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DMac
15th June 2010, 01:03 PM
Watch for a revival of the "Ottoman Empire..."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175260/tomgram:_john_feffer,_pax_ottomanica/



(Lots of links at the article above, check it for references)



Tomgram: John Feffer, Pax Ottomanica?


Posted by John Feffer at 5:06pm, June 13, 2010.


You know that something strange is happening when the usual crew of neocon critics takes out after Turkey -- yes, Turkey! -- a country that, as Inter Press Service’s Jim Lobe points out, they long cultivated and supported as a key ally and supposedly model democracy in the Islamic world. Of course, that was then. Now, Turkey’s involvement in a nuclear deal with Tehran and its prime minister’s outrage over the Israeli attack on a convoy bringing aid to Gaza that resulted in the deaths of nine Turks has soured them considerably on the country. In fact, the strength of the Turkish reaction -- essentially a breach with Israel, once a close ally -- sent the Obama administration scrambling awkwardly for a way to mollify the Turks without condemning the Israeli attack.

And don’t think it’s just the usual suspects on the right blaming Turkey either. The Washington Post editorial page denounced its government for “grotesque demagoguery toward Israel that ought to be unacceptable for a member of NATO,” while the Christian Science Monitor typically declared it “over the top,” raised the specter of “anti-Semitism,” and swore that its leaders now ran “the risk of further undermining Turkey’s credibility and goal of being a regional problem solver.” In a news story, the New York Times offered a classic statement of the problem from Washington’s perspective: “Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as 'running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,' said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is 'How do we keep the Turks in their lane?'”

And which lane might that be, one wonders? It looks ever more like the passing lane on the main highway through the Middle East. Talk about a country whose importance has crept up on us. It's a country that, as John Feffer, co-director of the invaluable Foreign Policy in Focus website and TomDispatch regular, indicates, has been in that passing lane for some time now (whatever Washington may think), whether in its relations with Iran, Russia, or Iraq, among other countries. And what surprising relations they turn out to be. If one thing is clear, it’s that, as American power wanes, the global stage is indeed being cleared for new kinds of politics and new combinations of every sort. The future holds surprises and, as Feffer makes clear, it will be surprising indeed if Turkey isn’t one of them. Tom

DMac
15th June 2010, 01:03 PM
http://theglobalrealm.com/2010/06/15/stealth-superpower/


Stealth Superpower
Posted on June 15, 2010 by The Global Realm

Stealth Superpower
How Turkey Is Chasing China to Become the Next Big Thing

By John Feffer
TomDispatch.com
June 13, 2010

The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China.

If a multinational corporation doesn’t shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic futurologists are fixated on an eventual global war between China and the United States. China even occupies valuable real estate in the imaginations of our fabulists. Much of the action of Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, for example, takes place in a future neo-Confucian China, while the crew members of the space ship on the cult TV show Firefly mix Chinese curse words into their dialogue.

Why doesn’t Turkey have a comparable grip on American visions of the future? Characters in science fiction novels don’t speak Turkish. Turkish-language programs are as scarce as hen’s teeth on college campuses. Turkey doesn’t even qualify as part of everyone’s favorite group of up-and-comers, that swinging BRIC quartet of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey remains stubbornly fixed in Western culture as a backward-looking land of doner kebabs, bazaars, and guest workers.

But take population out of the equation — an admittedly big variable — and Turkey promptly becomes a likely candidate for future superpower. It possesses the 17th top economy in the world and, according to Goldman Sachs, has a good shot at breaking into the top 10 by 2050. Its economic muscle is also well defended: after decades of NATO assistance, the Turkish military is now a regional powerhouse.

Perhaps most importantly, Turkey occupies a vital crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. A predominantly Muslim democracy atop the ruins of Byzantium, it bridges the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, even as it sits perched at the nexus of energy politics. All roads once led to Rome; today all pipelines seem to lead to Turkey. If superpower status followed the rules of real estate — location, location, location — then Turkey would already be near the top of the heap.

As a quintessential rising middle power, Turkey no longer hesitates to put itself in the middle of major controversies. In the last month alone, Turkish mediation efforts nearly heralded a breakthrough in the Iran nuclear crisis, and Ankara supported the flotilla that recently tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. With these and other less high-profile interventions, Turkey has stepped out of the shadows and now threatens to settle into the prominent place on the world stage once held by its predecessor. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was a force to be reckoned with, spreading through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna before devolving over the next 200 years into “the sick man of Europe.”

Today, a dynamic neo-Ottoman spirit animates Turkey. Once rigidly secular, it has begun to fashion a moderate Islamic democracy. Once dominated by the military, it is in the process of containing the army within the rule of law. Once intolerant of ethnic diversity, it has begun to reexamine what it means to be Turkish. Once a sleepy economy, it is becoming a nation of Islamic Calvinists. Most critically of all, it is fashioning a new foreign policy. Having broken with its more than half-century-long subservience to the United States, it is now carving out a geopolitical role all its own.

The rise of Turkey has by no means been smooth. Secular Turks have been uncomfortable with recent more assertive expressions of Muslim identity, particularly when backed by state power. The country’s Kurds are still second-class citizens, and although the military has lost some of its teeth, it still has a bite to go along with its bark.

Nonetheless, Turkey is remaking the politics of the Middle East and challenging Washington’s traditional notion of itself as the mediator of last resort in the region. In the twenty-first century, the Turkish model of transitioning out of authoritarian rule while focusing on economic growth and conservative social values has considerable appeal to countries in the developing world. This “Ankara consensus” could someday compete favorably with Beijing’s and Washington’s versions of political and economic development. The Turkish model has, however, also spurred right-wing charges that a new Islamic fundamentalist threat is emerging on the edges of Europe. Neocon pundit Liz Cheney has even created a new version of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in which Turkey, Iran, and Syria have become the dark trinity.

These are all signs that Turkey has indeed begun to wake from its centuries-long slumber. And when Turkey wakes, as Napoleon said of China, the world will shake.

Out of Ottomanism

Constantinople was once an Orientalist’s dream. In his otherwise perceptive 1877 guide to the city, the Italian author Edmondo de Amicis typically wrote that old Istanbul “is not a city; she neither labors, nor thinks, nor creates; civilization beats at her gates and assaults her in her streets, but she dreams and slumbers on in the shadow of her mosques, and takes no heed.”

Turkey’s first wake-up call came from Kemal Ataturk, the modernizing military officer from Salonika who created a new country out of the unpromising materials left behind by the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Decisively ending the caliphate in 1924, Ataturk patterned his new secular state on the French model: strong central power, a modern army, and a strict division between public and private spheres. This was no easy process: Ataturk brought Turkey kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

In many ways, that kicking and screaming continued throughout the rest of that century. The Turkish military never quite got used to civilian rule. It’s seized power four times since 1960. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkish security forces killed thousands of its own citizens in a dirty war against the Kurds and the Turkish left, and subjected many more to beatings, torture, and imprisonment. The country’s leadership maintained a garrison mentality based on a fear that outsiders, aided by a fifth column, were bent on dismembering the country (as outside powers had indeed attempted to do in 1920 with the Treaty of Sèvres).

In the 1980s, however, economic globalization began to eat away at this garrison mentality as then-President Turgut Ozal attempted to reconnect Turkey to the world through export-oriented reforms and a policy of building economic bridges rather than erecting suspicious walls. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, for instance, Turkey refused to choose sides, remaining a friend to both countries.

In the process, Istanbul was transformed. It became the center of a laboring, thinking, and creating class that faced both westward toward Europe and the United States and eastward toward the Middle East and Central Asia. Even Central Anatolia and its key city, Kayseri, once considered a Turkish backwater, was emerging as a vital center of manufacturing. “While Anatolia remains a socially conservative and religious society, it is also undergoing what some have called a ‘Silent Islamic Reformation,’” went the European Stability Initiative’s influential 2005 report on Turkey’s new Islamic Calvinists. “Many of Kayseri’s business leaders even attribute their economic success to their ‘protestant work ethic.’”

By the 1990s, the “star of Islam” — as The Economist dubbed Turkey — had gone about as far as it could within the confines of the existing Ataturk model. In 1997, the military once again swatted aside the civilian leadership in a “stealth coup,” and the country seemed to be slipping back into aggressive paranoia. The Kurdish war flared; tensions with Russia over Chechnya rose; a war of words broke out with Greece over maritime territorial disputes. And Turkey nearly went to war with Syria for harboring the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan.

But that stealth coup proved a last gasp attempt to place the uncontainable new political and economic developments in Turkish society under tighter controls. Soon enough, the military gave way again and the Islam-influenced Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, only enlarging its political base after the 2007 elections.

Zero Problems?

Throughout the twentieth century, geography had proved a liability for Turkey. It found itself beset on all sides by former Ottoman lands which held grudges against the successor state. The magic trick the AKP performed was to transform this liability into an asset. Turkey in the twenty-first century turned on the charm. Like China, it discovered the advantages of soft power and the inescapable virtues of a “soft rise” during an era of American military and economic dominance.

Led by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a former academic who provided a blueprint for the country’s new good-neighbor policy in his 2001 book Strategic Depth, Turkey pledged “zero problems with neighbors.” In foreign policy terminology, Davutoglu proposed the carving out of a Turkish sphere of influence via canny balance-of-power politics. Like China, it promised not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its partners. It also made a major effort to repair relations with those near at hand and struck new friendships with those far away. Indeed, like Beijing, Ankara has global aspirations.

Perhaps the most dramatic reversal in Turkish policy involves the Kurdish region of Iraq. The détente orchestrated by the AKP could be compared to President Richard Nixon’s startling policy of rapprochement with China in the 1970s, which rapidly turned an enemy into something like an ally. In March, Turkey sent its first diplomat to Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, to staff a new consulate there. Today, as journalist Jonathan Head has written, “70% of investment and 80% of the products sold in the Kurdish region [of Iraq] are Turkish.” Realizing that when U.S. troops leave Iraq, its Kurdish regions are bound to feel vulnerable and thus open to economic and political influence, Ankara established a “strategic cooperation council” to sort things out with the Iraqis in 2009, and this has served as a model for similar arrangements with Syria, Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia.

Détente with Iraqi Kurdistan has gone hand in hand with a relaxation of tensions between Ankara and its own Kurdish population with which it had been warring for decades. Until the early 1990s, the Turkish government pretended that the Kurdish language didn’t exist. Now, there is a new 24-hour Kurdish-language national TV station, and new faculty at Mardin Artuklu University will teach Kurdish. The government began to accept returning Kurdish refugees from northern Iraq, as well as a handful of Kurdish guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

This hasn’t been an easy sell for Turkish nationalists. In December, a Turkish court banned the main Kurdish political party, and this spring the military launched repeated attacks against PKK targets inside Iraq. But the AKP is continuing to push reforms, including proposed changes in the country’s constitution that would allow military commanders for the first time to be tried in civilian court for any crimes they commit.

The elimination of this demonizing of “internal enemies” is crucial to the AKP’s project, helping as it does to reduce the military’s power in internal affairs. Reining in the military is a top objective for party leaders who believe it will strengthen political stability, improve prospects for future integration into the European Union (EU), and remove a powerful opponent to domestic reforms — and to the party itself.

Only a little less startling than the government’s gestures toward the Kurds has been its program to transform Turkish-Greek relations. The two countries have long been at each other’s throats, their conflict over the divided island of Cyprus being only the most visible of their disagreements. The current Greek economic crisis, however, may prove a blessing in disguise when it comes to bilateral relations.

The Greek government — its finances disastrous and economic pressure from the European Union mounting — needs a way to make military budget reductions defensible. In May, Turkish president Erdogan visited Greece and, while signing 21 agreements on migration, environment, culture, and the like, began to explore the previously inconceivable possibility of mutual military reductions. “Both countries have huge defense expenses,” Erdogan told Greek television, “and they will achieve a lot of savings this way.”

If Turkey manages a rapprochement with Armenia, it will achieve a diplomatic trifecta. The two countries disagree over the fate of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which is also at the center of a dispute between Armenia and Turkish ally Azerbaijan. Complicating this territorial issue is a long-standing historical controversy. Armenia wants acknowledgement of the Ottoman Empire’s 1915 extermination campaign that killed more than a million Armenians. The Turkish government today disputes the numbers and refuses to recognize the killings as “genocide.” Nevertheless, Turkey and Armenia began direct negotiations last year to reopen their border and establish diplomatic relations. Although officially stalled, secret talks between the two are continuing.

Other diplomatic efforts are no less dramatic. When Bashar Assad arrived in Ankara in 2004, it was the first visit by a Syrian leader in 57 years. Meanwhile, Turkey has cemented its relations with Russia, remains close to Iran, and has reconnected to the Balkans. This charm offensive makes Chinese efforts in Asia look bumbling.

Mediation Central

A friend to all sides, Turkey is offering its services as a diplomatic middleman, even in places where it was persona non grata not long ago. “Not many people would imagine that the Serbians would ask for the mediation of Turkey between different Bosniak groups in the Sandjak region of Serbia,” observes Sule Kut, a Balkans expert at Bilge University in Istanbul. “Turks were the bad guys in Serbian history. So what is happening? Turkey has established itself as a credible and powerful player in the region.”

It’s not just the Balkans. The new Turkey is establishing itself as Mediation Central. Teaming up with Brazil, Turkey fashioned a surprise compromise meant to head off confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program (which the Obama administration managed to shoot down). Along with Spain, it initiated the Alliance of Civilizations, a U.N. effort to bridge the divide between Islam and the West. It also tried to work its magic in negotiating an end to the blockade of Gaza, removing obstacles to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, bringing Syria and Israel together, resolving the brouhaha around the cartoon depiction of Mohammed, and hosting U.N. meetings on Somalia.

“Zero problems with neighbors” is a great slogan. But it’s also a logical impossibility. Turkey can’t embrace Hamas without angering Egypt and Israel. It can move closer to Russia only at the potential expense of good relations with Georgia. Rapprochement with Armenia angers Azerbaijan.

Nor was Ankara’s attempt to transcend zero-sum thinking an easy task during the “with us or against us” years of the Bush administration. In addition, there are the periodic tensions that arise around U.S. congressional resolutions on the Armenian genocide, still a touchy issue in Turkey. Washington has indicated its growing unhappiness with Turkey’s increasingly active role in the Middle East, particularly its overtures to Syria. As a result, Turkey has had to finesse its relationship with the U.S. in order to remain a key NATO ally and a challenger to American power in the region.

As with China, the United States is willing to work with Turkey on some diplomatic issues even as it finds the country’s growing influence in the region a problem. In turn, Ankara, like Beijing, is trying to figure out how it can best take advantage of the relative decline in U.S. global influence even as it works closely with Washington on an issue-by-issue basis.

The greatest challenge to Turkey’s zero-problems paradigm, however, is its ever more troubled relationship with Israel. The U.S.-Turkey-Israel troika was once a solid verity of Middle Eastern politics. A considerable amount of bilateral trade, including military deals, has linked Turkey and Israel, and that trade increased dramatically during the AKP era.

But Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza — and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent excoriation of then-Israeli president Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos — began a process that is tearing these former allies apart, while boosting support for Turkey in the Arab world. In October, Turkey cancelled Israel’s participation in a military exercise, throwing lucrative military contracts between the two countries in jeopardy. In the wake of the recent Gaza-aid debacle in international waters, the rift threatens to become irreparable. When Israeli commandos seized a flotilla of ships attempting to break the Gaza embargo, killing nine Turkish citizens, Turkey spoke of severing diplomatic relations.

With Israel increasingly isolated and American mediation efforts seriously compromised, only Turkey is emerging stronger from what can now only be seen as the beginning of a regional realignment of power. Once viewed with suspicion throughout the area where the Ottomans ruled, Turkey may now be the only power that has even a remote chance of one day brokering peace in the Middle East.

Return to Ottomanism?

Neo-Ottomanism is not exactly a popular phrase in Turkey today. The leadership in Ankara wants to be clear: they have no intention of projecting imperial power or reestablishing the modern equivalent of the Ottoman caliphate. However, if you look at the friendships that Turkey has cultivated and the trade relations it has emphasized — Syria, Armenia, Greece, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, the Balkans — you can see a map of the old Ottoman empire reassembling itself.

In other words, just as the AKP has turned geography to its advantage, so it is transforming an imperial albatross into the goose that lays golden eggs (in the form of lucrative trade deals). In a similar way, China has tried to revive its old Sinocentric imperial system without stirring up fears of the Chinese army marching into India or the Chinese navy taking over the South China Sea, even as it — like Turkey — also establishes friendly relations with old adversaries (including Russia).


continued in next post

DMac
15th June 2010, 01:03 PM
Still, even this amiable version of neo-Ottomanism can raise hackles. “We want a new Balkan region based on political values, economic interdependence, and cooperation and cultural harmony,” Foreign Minister Davutoglu said nostalgically at a conference in Sarajevo in October. “That is what the Ottoman Balkans was like. We shall revive such a Balkan region… The Ottoman centuries were a success story, and this should be revived.” A furor followed among some Serb commentators, who viewed this romanticized version of history as evidence of a Turkish desire to Islamicize the Balkans.

What Turkey means by its vision of Balkan harmony may prove critical in the context of European integration. The Ottomans and Western Europe fought a succession of wars over control of the Balkans. Today, the E.U. and Turkey compete for influence in the region, and much hangs on Turkey’s prospects for joining the 27-member European organization. Although Turkey began the process of meeting requirements for joining the Union, the talks stalled long ago. In the meantime, some European leaders like French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy have spoken out against Turkish membership, while the spread of Islamophobia throughout Europe has dimmed what enthusiasm may still exist for bringing Turkey on board.

In Turkey as well, public support for membership has declined from 70% in 2002 to just over 50% today. In fact, Turkey’s turn toward the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa has in part been a reaction to the fading of the E.U. option. Fine, the Turks are saying, if you don’t want us, we can play with others.

And play they have, particularly when it comes to the energy game. If oil had been discovered in its territory just a little sooner, some form of the Ottoman Empire might have survived as the wealthiest energy player in history. The riches of Iraq, Kuwait, and Libya all once fell within the territorial limits of its empire.

Today, Turkey lacks energy wealth, but has worked assiduously to ensure that a maximum number of oil and natural gas pipelines flow through the country. Europe and the United States have funded a series of pipelines (like the Nabucco pipeline from the Caspian Sea) that use Turkish territory to bypass Russia and lessen Moscow’s ability to blackmail Western Europe by threatening to withhold energy supplies. Turkey hasn’t stopped there, however. It negotiated directly with Russia for another set of pipelines — the South Stream, which goes from Russia to Bulgaria through Turkish territorial waters, and the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline that would transport Russian and Kazakh oil from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean through Turkey.

Turkey now relies on Russia for 60% of its energy imports and Iran for another 30%. In this sense, “zero problems with neighbors” could just as easily be understood as “zero problems with energy suppliers.”

Turkey is also a builder. Of the top 225 international contractors, 35 are Turkish, second only to China. Like China, Turkey asks no difficult questions about the political environment in other countries, and so Turkish construction companies are building airports in Kurdistan and shopping malls in Libya. Despite political tensions, in 2009 they were even involved in nine projects worth more than $60 million in Israel.

Finally, there is culture. Like the Confucian institutes China is establishing all over the world to spread its language, culture, and values, Turkey established the Yunus Emre Foundation in May 2009 to administer cultural centers in Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Israel. Turkish schools have sprung up in more than 80 countries. Turkish culture has also infiltrated Middle Eastern life through television, as Turkish soap operas spread the liberal cultural values of moderate Islam. “The Turkish soaps have been daring and candid when it comes to gender equality, premarital sex, infidelity, passionate love, and even children born out of wedlock,” writes journalist Nadia Bilbassy-Charters.

Beyond Ottomanism

Turkey’s leaders may not themselves be comfortable with the neo-Ottoman label — in part because their ambitions are actually much larger. Their developing version of a peaceful, trade-oriented Pax Ottomanica takes in Turkey’s improved relations with sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific. Turkey declared 2005 the “year of Africa” and accepted observer status in the African Union. In 2010, it has already opened eight embassies in African countries and plans to open another 11 next year.

At the pan-Islamic level — and a Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, now heads up the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, the leading international voice of Islamic states — Turkish leaders think in terms of the ummah, the global Muslim community. For some critics, Turkey’s Islamic character and its ruling Islam-influenced party — as well as its recent attacks on Israel — suggest that the country is on a mission to reestablish, if only informally, the Islamic caliphate. In the most extreme version of this argument, historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis has argued that Turkey’s fundamentalism will strengthen to such an extent that, in a decade’s time, it will resemble Iran, even as the Islamic Republic moves in the opposite direction.

This is, however, a fundamental misunderstanding of the AKP and its intentions. Islamism has about as much influence in modern-day Turkey as communism does in China. In both cases, what matters most is not ideology, but the political power of the ruling parties. Economic growth, political stability, and soft-power diplomacy regularly trump ideological consistency. Turkey is becoming more nationalist and more assertive, and flexibility, not fundamentalism, has been the hallmark of its new foreign policy.

In 1999, Bill Clinton suggested that if Ankara launched a reformist movement, the twenty-first century could be “Turkey’s century.” Turkey has indeed heeded Clinton’s advice. Now, Europe and the United States face a choice. If Washington works with Turkey as a partner, it has a far greater chance of resolving outstanding conflicts with Iran, inside Iraq, and between the Palestinians and Israelis, not to mention simmering disputes elsewhere in the Islamic world. If the European Union accepts Turkey as a member, its economic dynamism and new credibility in the Muslim world could help jolt Europe out of its current sclerosis. Spurned by one or both, Turkey’s global influence will still grow.

By all means, get that Lenovo computer, buy stock in Haier, and encourage your child to study Mandarin. China can’t help but be a twenty-first-century superpower. But if you want to really be ahead of the curve, pay close attention to that vital crossroads between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It won’t be long before we’ll all be talking Turkey.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and co-directs its Balkans Project. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website. He would like to thank Alexander Atanasov, Rebecca Azhdam, and Noor Iqbal for research assistance.

JohnQPublic
17th June 2010, 07:16 AM
The Pan-European Otto-American Empire?

DMac
17th June 2010, 07:39 AM
The Pan-European Otto-American Empire?


Not quite, IMO. I think northern Iraq will become Kurdistan and end up absolved by Turkey. If the Israelis begin ww3 striking Iran, I think in the end we will see an expanded Turkish border to the south as Turkey and Israel split up Syria and Iraq, with possibly Jordan falling to the Israelis. Complete speculation I know, but Turkey is involved at so many levels of the criminal conspiracy I can't help but think of them playing a tremendous role in the upcoming war.

Think of the Byzantine empire and the Ottoman empire compared to the modern criminal cartel alliance of Istanbul/Tel Aviv - add in the desires of a "Greater Israel" and a middle east in complete disarray post the Iranian war and poof, we have a revived Ottoman empire.

The more I think about it and look into what role Jewish folks played throughout Turkey's history I am inclined to say the flotilla massacre was a staged event (the participants did not know that but the brains in Istanbul and Tel Aviv knew).

Turkey is a near super power militarily speaking and has a fairly robust economy.

Also, as the trend seems to indicate, Christian Pogroms are ongoing in nations being plagued by wars and rumors of wars and the Turkish led "Istanbul Pogram" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom) is still a fairly recent event. (1955)

I am of the opinion that nations participating in Christian Pogroms or other (Christian) secular injustices are part of a large cycle of empire building. Seems to be a coincidence that is not spoken of often.

DMac
16th September 2011, 08:23 AM
Turkey takes over the "Arab Spring" (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26592)


Finally. Crystal clear. Someone finally said it - what the whole world, except Washington and Tel Aviv, knows in its collective heart; the recognition of a Palestinian state is "not an option but an obligation".

It did wonders that the man who said it was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Cairo, at the Arab League, in front of all Arab foreign ministers and with virtually the whole Arab world glued to satellite networks scrutinizing his every word.

The current Erdogan Arab Spring tour - as it was billed by the Turkish press - comprising Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, has already rocketed him to the status of a geopolitical cross between U2's Bono and Barcelona's superstar Argentine footballer Lionel Messi.

Erdogan received a rock/soccer star welcome at Cairo's airport - complete with "Hero Erdogan" banners brandished by the Muslim Brotherhood. He even addressed the crowd in Arabic (from "Greetings to the Egyptian youth and people, how are you?" to "Peace be upon you").

Erdogan repeatedly stressed, "Egypt and Turkey are hand-in-hand." But it's the subtext that is even more incendiary. While Israel's former good friends Egypt and Turkey are now hand-in-hand, Israel is left isolated facing a wall. There could not be a more earth-shattering development in the Levant - unheard of since the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.

A model campaigner

Erdogan's tour is a realpolitik master class. He's positioning Turkey as the forefront supporter of the Palestinian cause. He's also positioning Turkey at the core of the Arab Spring - as a supporter and as an inspirational model, even though there have been no full-fledged revolutions so far. He's emphasizing solid Turkish-Arab unity - for instance planning a strategic cooperation council between Egypt and Turkey.

Plus the whole thing makes good business sense. Erdogan's caravan includes six ministers and nearly 200 Turkish businessmen - bent on investing heavily all across northern Africa. In Egypt, they may not match the billions of dollars already committed by the House of Saud to the military junta led by Air Marshall Mohammed Tantawi. But in 2010, Turkish trade with the Middle East and North Africa was already at $30 billion, representing 27% of Turkish exports. Over 250 Turkish companies have already invested $1.5 billion in Egypt.

Crucially, Erdogan told Egyptian TV channel Dream, "Do not be wary of secularism. I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt." Erdogan was subtly referring to Turkey's secular constitution; and at the same time he was very careful to remind Egyptians that secularism is compatible with Islam.

The current Turkish model is enormously popular among the Egyptian street, featuring a moderate Islamic party (the Justice and Development Party - AKP) in power; a secular constitution; the military - albeit strong - back in the barracks; and an ongoing economic boom (Turkey was the world's fastest growing economy in the first half of 2001). [1]

This model is not exactly what the regressive House of Saud wants. They would prefer a heavily Islamist government controlled by the most conservative factions of the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse; as far as Libya is concerned, the House of Saud would love to have a friendly emirate, or at least a government peppered with Islamic fundamentalists.

Erdogan also stressed that the "aggressiveness" of Israel "threatens the future of the Israeli people". That's music for the Arab street. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Erdogan in Cairo - and confirmed he'll go ahead with Palestine's bid to be fully recognized as a state by the United Nations Security Council later this month.

Palestine will definitely be accepted as a non-voting state by the UN General Assembly floor. The problem is the extremely non-representative Security Council - which sanctions full UN membership with state voting rights. It's a done deal that Washington will veto it. The fractured European Union (EU), true to its character, still has not decided on a unified vote. There's a strong possibility Britain and France will also veto the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.

Yet even with the consolation price of "only" becoming a non-voting state, Palestine strikes a moral victory - aligned with world public opinion. Moreover, Palestine can become a member of the International Criminal Curt and sue the hell out of Israel over its serial violations of international law.

Follow the leader

Turkey's game goes way beyond "neo-Ottomanism" - or nostalgia to revive the superpower days of the 16th and 17th centuries. It's a natural development of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's policy of "zero problems with our neighbors" - moving to forge deeper bonds with most of these neighbors, and consolidating what Davutoglu himself defines as Turkey's strategic destiny (see Turkey: the sultans of swing Asia Times Online, April 7, 2011).

Turkey, for some years now, had decisively abandoned an isolationist brand of Turkish nationalism. The country seems to have finally surmounted the trauma associated to its dream of joining the EU; for all practical purposes the dream was shattered by France and Germany.

As for the Israeli-Turkey alliance, in fact it kept the Arab world at bay and confined Turkey to a passive role of ineffective outsider in the Middle East. Not anymore. Erdogan can now afford to send multiple simultaneous messages to Israel, the US, the EU, assorted Arab leaders and most of all the Arab street.

Davutoglu has been relatively magnanimous towards Israel, saying it is "out of touch with the region and unable to perceive the changes taking place, which makes it impossible for the country to have healthy relations with its neighbors".

What he could have added is with "friends" like that - Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, former Moldova bouncer Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, rabid settlers dictating policy - Israel does not need enemies; or rather fabricates enemies en masse. It is the Israeli government itself that accelerated Turkey's rapprochement with Egypt - which is leaving Israel totally isolated.

The touch of genius in the whole process is that Erdogan represents a democracy in a Muslim majority country strongly supporting both the Palestinians and the real pro-democrats in the Arab Spring. This provides a direct connection between the Palestinian tragedy and the spirit of the Arab Spring (which has nothing to do, it must be stressed, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing Libya or a military junta running Egypt).

It will be crucial to watch Erdogan's Islam-rooted AKP's follow-up. It's virtually certain that in the next Egyptian elections the Muslim Brotherhood will come out swinging. It's also virtually certain the Brotherhood will press for a minimalist relationship with Israel, including a full revision of the Camp David accords. In theory, Turkey would be fully behind it.

Then there's the Libya front. In his first public address in Tripoli, the chairman of the dodgy Transitional National Council (TNC), Mustafa Abdel Jailil, stressed Islamic sharia law would be the main source of legislation. But he crucially added, "We will not accept any extremist ideology, on the right or the left. We are a Muslim people, for a moderate Islam."

There's no evidence yet the TNC will be even able to hold the country together, not to mention promote "moderate Islam". The (foreign) vultures continue circling. NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has been warning that Libya is in danger of falling into the hands of Islamic extremists who would "try to exploit" the current power vacuum. It's unclear what role Turkey - a key NATO member - would have inside a NATO fully implanted in Libya.

Heavy metal birth pangs

And all this while the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies - horrified by the Arab Spring - have proposed $2 billion in annual direct aid to Jordan so it will become part of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, also known as the Gulf Counter-revolutionary Club. As a monarchical club, the GCC wants Jordan and Morocco as new members. The icing on the cake, though, would be a monarchical Libya.

On a parallel track, the counter-revolutionaries have been forced by Turkey to step up - at least verbally - their support for Palestine. Even Jordan's King Abdullah, staunch US ally and Israel's only "friend" left in the Middle East, has claimed that "the future Palestine are stronger than Israel is today".

Well, Israel did look for it - after the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the massacre in Gaza in 2008 and the attack on the Turkish flotilla in 2010. In terms of world public opinion, Israel is toast - and even the Arab counter-revolution had to notice.

That includes the House of Saud. None other than former Saudi intelligence supremo Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote a New York Times op-ed piece stating outright, "Saudi leaders would be forced by domestic and regional pressures to adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy" if the US vetoes the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.

Prince Turki also stressed that everything must evolve around a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders, which every grain of sand in the Sinai knows Israel will never accept.

In the event of a US veto, Prince Turki threatened Saudi Arabia would be "opposing the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq" and would "part ways with Washington in Afghanistan and Yemen as well".

Now imagine the House of Saud lavishly funding a double guerrilla war all across the Pentagon's "arc of instability" - Sunnis against Shi'ites in Iraq plus the already turbocharged Taliban in Afghanistan - while lobbying for an Islamist government in both Egypt and Turkey; and this while Egypt and Turkey for their part fully collide with an isolated and angry Israel. Now that's what the "birth pangs of the new Middle East" are all about.

JohnQPublic
19th September 2011, 04:51 AM
Turkey is being very belligerent towards Israel these days. The Israelis are probably peeing in their pants. A regional superpower that can do what it wants is not playing their game. I heard they put a bunch of reservists on notice this weekend (maybe in General Discussion?).

DMac
9th October 2012, 08:18 AM
Not quite, IMO. I think northern Iraq will become Kurdistan and end up absolved by Turkey. If the Israelis begin ww3 striking Iran, I think in the end we will see an expanded Turkish border to the south as Turkey and Israel split up Syria and Iraq, with possibly Jordan falling to the Israelis. Complete speculation I know, but Turkey is involved at so many levels of the criminal conspiracy I can't help but think of them playing a tremendous role in the upcoming war.

Think of the Byzantine empire and the Ottoman empire compared to the modern criminal cartel alliance of Istanbul/Tel Aviv - add in the desires of a "Greater Israel" and a middle east in complete disarray post the Iranian war and poof, we have a revived Ottoman empire.

The more I think about it and look into what role Jewish folks played throughout Turkey's history I am inclined to say the flotilla massacre was a staged event (the participants did not know that but the brains in Istanbul and Tel Aviv knew).

Turkey is a near super power militarily speaking and has a fairly robust economy.

Also, as the trend seems to indicate, Christian Pogroms are ongoing in nations being plagued by wars and rumors of wars and the Turkish led "Istanbul Pogram" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom) is still a fairly recent event. (1955)

I am of the opinion that nations participating in Christian Pogroms or other (Christian) secular injustices are part of a large cycle of empire building. Seems to be a coincidence that is not spoken of often.

Bump. Line in red is a future big fat I told ya so. I posted this thought @ gim in late 2008 IIRC.

Neuro
9th October 2012, 10:33 AM
Can't believe I missed this thread. Well summer of 2010, I had my hip surgery in India. Anyway I think that this thread is a good illustration of the games going on in Turkey today. A couple of years ago it was shouting at Israel for the Gaza flotilla, today they are lobbying grenades at Syria for them. They are still importing lots of oil from Iran, meanwhile getting tons of investments from Saudi Arabia. They are playing a long term power game, personally I am not sure at all about the image of moderate Islam that the ruling AK Party is trying to portray, what is true is that changes have happened slowly, but accelerating recently, the army has decidedly been neutered as a political force at least for the time being...