If you’re going to enter the the­atre of Cen­tral Asian geopol­i­tics, be sus­pect of the pro­gram they hand you at the door. The actors have a ten­dency to switch roles at will or even play more than one char­ac­ter simul­ta­ne­ously.
Turkey’s ambi­tions to reestab­lish an Ottoman Empire Lite along the Old Silk Road would nor­mally be expected to foment noth­ing but resis­tance from China, who has to worry about a Tur­kic lin­guis­tic and eth­nic minor­ity at her west­ern back door. But China’s pol­icy of soft power expan­sion­ism helps avoids much direct confrontation.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1230/china_and_turkey_revive_silk_road
“The lead­ers of the world’s fastest grow­ing economies in Eura­sia met in Bei­jing last month. Prime Min­is­ter Erdogan’s visit to China, com­ing soon after president-in-waiting Xi Jinping’s visit to Turkey might have her­alded a new dawn of Sino-Turkic rela­tions on the old Silk Road: in Cen­tral Asia.“
China would rather absorb ene­mies than fight them. A still fur­ther basis for coop­er­a­tion with Turkey is both par­ties’ mutual desire to hold Rus­sia in check in the Earth Island. Con­sis­tent with this, the EU/US block offers its ten­ta­tive sup­port for this oth­er­wise sur­pris­ing alliance, con­sid­er­ing that China faces a real threat from a revived Tur­kic union.

“This could be an oppor­tu­nity for the United States to enlist these two dynamic economies to con­tribute to sta­bil­ity in the region once West­ern forces have with­drawn from Afghanistan. It could also emerge as an alter­na­tive to U.S. influ­ence in the region. Much depends on how Wash­ing­ton approaches the revived relationship.”

Read the above as: Turkey’s pos­si­ble grow­ing influ­ence in the region ( act­ing as a proxy for the EU ) can be steered more firmly against Rus­sia by manip­u­lat­ing his­tor­i­cal Russ­ian and Chi­nese com­pe­ti­tion for the loy­al­ties of Cen­tral Asian gov­ern­ments. As US mil­i­tary intim­i­da­tion fades (slightly) from the area, China, Turkey and Pak­istan can take up the slack, hold­ing the Russ­ian bear at bay. See­ing the inevitable and posi­tion­ing her­self for max­i­mum advan­tage, the dis­mem­ber­ment of Syria and Iran may not be resisted by China overmuch.

It’s too tempt­ing, given the topic, not to make some sweep­ing obser­va­tions con­trast­ing the Tur­kic peo­ple and the Chi­nese and their respec­tive histories.

Very, very roughly, Turks = Mon­gols = Huns = Manchus = Scythi­ans = Bul­gars = Mag­yars = Moghuls = Khaz­ars = Ottomans. The hard edged north Asian peo­ple who were the main prog­en­i­tors of the native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion and who first domes­ti­cated the horse went on to invent the stir­rup so that they could have both hands free to kick for­eign­ers’ asses (ignore con­fus­ing hand/foot metaphor). They began early, begin­ning about 3000 years ago, and have stayed late.

One his­tor­i­cal puz­zle is where they got the raw num­bers to repeat­edly invade and con­quer all within reach on the Eurasian con­ti­nent. The Manchus were one spe­cific incar­na­tion of the north­ern con­querors who made a cult of their rela­tion­ship to their horses and wore a long braid in imi­ta­tion of a horses tail. Loyal sub­jects were expected to emu­late this, hence the ‘que’ of Chi­nese stereotype.

The Hun and Mon­gol inroads into Europe sur­vive into the present day and their var­i­ous incar­na­tions, across cen­turies, held together the lin­guis­tic and cul­tural iden­tity known today as ‘Turk’ with its rec­og­nized roots in Siberia. (‘Turk’ prob­a­bly comes from a word mean­ing ‘blue’ of the Blue Horde.)

The peo­ple we know today as Chi­nese, on the other hand, are more sinned against than sin­ning in the inva­sion and expan­sion arena. China has been invaded, con­quered and frag­mented by the north­ern­ers a dozen times ( not to men­tion Japan and Europe in liv­ing mem­ory ) and, whether it takes decades or cen­turies, tol­er­ates the invaders and assim­i­lates them, until the day when the Chi­nese lan­guage, cul­ture and iden­tity reemerges united and seem­ingly unscathed. It is some­what of an over-generalization and sounds close to racial chau­vin­ism to say it but the his­tor­i­cal evi­dence is about cul­ture, not genet­ics, and shows this: The Chi­nese are much more sur­vival­ist ori­ented than expan­sion­ist and so tend to the long view. The Turks, in con­trast and if they fol­low the incli­na­tions of their Siber­ian war­rior fore­bears, want what they want now.

Com­par­ing the sim­ple cli­mac­tic com­mon­al­i­ties of Euro­pean and Asian his­tory and con­sid­er­ing the seem­ingly innate aggres­sive­ness of Scan­di­na­vian and north­ern Ger­man peo­ples. a recipe for cre­at­ing a war­like cul­ture would seem to be sim­ply freez­ing them for a few mil­lenia. Then watch out when they come from behind the glacier.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3132/turkey-sex-lies-and-videotapes

Turkey’s Sex, Lies and Videotapes

by Claire Berlin­ski
June 26, 2012 at 8:30 am

If you are not allowed to keep these tapes on your com­puter, how can you threaten your ene­mies with them? The issue peo­ple should have been con­cerned about was not porn at all, but the imple­men­ta­tion of a sys­tem that allows the gov­ern­ment at will to to shut off chan­nels of polit­i­cal dis­sent – a feat it man­aged quite successfully.

Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals did not crim­i­nal­ize all porn recently—it just ruled that any­one in pos­ses­sion of videos depict­ing oral or anal sex may be sen­tenced to prison. This fol­lowed a recent rul­ing iden­ti­fy­ing videos of gay and group sex as “unnatural”—that is, in the same legal cat­e­gory as videos depict­ing sex with ani­mals, chil­dren and corpses, all of which are for­bid­den by Arti­cle 262.2 of the Turk­ish Penal Code. This arti­cle stip­u­lates that own­ing, traf­fick­ing, dis­trib­ut­ing or pub­lish­ing such videos will earn you one-to-four. The rul­ing fol­lowed the sen­tenc­ing by a local court of a sus­pect to six months in prison for sell­ing CDs that depicted what we in the deca­dent West might call “send­ing your hus­band off to the office happy.”

The case went up to the Supreme Court of Appeals, which not only ruled that the defendant’s sen­tence was too low, but declared that the activ­ity in ques­tion was also “unnat­ural”— on a par with necrophilia. The court thus over­ruled the orig­i­nal sen­tence and replaced it with one con­sis­tent with Arti­cle 262.2.

As if this were not enough to chill the country’s libido, the new rul­ing applies both to videos down­loaded from the Inter­net or stored on a per­sonal com­puter— in other words, it prob­a­bly applies to every male with a com­puter in Turkey: accord­ing to Google, Turkey leads the world in searches for the word “porn” (fol­lowed, if you are curi­ous, by Roma­nia and Peru). As one Turk­ish friend put it, “Who wants to watch porn with­out oral sex?”

Bans on porn in Turkey are noth­ing new—after the 1980 coup, for exam­ple, the mil­i­tary imposed a desul­tory ban; but what really hap­pened was that news­pa­pers unable to report about any­thing else started com­pet­ing on skin, until, by the end of the decade, porn was a growth indus­try. A Turk­ish friend recently nos­tal­gi­cally rem­i­nisced about the kids who sold Kleenex out­side his favorite Beyo­glu cin­ema when he was grow­ing up.

By the late 1990s, the porn indus­try here was appar­ently in its Golden Age. I don’t know much about it and don’t really want to do the research; I’ll just take everyone’s word for it. Then the AKP came to power and began crack­ing down. In 2004, mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment passed leg­is­la­tion mak­ing it ille­gal to dis­trib­ute “obscene” images, words, or texts through any means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – pretty much crim­i­nal­iz­ing the entire coun­try. In 2005, they banned the four erotic tele­vi­sion chan­nels avail­able on Turkey’s sole satel­lite provider: Dig­i­turk. Play­boy TV, Exot­ica TV, Adult Chan­nel, and Rouge TV all dis­ap­peared, to lit­tle out­cry. No one watched porn on satel­lite TV anyway—it had long since entered the Inter­net age.

But then they went too far: They announced plans to fil­ter the stuff off the Inter­net. Del­i­cacy pre­vents me from list­ing the banned words, but their move prompted the kind of out­rage usu­ally not seen in Turkey: peo­ple who had never before expressed the faintest inter­est in attend­ing a protest said they planned to attend one.

There were mas­sive cam­paigns against the leg­is­la­tion on Face­book and Twit­ter, some of them quite sophis­ti­cated, defend­ing the right to unfet­tered Inter­net access. The gov­ern­ment was forced to back down: it would intro­duce a fil­ter­ing sys­tem, it said, but adults could opt out.

The issue peo­ple should have been con­cerned about, of course, was not porn at all, but the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion of a sys­tem that allows the gov­ern­ment at will to shut off chan­nels of polit­i­cal dis­sent – a feat it man­aged quite successfully.

The gov­ern­ment has not given up the dream of ban­ning porn, or books, for that mat­ter. Last year, the Board for Pro­tec­tion of Minors from Obscene Pub­li­ca­tions brought a case against both the pub­lisher and the Turk­ish trans­la­tor of The Soft Machine by William Bur­roughs, pro­nounc­ing the book “incom­pat­i­ble with the morals of soci­ety and the people’s honor,” “inju­ri­ous to sex­u­al­ity” and “gen­er­ally repug­nant.” The owner of the pub­lish­ing house, Irfan Sanci, had been tried on sim­i­lar charges the year prior, and was acquit­ted for pub­lish­ing a Turk­ish trans­la­tion of Apollinaire’s The Adven­tures of a Young Don Juan. Now, how­ever, the trans­la­tor of The Soft Machine, Suha Sertabi­boglu, faces up to three years in prison if con­victed. The Board for the Pro­tec­tion of Minors also brought the pub­lisher and trans­la­tor of Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff to trial on charges of obscen­ity. Snuff is a satire of the porn indus­try, not an exam­ple of it, but the level of Eng­lish lan­guage com­pre­hen­sion and lit­er­ary sophis­ti­ca­tion one would need to appre­ci­ate this is far beyond that of the Board. The Board, by the way, has existed since 1921, but has been so som­no­lent that no one I know can even remem­ber hear­ing about it until the AKP won its third term.

Given the num­ber of politi­cians, gen­er­als, jour­nal­ists and other fig­ures who have been black­mailed with ille­gally filmed video­tapes of their sex­ual activ­ity, this new rul­ing puts black­mail­ers, in par­tic­u­lar, in a legal conun­drum: If you aren’t allowed to keep these tapes on your com­puter, how can you threaten your ene­mies with them?

Illicit sex tapes were a major fea­ture of the last gen­eral elec­tion cam­paign that brought the AKP back to power for its third and arguably least glo­ri­ous term. One well-timed sex-tape scan­dal after another held the oppo­si­tion par­ties hostage, and may have con­tributed to the AKP’s cap­ture of 326 votes in the 550 seat parliament—almost enough to put its pro­pos­als for con­sti­tu­tional reform to a ref­er­en­dum with­out the sup­port of any other party. (Or per­haps it lost seats instead: Quite a bit of the coun­try was just dis­gusted by the whole busi­ness.) Released just a month before the June 12 elec­tion, one tape appeared to show two (mar­ried) senior oppo­si­tion party mem­bers engaged in a bit of rumpy-pumpy with female uni­ver­sity stu­dents. The anony­mous cin­e­matog­ra­phers warned the leader of the minor­ity Nation­al­ist Move­ment Party, or MHP, that if he did not want to see more sex and audio tapes of his clos­est aides released, he might like to step aside.

It’s pos­si­ble that the wave of tape-scandals was an inside job: Some believed they were the work of a dis­sent­ing fac­tion of the MHP. But they were also widely rumored to be the hand­i­work of the AKP or its sup­port­ers, and designed to push the MHP below the 10% elec­tion thresh­old. This would have barred the MHP from enter­ing par­lia­ment and reas­signed its seats to the par­ties that passed, giv­ing the AKP the super­ma­jor­ity its mem­bers so badly wanted to be able to pass a new con­sti­tu­tion with­out a ref­er­en­dum. It almost worked, too—the MHP squeaked in with just 53 seats.

While the tech­nique of rid­ding one­self of polit­i­cal rivals by means of a well-timed sex-tape leak is hardly unknown to the West, in Turkey the rit­ual has cer­tain unique cul­tural adap­ta­tions: In the pre-election video­tape scan­dal, a group that called itself “Dif­fer­ent Ide­al­ism” began sys­tem­at­i­cally releas­ing video­tapes of MHP lead­ers in indeco­rous poses with, as one colum­nist here chastely put it, “women who do that sort of thing for a liv­ing.” Two video clips depicted Bülent Did­in­mez, a deputy chair­man and for­mer MHP Istan­bul provin­cial branch leader and par­lia­men­tary can­di­date Ihsan Barutçu involved in acts that def­i­nitely did not involve the women to whom they were mar­ried. The clips were released shortly after a video­tape dis­play­ing deputy chair­men and Adana Deputy Recai Yildirim and Kirse­hir Deputy Metin Çobanoglu in an “inti­mate” con­ver­sa­tion with two women to whom they, too, were not wed. When MHP leader Bahçeli pub­licly demanded the errant party lead­ers’ res­ig­na­tion, they stepped down.

Up to this point we are still in famil­iar territory—all of this could have hap­pened in the West. But then Did­in­mez and Barutçu defended them­selves by say­ing that they had taken the women in the videos as their sec­ond wives—so it was all in fact quite legit­i­mate, you see. The men claimed that many of the rul­ing AKP mem­bers had sec­ond or third wives out­side their civil mar­riages, so they were only doing the same thing. Not even John Edwards could come up with a defense like that.

Of course, no scan­dal in Turkey is com­plete with­out the accu­sa­tion of a for­eign con­spir­acy: Deputy MHP Chair­man Faruk Bal indig­nantly announced that “this is a prod­uct of a plan by domes­tic and for­eign cir­cles, and those who wish to see par­lia­ment with­out the MHP in it are actors of this plan.”

His expla­na­tion, how­ever, did not fly. Ten high-ranking party lead­ers were forced to resign after videos were released of them engaged in var­i­ous shades of socia­bil­ity with women def­i­nitely not their wives in a house the MHP appar­ently main­tained for these secret liaisons. Worst of all, one of these men was caught on film bitch­ing to his mis­tress about Devlet Bahçeli, the MHP party leader. There is stu­pid, then there is really stu­pid. This is Turkey: Take a sec­ond wife, okay, but do not crit­i­cize the party leader.

It is cus­tom­ary, in Turkey, to blame Fethul­lah Gülen for these cin­e­mato­graphic feats. The aged preacher, who lives in self-imposed exile in the Poconos, is widely believed (not with­out rea­son) to con­trol every­thing in Turkey, although most likely even he does not con­trol these recre­ational par­tial­i­ties. State pros­e­cu­tor Nuh Mete Yük­sel, famous for indict­ing and impris­on­ing then-mayor and now prime min­is­ter Erdo­gan for read­ing, at a party rally, a poem with a puta­tively anti-secular inter­pre­ta­tion, filed for the arrest of Gülen on August 3, 2000, at the Ankara State Court of Secu­rity on the charge that his sym­pa­thiz­ers and he had sought to over­throw the sec­u­lar state. A mere year later, a secretly-taped video of Yük­sel engaged in hanky-panky (rumpy-pumpy, indeco­rous activ­i­ties, what­ever you like ...) with a sub­or­di­nate was released to the pub­lic. We can extend this list. If, for exam­ple, you want to know the fate of the jour­nal­ist Ali Kirca, who broad­cast the video­tape of the Gülen ser­mon that prompted Yük­sel to file those charges, try this Google search.

In fair­ness, it must be noted, that in Turkey there is a long sec­u­lar tra­di­tion of video­tape shenani­gans. The main oppo­si­tion CHP leader, Deniz Baykal was filmed in happy bon­homie with one of his party’s female MPs, forc­ing him to resign — a CHP inside job, most believe; and while few could approve of the method, every­one approved of the out­come. Baykal was a fos­silized old bore with no hope what­so­ever of win­ning an election—not that his mouse-like suc­ces­sor, Kemal Kil­iç­daroglu, has been the improve­ment every­one had hoped for.

Inci­den­tally, they—whoever “they” are—have not been con­fin­ing them­selves to black­mail­ing oppo­si­tion politi­cians, gen­er­als and dis­si­dents of all stripes. They have also been film­ing their kids. Turn­ing people’s kids into unin­ten­tional porn stars is about as dirty as it gets. Sadly, jour­nal­ists who viewed the harass­ment of the fam­ily of the blind Chi­nese rights activist Chen Guangchen as beyond the unspeak­able have not once sug­gested, as far as I know, that the humil­i­a­tion and harass­ment of the fam­i­lies of dis­si­dents in Turkey might be wor­thy of some moral out­rage, as well.

Shortly before the Turk­ish police arrested the for­mer 1st Army Corps com­man­der Gen­eral Hasan Igsiz on charges of “mak­ing pro­pa­ganda cam­paigns against civil­ian groups and the gov­ern­ment,” pho­tos of his son’s bob­bling and naked rear end were splashed across the tabloid press. The term “civil­ian groups” is a euphemism here—the group in ques­tion is the Gülen movement—and Hakan Igsiz, whose anatomy became mildly famous, is not in much doubt that Gülen’s sup­port­ers were the cin­e­matog­ra­phers. Hakan, by the way, a sound tech­ni­cian, men­tioned that he was in awe of the excep­tion­ally high qual­ity of their audio equipment—he said he had seen noth­ing like it in the indus­try before.

The really huge news for black­mail­ers, though, is the government’s pro­posal to ban the pub­li­ca­tion in dig­i­tal news­pa­pers and the press of illegally-acquired sound record­ings. Some believe that the pur­pose of this leg­is­la­tion is to pro­tect prime min­is­ter Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan from the kind of embar­rass­ment to which he was exposed when it was revealed that his intel­li­gence chief and per­sonal con­fi­dant, Hakan Fidan, had been sur­rep­ti­tiously nego­ti­at­ing with the PKK—this despite Erdogan’s recent cam­paign blus­ter that had he been in charge when PKK leader Abdul­lah Öcalan was cap­tured, he would have had him hanged.

Erdo­gan is now try­ing to arrange a deal to release the impris­oned mil­i­tary offi­cers, who for years have been lan­guish­ing in prison with­out a con­vic­tion. Why, you might won­der, does he want to do that? Well, we would all like to know, but the best we can do is guess. Per­haps he is wor­ried that more offi­cers will be hit, leav­ing in tat­ters what is left of the mil­i­tary. Per­haps he is wor­ried that the Gülenist infil­tra­tion of the mil­i­tary has gone too far and is becom­ing a dan­ger to him. Erdo­gan may be many things; a fool is not one of them: The sit­u­a­tion in Syria may have reminded him that he might actu­ally need his mil­i­tary, and in par­tic­u­lar the gen­er­als who know how to use it—the best of whom are all in jail.

This, of course, has the Gülen move­ment in a panic. There is no greater night­mare sce­nario for Gülen’s sup­port­ers than the com­bined and con­sid­er­able wrath of Erdo­gan and the mil­i­tary. So in Turkey, as in the US, leak­ing sea­son is here. The pro­posal to ban the pub­li­ca­tion of such record­ings has the news­pa­pers that plumped for the impris­on­ment of Turkey’s top mil­i­tary brass, and who are sym­pa­thetic to Gülen—who is no longer sym­pa­thetic to Erdogan—panic-stricken. Of late, Gülen’s sup­port­ers have been releas­ing illegally-taped record­ings almost every day, mostly from jailed mil­i­tary lead­ers in Has­dal prison. These recordings—unsurprisingly—reveal that the men in jail are furi­ous and wish ill upon the peo­ple who put them there—many of whom hap­pen to be, in their eyes, the jour­nal­ists fran­ti­cally leak­ing these tapes. Tapes are sur­fac­ing from their archives almost every day now, killing two birds with one stone: first, the tapes hint that if the offi­cers are released, the mil­i­tary will take bloody revenge; sec­ond, the jour­nal­ists need to empty their pock­ets before their record­ings are banned.

It is rumored that Gülen’s sup­port­ers have quite the col­lec­tion of record­ings of Erdo­gan and his inti­mates (polit­i­cal or oth­er­wise). It is also rumored — and pretty obvi­ous — that they are threat­en­ing Erdo­gan with the release of record­ings by means of unsub­tle mes­sages con­veyed by sym­pa­thetic jour­nal­ists such as Emre Uslu and Mehmet Baransu, who hint darkly on Twit­ter of their knowl­edge of “igrenç” infor­ma­tion— a word Turk­ish for “dis­gust­ing,” and pre­cious for its ono­matopoeic apt­ness. I could not with cer­tainty say this is what is happening—I’m not the one putting hid­den cam­eras under people’s beds—but if I were a bet­ting woman, I would place every penny I had on it.

Turkey is one of the world’s most opaque coun­tries, so it is hard to dis­cern which snake is bit­ing which tail in this story, which broke the other week:

Police and spe­cially autho­rized pros­e­cu­tors raided sev­eral homes and mil­i­tary build­ings across the coun­try yes­ter­day as part of an ongo­ing probe into an alleged espi­onage ring. ...

The loca­tions searched included secure mil­i­tary build­ings, includ­ing the Gen­eral Com­mand of the Turk­ish Gen­darmerie Forces, the Navy, the Spe­cial Forces Com­mand top secret room and the Mil­i­tary Hos­pi­tal (GATA) in Ankara.

The lat­est raids were part of an inves­ti­ga­tion launched in Izmir last month into alle­ga­tions that secret mil­i­tary doc­u­ments were acquired through black­mail. Accord­ing to the probe, nine active-duty mem­bers of the mil­i­tary allegedly used a pros­ti­tu­tion ring to black­mail high-ranking offi­cers and obtain con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion about the Turk­ish military.

The mem­bers of the pros­ti­tu­tion ring allegedly recorded secret footage of high-ranking offi­cers as they had sex­ual inter­course with escorts and later used the footage to black­mail them. The active-duty sol­diers police arrested had been black­mailed them­selves and later par­tic­i­pated in ensnar­ing their col­leagues. They also allegedly prof­ited finan­cially from the ring’s activities.

There is almost cer­tainly more to this than what you just read. And this is the model democ­racy we are pro­mot­ing to the Mid­dle East?

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/turkey-davutologu-ottoman-new-order-mideast.html

Davu­to­glu Invokes Ottoman­ism As a New Order for Mideast
[US Sec­re­tary of State John Kerry (L) shakes hands with Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Ahmet Davu­to­glu after their news con­fer­ence at Ankara Palas in Ankara, March 1, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Umit Bektas)]

By: Tulin Daloglu for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse. Posted on March 10.

Speak­ing of the inter­na­tional order or lack thereof has always been con­tro­ver­sial. For Turkey to chal­lenge the inter­na­tional order, how­ever, car­ries some real risks — sim­ply because it’s a NATO mem­ber coun­try, and its objec­tions raise ques­tions as to whether it’s propos­ing an alter­na­tive for­eign pol­icy to this mil­i­tary bloc’s gen­er­ally per­ceived world­view, and if so, whether it is diverg­ing in its per­cep­tion of secu­rity issues from the rest. NATO is also the most sig­nif­i­cant alliance Turkey has, anchor­ing it in the West.
About This Arti­cle
Summary :

Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Ahmet Davutoglu’s sug­ges­tion of an Ottoman model for a new Mid­dle East order is likely a mis­read­ing of regional pol­i­tics that could prove hard for Turkey to back away from, writes Tulin Daloglu.
Author: Tulin Daloglu
Posted on : March 10 2013
Cat­e­gories : Orig­i­nals Turkey Syria Security

The ongo­ing crit­i­cism that comes out of Ankara to the inter­na­tional order is not news. The Erdo­gan gov­ern­ment has been vocally ask­ing for the enlarge­ment of the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil, espe­cially since the Russ­ian and Chi­nese veto power has been pre­sented as the main stum­bling block before the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to estab­lish no-fly zones in the war-torn Syr­ian bat­tle­field for the past two years.

As set­ting a no-fly zone lit­er­ally means for the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to decide to go to war against Syria — since they need to knock down all the radar sys­tems to do that, Ankara there­fore has also been ral­ly­ing for war against the Assad regime. While Turkey’s ini­tia­tives on that were not real­ized, NATO responded pos­i­tively to Turkey’s request to install Patriot mis­siles on its ter­ri­tory as a pre­cau­tion against an esca­la­tion of the Syr­ian fight­ing into Turkey. Yet Ankara has been tire­lessly com­plain­ing about the lack of the inter­na­tional community’s moral oblig­a­tion to Syr­i­ans, while being dread­fully depen­dent on it, maybe more than ever, for the pro­tec­tion of its east­ern bor­ders — not only with the Assad regime, but poten­tially with Iraq and Iran as well. And not that all this coop­er­a­tion has to be about mil­i­tary engage­ment, but Ankara needs the polit­i­cal sup­port of the coun­tries that it crit­i­cizes to keep things under con­trol and to its benefit.

The rea­son for this entire intro­duc­tion is sim­ply this: It’s more than likely now than ever that Ankara has been mis­read­ing the cur­rent devel­op­ments in its neigh­bor­hood, and the mak­ing of the new world order.

Like Henry Kis­sen­ger, Ahmet Davu­to­glu, the Turk­ish For­eign Min­is­ter, is also com­ing from acad­e­mia — but it’s very likely that he is find­ing it way too dif­fi­cult to admit that his aca­d­e­mic the­o­ries actu­ally has not been prac­ti­cally work­ing on the ground — yet he keeps on dwelling in the same direc­tion with­out any hope. Kissinger, a for­mer sec­re­tary of state, was more prac­ti­cal in that sense.

Take Davutoglu’s recent remarks on two con­sec­u­tive days, March 3 and 4 — as an exam­ple. First he claims that Turkey for the first time has finally been back to the lands that were lost dur­ing the Ottoman times, and he sug­gests that it’s time for Turkey to take the lead to set an order for these lands and re-connect them once again — “With­out going to war, we will again tie Sara­jevo to Dam­as­cus, Beng­hazi to Erzu­rum and to Batumi.”

Before con­tin­u­ing with his fol­low­ing remarks though, two quick obser­va­tions need to be made. First, there is noth­ing against these cities or coun­tries to feel against being con­nected to one another. The world is a vil­lage, and who ever likes to join hands and work together may do that. There­fore, his remarks as such invite ques­tions as to whether he is propos­ing an alter­na­tive for­eign pol­icy, and what that means exactly. Sec­ond of all, it may not be the place of Turkey’s for­eign min­is­ter to sug­gest that Sara­jevo to be tied to Dam­as­cus — espe­cially at a time like this, when Syria is drown­ing in an unfor­tu­nate civil war, one needs to won­der as to what the peo­ple of Sara­jevo think about such a proposal!

But, let’s not linger on that point and get lost in the con­ver­sa­tion. After all, Davu­to­glu is won­der­ing why peo­ple use an accusatory rhetoric, as if his pol­icy sug­ges­tions mean to sug­gest the refur­bish­ment of Ottoman era.

Here is why in his own words: “Last cen­tury was only a paren­the­sis for us. We will close that paren­the­sis. We will do so with­out going to war, or call­ing any­one an enemy, with­out being dis­re­spect­ful to any bor­der, we will again tie Sara­jevo to Dam­as­cus, Beng­hazi to Erzu­rum to Batumi. This is the core of our power,” he said. “These may look like all dif­fer­ent coun­tries to you, but Yemen and Skopje were part of the same coun­try 110 years ago, or Erzu­rum and Beng­hazi. When we say this, they call it ‘new Ottoman­ism.’ The ones who united the whole Europe don’t become new Romans, but the ones who unite the Mid­dle East geog­ra­phy are called as new Ottoman­ists. It’s an honor to be reminded with the names of Ottomans, Seljuks, Artuklu or Eyyubi, but we have never or will ever have our eye on anyone’s land based on a his­toric background.”

On March 4, Davu­to­glu con­tin­ued with his remarks: “The peo­ple who lived together through­out the his­tory in this region were torn apart from each other in the last cen­tury; they grew dis­tant from each other. Turkey was the cen­tral coun­try at the time when bor­ders were dimin­ished, geog­ra­phy was divided, and eco­nomic spheres were sep­a­rated. As if these are not enough, a new seed of divi­sion started to be planted in our coun­try.”
This new seed Davu­to­glu is refer­ring to is the Kur­dish nation­al­ism that seeks some form of auton­omy or recog­ni­tion. He calls on every­one to grasp the impor­tance of the moment, and be alert for those who might attempt to pre­vent Turkey from grow­ing stronger as a coun­try that has solved its Kur­dish problem.

“This cur­rent labor pain is the pain of gain­ing back that old his­tor­i­cal nature. We have to get our act together both domes­ti­cally and abroad. Surely, we have to first cure our own prob­lem,” he says. “It’s time to think big. When I was an aca­d­e­mi­cian, I used to observe this coun­try feel­ing scared of com­mu­nism dur­ing win­ter, and divi­sion [of its land] dur­ing sum­mer [i.e., cre­ation of a Turk­ish Kur­dis­tan]. It’s now time to solve our own prob­lem. If this gets delayed, the trau­mas from the out­side will inevitably play a neg­a­tive impact on us, and that it will be likely that the oppo­site may also happen.”

“What I have observed in for­eign pol­icy prac­tice is that if you have a right read­ing, and pre­sented a firm posi­tion, you may receive crit­i­cism in the first place, but you will get results in the mid– and long-term. What is impor­tant is to stand firm there. If you are con­fi­dent of your pol­icy, you should not give any con­ces­sions. What is impor­tant is not to be inde­ci­sive at a crit­i­cal, decision-making moment.”

Fair enough, but Turkey has not accom­plished any­thing solid with Davutoglu’s pol­icy except strength­en­ing its trade ties with the Arab Mus­lim coun­tries. That said, Europe still remains Turkey’s major trad­ing part­ner. Yet for things where Turkey has put its polit­i­cal cap­i­tal on the line in the region — whether sid­ing with Hamas against Israel, or ral­ly­ing the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to use mil­i­tary force to end the Assad regime in Syria, it has not scored any­thing con­crete to show as a Turk­ish vic­tory. In that per­spec­tive, one has to ask — what hap­pens if Davutoglu’s poli­cies are actu­ally wrong, and that his insis­tence on wrong poli­cies exposes Turkey to new and unprece­dented threats? Who would actu­ally bear the respon­si­bil­ity for that?

May he be hum­ble enough to under­stand that he, or any­one else for that mat­ter, won’t be able to bear the respon­si­bil­ity for it all when things get rough.

It’s time for the Erdo­gan gov­ern­ment to lis­ten to the crit­ics of its poli­cies, and at the very least begin ton­ing down these arro­gant sug­ges­tions that Turkey be the core coun­try for set­ting a new order for those once-Ottoman lands.

That said, it may already be too late for Turkey to take a new direction.

Tulin Daloglu is a colum­nist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse. She has writ­ten exten­sively for var­i­ous Turk­ish and Amer­i­can pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing The New York Times, Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune, The Mid­dle East Times, For­eign Pol­icy, The Daily Star (Lebanon) and the SAIS Turkey Ana­lyst Report. She also had a reg­u­lar col­umn at The Wash­ing­ton Times for almost four years. In the 2002 gen­eral elec­tion, Daloglu ran for a seat in the Turk­ish par­lia­ment as a mem­ber of the New Turkey Party.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/turkey-davutologu-ottoman-new-order-mideast.html#ixzz2Nla4Rt7t

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/04/18/turkeys-regime-fails-abroad-is-world-champion-at-fundamental-transformation-at-home/
Turkey’s Regime Fails Abroad; Is World Cham­pion at Fun­da­men­tal Trans­for­ma­tion at Home
Barry Rubin April 18th, 2013 — 10:58 am

A Turk­ish friend just wrote me that Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan has sold his soul to the Devil. That implies Erdo­gan is suc­ceed­ing on every front, as if by magic. More accu­rately, how­ever, the trick is that Erdogan’s for­eign pol­icy is fail­ing on almost every front but he’s able to con­vince Turks that the sit­u­a­tion is the exact opposite.

Let’s exam­ine the list of devel­op­ments in objec­tive terms:

–He has made no progress on mem­ber­ship or inte­gra­tion in the Euro­pean Union. Sim­i­larly, his diplo­matic efforts to ease rela­tions with neigh­bor­ing Arme­nia have borne no fruit.

–Erdo­gan has thrown away the vir­tual alliance with Israel with­out gain­ing any­thing mate­ri­ally in the Arabic-speaking world. Although few seem to under­stand this point, it was not Israel that grov­eled in accept­ing Erdogan’s terms but the exact opposite.

Remem­ber that if the bully lies and the media gets it wrong that does not change real­ity. Erdo­gan swore not to back down on three issues but then accepted Israel’s posi­tion. Erdo­gan said: no deal with­out for­mal apol­ogy; pay­ment of com­pen­sa­tion; and end to all sanc­tions on Gaza. He then backed down. He then, of course, imme­di­ately, broke this com­mit­ment. That’s my point: defeat inter­na­tion­ally cou­pled with boast­ful pro­pa­ganda to make gains at home.

The Syr­ian sit­u­a­tion has a lot to do with this, as does—amazingly enough—a bit of U.S. pres­sure (see below), but also he had a new prob­lem. As an Israeli diplo­mat explained:

“Turk­ish export routes to the east used to go through Syria, to the East and to the Gulf. That’s not pos­si­ble any­more. Turk­ish exports are shipped to the port of Haifa, where they’re loaded onto trucks, which cross Israel and then go to Jor­dan, and then from Jor­dan, they are shipped to the Gulf and to the East. Israel has now become a [piv­otal] point for Turk­ish exports.”

–Turkey had gained no real influ­ence over the Pales­tin­ian Hamas and the Lebanese Hizbal­lah groups on which he has lav­ished much attention.

–In Syria, despite Turkey’s good rela­tions with the dic­ta­tor­ship there, he has backed a rebel­lion in which he seem­ingly had great influ­ence. But now Erdo­gan is clearly hav­ing sec­ond thoughts, becom­ing scared that he may have pro­duced a Frankenstein’s mon­ster, a rad­i­cal Islamist state next door which might cause trou­bles for Turkey.

–And now Turkey is bor­dered also by not one but two Kur­dish “states.” While he has done well in keep­ing good rela­tions with the Kurdish-governed dis­trict in north­ern Iraq, its flour­ish­ing exis­tence must be wor­ri­some to him, includ­ing its effect on Turkey’s own large Kur­dish minor­ity. And now there is a much more mil­i­tant Kur­dish statelet in Syria ruled by his old adver­saries, the Kur­dish Work­ers’ Party’s local branch. Erdo­gan does have a plan to deal with Syr­ian Kur­dis­tan build­ing on the Iraq model: good rela­tions, regional auton­omy, and no attacks from there against Turkey. Still, how cer­tain can he be that there won’t be big problems?

–Most impor­tant of all, per­haps, is that Erdogan’s attempt to gain wider lead­er­ship in the Mid­dle East (called “neo-Ottomanism,” recall­ing Turkey’s pre-World War One empire in the region) has fallen flat on its face. While Erdo­gan stresses his Mus­lim cre­den­tials, nobody who speaks Ara­bic has for­got­ten that he isn’t one of them.

–And now his love affair with Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is on the rocks, at least tem­porar­ily. Erdogan’s level of anti-Israel and even anti­se­mitic invec­tive has risen so high and become so obvi­ous that the U.S. gov­ern­ment can no longer ignore it. For the first time, ques­tions were raised about the great model Islamist in Wash­ing­ton. That was one of the key motives for the president’s effort to effect Israel-Turkey con­cil­i­a­tion. As always, Erdo­gan has gone out of his way to be provoca­tive. He told the Fifth UN Alliance of Civ­i­liza­tions meet­ing in Vienna, for exam­ple, that Zion­ism was a “crime against human­ity.” Since such crimes should pre­sum­ably be pun­ished, this can be regarded as Erdo­gan call­ing for geno­cide against Israel and its residents.

“Just like Zion­ism, anti-Semitism and fas­cism, it becomes unavoid­able that Islam­o­pho­bia must be regarded as a crime against human­ity,” he alleged.

It is also possible–and there is some evi­dence for this–that the U.S. gov­ern­ment feels that Erdo­gan mis­led it on Syr­ian issues now that it has partly awak­ened to see­ing that coun­try about to go under rad­i­cal Islamist rule. Amer­ica fol­lowed Turk­ish advice and the result is advanced weapons in the hands of ter­ror­ists who may soon be run­ning the coun­try. I warned about this two years ago, but per­haps the U.S. gov­ern­ment is a bit ticked off at being made to look like idiots and hav­ing got­ten into a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion. Let’s also remem­ber that Erdogan’s pro­jected trip to the Gaza Strip would have dis­rupted U.S. “peace­mak­ing” efforts and after talk­ing to Obama, Erdo­gan backed off (but see below). And, finally, let’s remem­ber that the whole Israel-Turkey rap­proche­ment might still fall apart due to Erdo­gan and leave Obama and Kerry look­ing foolish.

The prob­lem is that since Erdo­gan has received U.S. praise and sup­port as he has bashed U.S. inter­ests he then doesn’t need to respect U.S. inter­ests. Many or most Turks today can com­bine two seem­ingly dis­cor­dant views: Obama and his gov­ern­ment love Turkey’s gov­ern­ment and views it as a friend; they them­selves increas­ingly hate the United States and its goals.

We will know more after Erdo­gan vis­its the White House on May 16. If that turns out to be another Obama-Erdogan love fest, more demon­stra­tion of the fact that Erdo­gan is Obama’s favorite Islamist, with no crit­i­cism in evi­dence despite all that the Turk­ish prime min­is­ter has done delib­er­ately against U.S. inter­ests, it would be safe to con­clude that Erdo­gan owns the White House for the next three years. He will know that he can do any­thing he pleases.

But there are few in Turkey who under­stand this list of losses. On the con­trary, Erdo­gan has suc­cess­fully sold the sit­u­a­tion to them as one of tremen­dous suc­cess. They can be proud of their country’s return to inter­na­tional power and great respect, or at least so it seems. In this view, Turkey is act­ing in a prop­erly Islamic man­ner, the Arabs love them, Amer­ica rec­og­nizes their great­ness (they can do what­ever they want and the United States caves in), he made Israel apol­o­gize, and so on.

On top of this, Turkey’s muscle-flexing bold­ness, anti-Americanism, and hos­til­ity to Israel pleases the left and the nation­al­ist right; his Islamic pol­icy pleases the pious. As a result, Erdo­gan enjoys the sup­port of a strong majority.

Con­se­quently, Erdo­gan is the world’s most suc­cess­ful leader in fun­da­men­tally trans­form­ing his coun­try. Step by step, he is seiz­ing all of the country’s insti­tu­tions for Islamism. Grad­u­ates of Islamic schools, who have now been given par­ity with uni­ver­sity grad­u­ates, are flood­ing into the state bureaucracy.

The army’s polit­i­cal power has been bro­ken and Islamists are now going into the offi­cer corps. The media has largely—but not completely—been bought up and intim­i­dated. Only the judi­ciary remains. The econ­omy is doing rea­son­ably well.

In this con­text, Erdo­gan increas­ingly appears to be a dic­ta­tor who is build­ing a cult of per­son­al­ity. Every­where there are signs claim­ing that Erdo­gan “gave” the peo­ple what­ever pub­lic works’ project or new school exists in the vicin­ity. His sit­u­a­tion is com­pa­ra­ble to Russia’s dic­ta­tor (in every­thing but name) Vladimir Putin.

Here’s a case study, the Israel-Turkey agree­ment on resolv­ing the dis­pute over the Gaza flotilla. Under pres­sure from Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, Erdo­gan agreed to Israel’s terms while pre­tend­ing that this was a great vic­tory for him­self. Yet there is increas­ing rea­son to believe that the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment will NOT imple­ment its draft agree­ment with Israel. There are two fac­tors involved here. First, Erdo­gan, as usual, is over­reach­ing abroad, get­ting noth­ing because he tried to get too much. Sec­ond, though, Erdo­gan doesn’t care because his real intended audi­ence is domes­tic, using the flotilla after­math to stir up hatred against Israel and now claim­ing he has forced Israel to sur­ren­der in what con­sti­tutes a great vic­tory for Turkey. What Israel’s con­cil­ia­tory behav­ior actu­ally did was to expose the Turk­ish regime’s bad faith, show­ing that it is impos­si­ble to deal with it, an expe­ri­ence com­pre­hended now in Wash­ing­ton for the first time.

Now Erdo­gan has vetoed Israel’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in NATO maneu­vers and Erdo­gan says he won’t send back his ambas­sador unless Israel stops all sanc­tions against the Gaza Strip. He knows that this demand will kill the deal. Yet at home he can claim to be the cham­pion of Mus­lims and of Pales­tini­ans. That domes­tic pro­pa­ganda is all that counts for him. Sim­i­larly, after agree­ing to post­pone his provoca­tive trip to the Gaza Strip Erdo­gan then merely resched­uled it for May. And on top of that, Erdo­gan then announced he would (for the first time) send an ambas­sador to Pales­tine even when refus­ing to send an ambas­sador back to Israel. Once again, he threw a pie in Obama’s face.

Why does this make sense? Again, because he doesn’t care about the inter­na­tional impli­ca­tions but only domes­tic polit­i­cal brag­ging rights. More­over, none of his antics mate­ri­ally hurt Israel but–note this well–there are some inter­est­ing ways in which Erdo­gan is going to lose by for­feit­ing Israel’s cooperation.

Mean­while, the West, espe­cially the mass media, has not yet quite caught on to the fact that the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk, the sec­u­lar repub­lic, is gone. Mas­sive rural migra­tion to the cities has cre­ated a wave of tra­di­tional behav­ior that has been fun­neled and retrained as Islamism. Turkey has also become an increas­ingly repres­sive state where jour­nal­ists trem­ble, crit­ics may be thrown into jail on trumped-up charges, and a cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion to reverse Ataturk’s reforms is far advanced. Erdogan’s great­est achieve­ment in terms of the inter­na­tional scene is that by his maneu­vers and Obama’s approval, he has made the world unin­ter­ested in the esca­lat­ing repres­sion in Turkey includ­ing ridicu­lous Stalinist-style show tri­als of dis­si­dents. The lat­est event is the sen­tenc­ing of an inter­na­tion­ally famous Turk­ish con­cert pianist to ten months’ impris­on­ment for tweets “insult­ing” Islam and a court deci­sion claim­ing a 700-year-old church was ille­gally run as a state museum mak­ing pos­si­ble its con­ver­sion into a mosque.

Thus, Erdo­gan has put together a win­ning com­bi­na­tion: fake vic­to­ries abroad; repres­sion, seiz­ing insti­tu­tions, and mobi­liz­ing sup­port through patri­o­tism and Islam at home.

If you are inter­ested in read­ing more about Turkey’s history—during World War Two–you’re wel­come to read my book Istan­bul Intrigues online for free.