syria. After all, as nervous as the government in Baghdad is about the Kurds, at this point one would think Iraq and the Kurds could find real common cause here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[81,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-relations","category-religion-and-theology","post-with-thumbnail","post-with-thumbnail-large"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6R3Ax-cZ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":918,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=918","url_meta":{"origin":805,"position":0},"title":"Doing what comes naturally","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"1 February 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"It is the most natural thing in the world to falsify God. 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