THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 96, June 8, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
ISLAMIST TURKEY OVERREACHES
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
TURKISH POLICY & THE FUTURE OF ISLAMISM: THE ISLAMISTS' RISE TO POWER IN TURKEY -- PRIME MINISTER
RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN'S ISLAMIST OUTLOOK -- INCREASED AUTHORITARIANISM IN TURKEY -- TURKEY'S MORE
BELLIGERENT APPROACH TO FOREIGN POLICY & INTERNATIONAL POLITICS -- TURKEY & THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR BUILDUP --
TURKEY & THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT -- THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT'S TIES TO AL-QA'IDA -- ISLAMISM 2.0 & ISLAMISM
1.0 IN TURKEY -- TURKEY, THE U.S.A., & NATO -- TURKEY'S OPPOSITION POLITICAL PARTIES
FULL STORY:
As typical Islamist-Leftist theater to delegitimize Israel, late May's Turkish-sponsored "Free Gaza" flotilla was tediously
repetitious. As an illustration that Israelis don't understand the kind of war they now must fight, the outcome was
drearily predictable. But, as a statement of Turkey's policies and an augur of the Islamist movement's future, it bristled
with novelty and significance.
Some background: After some 150 years of faltering efforts at modernization, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in
1923, replaced by the dynamic, Western-oriented Republic of Turkey founded and dominated by a former Ottoman
general, Kemal Atatürk. Over the next fifteen years, until his death in 1938, Atatürk imposed a Westernization program
so stringent that, at one point, he had rugs in mosques replaced by church-like pews. Although Turkey is nearly 100
percent Muslim, he insisted on a purely secular state.
Atatürk never won the entire Turkish population to his vision and, with time, his laic republic increasingly had to
accommodate pious Muslim sentiments. Yet Atatürk's order persisted into the 1990s, guarded over by the military
officer corps, which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched.
Islamists first acquired parliamentary representation in the early 1970s, and, during that decade, their leader, Necmettin
Erbakan, served three times as his country's Deputy Prime Minister. As mainstream Turkish political parties frittered
away their legitimacy through a disgraceful mix of egoism and corruption, Erbakan went on to become Prime Minister
for a year, 1996-1997, until the military asserted itself and threw him out.
Some of Erbakan's more agile and ambitious lieutenants, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in August, 2001, formed a new
Islamist political party, the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP). Just over a year later, it won a resounding 34 percent
plurality of votes and, due to the vagaries of Turkish electoral regulations, dominated Parliament with 66 percent of
the seats.
Erdogan became Prime Minister and, by dint of good governance, AKP won a very substantial increase in vote and
reelection in 2007. With a renewed mandate and an increasingly sidelined military, it aggressively pursued elaborately
fake conspiracy theories, fined a political critic US$2.5 billion, videotaped the opposition leader in a compromising
sexual situation, and now plans to alter the Turkish Constitution.
Foreign policy, in the hands of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who aspires for Turkey to regain its former
leadership of the Middle East, over-reached even more blatantly. Ankara not only adopted a more belligerent
approach to Cyprus, but recklessly inserted itself in such sensitive topics as the Iranian nuclear buildup and the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Most surprising of all has been its backing for IHH, a domestic Turkish "charity" with
documented ties to Al-Qa'ida.
If Ankara's irresponsible behavior has worrisome implications for the Middle East and Islam, it also has a mitigating
aspect. Turks have been at the forefront of developing what I call Islamism 2.0, the popular, legitimate, and
non-violent version of what Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden tried to achieve forcefully via Islamism 1.0. I
have predicted that Erdogan's insidious form of Islamism "may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0's
brutality."
But his abandonment of earlier modesty and caution suggests that Islamists cannot help themselves, that the
thuggishness inherent to Islamism must eventually emerge, that the 2.0 variant must revert to its 1.0 origins. As
Martin Kramer posits, "the further Islamists are from power, the more restrained they are, as well as the reverse." This
means it might be the case that Islamism presents a less formidable opponent, and for two reasons.
First, Turkey hosts the most sophisticated Islamist movement in the world, one that includes not just the AKP, but
also the Fethullah Gülen mass movement, the Adnan Oktar propaganda machine, and more. AKP's new bellicosity has
caused dissension; Gülen, for example, publicly condemned the "Free Gaza" farce, suggesting a debilitating internal
battle over tactics could take place.
Second, if once only a small band of analysts recognized Erdogan's Islamist outlook, this fact has now become
self-evidently obvious for the whole world to see. Erdogan has gratuitously discarded his carefully crafted image of a
pro-Western "Muslim democrat," making it far easier to treat him as the Tehran-Damascus ally that he is.
As Davutoglu seeks, Turkey has returned to the center of the Middle East and the umma. But it no longer deserves
full NATO membership, and its opposition parties deserve support.
June 8, 2010 update -- extra points that did not fit my main article today:
(1) The sex scandal that forced opposition leader Deniz Baykal to resign as head of the CHP a month ago could
potentially be the turning point whereby Turkey's secular forces find their voice and develop a compelling program.
(2) Ahmet Davutoglu has made some astonishing statements about the flotilla confrontation, including an allusion to
invoking Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty: "Citizens of member-states were attacked by a country that was not a
member of NATO. We think that should be discussed in NATO."
© Daniel Pipes 2010
Originally Published in National Review Online, June 8, 2010
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, June 8, 2010
Article URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/8467/islamist-turkey-overreaches
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Turkey, the Middle East, & the U.S.A.
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Middle East: Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
The Middle East & the Problem of Iran
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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