Saving NATO from Turkey: Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, Oct. 16, 2017— The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, faces an existential problem.
Turkey Is Behaving like an Enemy Now: Michael J. Totten, World Affairs Journal, Oct. 12, 2017— Turkey, along with the American-Turkish relationship, is going so far off the rails so quickly right now that there’s no chance you’re aware of everything that’s going on unless you track it professionally or get Google Alerts in your inbox.
The Turkish Love-Hate Relationship with America: Burak Bekdil, BESA, Oct. 10, 2017— Turks often expose degrees of confusion when asked about their foreign policy preferences.
This is Kurdistan’s Last Chance: Bernard-Henri Lévy, Globe & Mail, Oct. 18, 2017 — On Monday, what had been feared transpired: Paramilitary units supported by elements of the Iraqi army attacked in the vicinity of Kirkuk.
The American Alliance With Turkey Was Built On a Myth : Steven A. Cook, Foreign Policy, Oct. 12, 2017
Bernard-Henri Lévy Slams Turkish President Erdogan for Pushing ‘Crudest, Worst’ Antisemitic Campaign in Wake of Kurdish Independence Vote: Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, Oct. 9, 2017
‘We Don’t Trust Americans Any More’: Roadblock on Kurdish Quest for Independence in Iraq: John Beck & Loveday Morris, Telegraph, Oct. 22, 2017
The Kurds: Neither the Twin of Palestine Nor the Clone of Israel: Jose V. Ciprut, BESA, October 23, 2017
Daniel Pipes
Washington Times, Oct. 16, 2017
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, faces an existential problem. No, it’s not about getting member states to fulfill agreed-upon spending levels on defense. Or finding a role after the Soviet collapse. Or standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Rather, it’s about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist, dictatorial ruler of Turkey whose policies threaten to undermine this unique alliance of 29 states that has lasted nearly 70 years.
Created in 1949, NATO’s founding principles ambitiously set out the alliance goal “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of [member states’] peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” In other words, the alliance exists to defend Western civilization. For its first 42 years, until the USSR collapsed in 1991, this meant containing and defeating the Warsaw Pact. Today, it means containing and defeating Russia and Islamism. Of these latter two, Islamism is the deeper and longer-lasting threat, being based not on a single leader’s personality but on a highly potent ideology, one that effectively succeeded fascism and communism as the great radical utopian challenge to the West.
Some major figures in NATO appreciated this shift soon after the Soviet collapse. Already in 1995, Secretary-General Willy Claes noted with prescience that “Fundamentalism is at least as dangerous as communism was.” With the Cold War over, he said, “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security.” In 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s former prime minister, warned that “Islamist terrorism is a new shared threat of a global nature that places the very existence of NATO’s members at risk.” He advocated that NATO focus on combating “Islamic jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction” and called for “placing the war against Islamic jihadism at the center of the allied strategy.”
But, instead of a robust NATO on the Claes-Aznar model leading the battle against Islamism, it was internally hobbled by Mr. Erdogan’s opposition. Rather than assert the fight against Islamism, the other 28 members dismayingly deferred to the Islamist within their ranks. The 28 stay mum about the near-civil war the Turkish regime wages in southeastern Anatolia against its own Kurdish citizens. The emergence of a private army (called SADAT) under Mr. Erdogan’s exclusive control seems not to bother them. Likewise, they appear oblivious to Ankara’s unpredictably limiting access to the NATO base at Incirlik, the obstructed relations with friendly states such as Austria, Cyprus and Israel, and the vicious anti-Americanism symbolized by the mayor of Ankara hoping for more storm damage to be inflicted on the United States.
Maltreatment of NATO-member state nationals hardly bothers the NATO worthies: Not the arrest of 12 Germans (such as Deniz Yucel and Peter Steudtner) nor the attempted assassination of Turks in Germany (such as Yuksel Koc), not the seizure of Americans in Turkey as hostages (such as Andrew Brunson and Serkan Golge), nor repeated physical violence against Americans in the United States (such as at the Brookings Institute and at Sheridan Circle). NATO seems unfazed that Ankara helps Iran’s nuclear program, develops an Iranian oil field, and transfers Iranian arms to Hezbollah. Mr. Erdogan’s talk of joining the Moscow-Beijing dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organization ruffles few feathers, as do joint exercises with the Russian and Chinese militaries. A Turkish purchase of a Russian missile defense system, the S-400, appears to be more an irritant than a deal-breaker. A mutual U.S.-Turkish ban on visas fazed no one.
NATO faces a choice. It can, hoping that Mr. Erdogan is no more than a colicky episode and Turkey will return to the West, continue with the present policy. Or it can deem NATO’s utility too important to sacrifice to this speculative possibility, and take assertive steps to freeze the Republic of Turkey out of NATO activities until it again behaves like an ally. Those steps might include:
Removing nuclear weapons from Incirlik; Closing NATO’s operations at Incirlik; Canceling arms sales, such as the F-35 aircraft; Exclude Turkish participation from weapons development; Refuse to share intelligence; Refuse to train Turkish soldiers or sailors; Reject Turkish personnel for NATO positions.
A unified stance against Mr. Erdogan’s hostile dictatorship permits the grand NATO alliance to rediscover its noble purpose “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization” of its peoples. By confronting Islamism, NATO will again take up the mantle it has of late let down, nothing less than defending Western civilization.
TURKEY IS BEHAVING LIKE AN ENEMY NOW
Michael J. Totten
World Affairs Journal, Oct. 12, 2017
Turkey, along with the American-Turkish relationship, is going so far off the rails so quickly right now that there’s no chance you’re aware of everything that’s going on unless you track it professionally or get Google Alerts in your inbox. Where to even begin? We could start, I suppose, with the fact that a Turkish court sentenced a Wall Street Journal reporter to two years in prison in absentia for “promoting a terrorist organization.” Her real crime? Interviewing and quoting members of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). In other words, doing her job.
The reporter, Ayla Albayrak, is in the United States now, so President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can’t get his grubby mitts on her, but let this be a lesson to all journalists who write about Turkey. You can and will be sentenced to prison. Whether or not you’re a journalist, Americans can be sentenced to prison just for existing in Turkey. Conspiracy theorists who manage to bend a state to their will are capable of extraordinary destruction.
Last year, the government arrested and imprisoned American pastor Andrew Brunson, who has lived there for decades, on bogus terrorism charges. He is being warehoused along with thousands of other innocent people for allegedly associating themselves with Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish cleric and former Erdoğan ally who is currently living in exile in rural Pennsylvania and blamed for the botched military coup last summer.
Lest you believe these people might actually be guilty of something, consider this: A NASA scientist is also currently jailed there. The authorities arrested him while he was visiting on vacation. The evidence against him? Having an account at a bank supposedly “linked” to Gülen, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, and for having a one-dollar bill in his pocket, which is supposedly how Gülenists identify themselves to each other.
These are just three of the individuals gratuitously punished by the regime. There are tens of thousands more who have been purged from their jobs, imprisoned or both. If you’ve ever seriously wondered if political leaders who wallow in conspiracy theories are dangerous or simply exasperating, look no farther than Erdoğan. Conspiracy theorists who manage to bend a state to their will are capable of inflicting extraordinary amounts of destruction on a virtually limitless number of people.
I have reported from police states in the past. I risked deportation for doing so, not imprisonment, even in communist countries. When it comes to the treatment of journalists, the Turkish government is more oppressive even than China’s or Cuba’s. Turkey has in fact jailed more journalists than any other country in the entire world. Erdoğan says they’re all terrorists. Probably none of them are. Being branded a terrorist in Turkey is only faintly more plausible than being fingered a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, 300 years ago.
On the off chance that you aren’t quite convinced, the director of Amnesty International in Turkey is also facing 15 years in prison on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, an employee at the US Consulate in Istanbul was arrested for “facilitating the escape” of some “Gülenists.” The United States government responded by refusing to issue non-immigrant visas to anybody from Turkey, and the Turkish government responded in kind. So if you’re an American planning on visiting Turkey any time soon on business or as a tourist, sorry. You can’t.
Under current conditions, you probably shouldn’t go anyway. Turkey is holding a number of Americans hostage and isn’t shy about admitting that they are hostages. “Give us the pastor back,” Erdoğan himself said last month. “You have one pastor as well. Give him (Gülen) to us. Then we will try him (Brunson) and give him to you…The (pastor) we have is on trial. Yours is not – he is living in Pennsylvania. You can give him easily. You can give him right away.” Taking hostages is an act of war. It’s what Iran, North Korea, and Hezbollah do. Needless to say, this is not how a NATO ally is supposed to behave. Taking hostages is an act of war. It’s what Iran does. It’s what North Korea does. It’s what Hezbollah does. It is not what genuine allies like the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Germany do.
Erdoğan is not going to settle down if the United States doesn’t deport Gülen, which Washington refuses to do as there is scant evidence that the exile had anything to do with last year’s coup attempt and reams of evidence that the old man couldn’t possibly get a fair trial if he were shipped back to Ankara even with the best lawyers on earth. Erdoğan probably won’t settle down even if he does manage to throw Gülen into a dungeon or onto the executioner’s chopping block. Stalin didn’t settle down after one of his goons dispatched his rival Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City, nor did the Ayatollah Khomeini settle down after the Shah Reza Pahlavi died from cancer in the United States in 1980. Authoritarian conspiracy theorists are never sated. They can only be resisted until they are overthrown or in the ground. Turkey is still in NATO. We’ll see if that lasts much longer.
THE TURKISH LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH AMERICA
Burak Bekdil
BESA, Oct. 10, 2017
Turks often expose degrees of confusion when asked about their foreign policy preferences. A public opinion poll in the mid-2000s found that most Turks viewed the US as a threat to world security – but the same poll found that Turks expected the US, before every other ally, to come to Turkey’s help if needed.
Conspiracy theories have always been abundant in the Turkish psyche. Schoolchildren grow up hearing maxims like “A Turk’s only friend is another Turk” and “Our Ottoman ancestors had to fight seven worlds (the big powers).” According to this worldview, the world’s major powers construct intricate conspiracies as they tirelessly plot to stop Turkey’s rise. In an age of rising populism, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has systematically fueled the common thinking that “the entire world is conspiring against us.” His Islamist, anti-western, isolationist narrative is creating a vicious circle that threatens to take Turkey’s foreign policy calculus hostage – not only today, but well into the future.
Until Erdoğan came to power in November 2002, most Turks would not have known or even been interested in the names of their foreign ministers. In the 1990s, I saw a group of party supporters clamor to kick the then foreign minister out of a party meeting, mistaking him for a journalist. Erdoğan’s ambitious neo-Ottoman ideology introduced foreign policy into Turks’ daily lives. Coffeehouse talk changed from standard ruminations on inflation, joblessness, economic hardships, and football to pontifications about the Arab-Israeli dispute, the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, America, the EU, and Russia.
Two different surveys in 2011, conducted just after Erdoğan’s party had won 49.5% of the national vote in a general election, found the following: 75% of Turks thought problematic relations between Islamic countries and the West were the West’s fault; 53% blamed poverty in Muslim countries on the West and America; 82% had a negative opinion about Christians; only 9% believed Arab groups had carried out the 9/11 attacks; 41% thought the most violent religion in the world is Judaism; 65% said they approved of Erdoğan’s foreign policy
In August, the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s global survey found that 72% of Turks saw America as a threat to their country’s security. In Turkey, a NATO member state, the US is perceived as a greater threat than Russia or China. “America’s influence is a top concern in Turkey,” the survey read. “This figure [72%] is up 28 percentage points since 2013, when just 44% named US power and influence as a major threat.”
Bizarrely, similar numbers of Turks view the US and ISIS as a threat to their country. Pew did not ask Turks about their perceptions of ISIS this year, but its 2015 research found that 73% of Turks had a negative opinion of ISIS and 72% had a negative opinion of America. (In that poll, 8% of Turks had a favorable opinion of ISIS while 19% had no opinion.)
The explanations for anti-Americanism vary in different countries. For instance, in Greece, the sentiment is a largely historical phenomenon, as many blame the violent Greek civil war on the US. In Turkey, it has a different nature. As Turkish society becomes more and more ethnically and religiously conservative and xenophobic, anti-American thinking gains ground and spreads to more segments of the society. Erdoğan’s populist rhetoric only makes things worse.
“It [the presumed American hostility toward Turkey] is because we are Muslim,” a schoolteacher explained to me when I asked her why she thought America was conspiring against Turkey. Her husband, a government banker, broadened the issue: “Also because we [Turkey] stand against the Jewish oppression of the Palestinians … America doesn’t like this.” Such theories, pumped up by Erdoğan and his powerful media machinery, are quite palatable to the conservative masses, making this kind of manipulation a winning game for Erdoğan. The more Turks feel “imperial” again – the more they believe they have a strong leader and government at long last – the more votes Erdoğan can garner.
In this game, Erdoğan has to show that he really cares about “my nation’s foreign policy preferences” – a concern he does in fact share. The deal he offers is to make voters feel proud again in exchange for their support. All Erdoğan has to do is give the impression that he is fighting the world powers, America included. He then tells the world powers in private that they should ignore his rhetoric, which is only for domestic consumption. “Still, since taking power in Ankara in 2002, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has mainstreamed anti-Americanism,” wrote Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute.
Erdoğan’s generation of Islamists was anti-American largely because of the Arab-Israeli dispute, although they feared Soviet communism more than American imperialism. Future generations of Turkish Islamists will hate America even more because they will have gone through long years of indoctrination by a beloved leader and his powerful propaganda machine. One of the schoolboys who today admires the “great leader” and his brave fight against “the Satan” will one day become his country’s foreign minister, prime minister, or president.
THIS IS KURDISTAN’S LAST CHANCE
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Globe & Mail, Oct. 18, 2017
On (Oct. 16), what had been feared transpired: Paramilitary units supported by elements of the Iraqi army attacked in the vicinity of Kirkuk. Baghdad’s putatively federal army put into action the threats of the country’s leaders and, at the risk of ruining any chance of future co-existence with the Kurds, responded to the peaceful referendum of Sept. 25 with a dumbfounding and vengeful act of force.
Not long ago, it was Saddam Hussein operating with gas and deportations. Then, on Monday, Saddam’s Shi’ite successors, answering to Tehran, sent tanks, artillery and Katyusha rockets into the oil fields that are the life blood of Kurdistan. They are doing the same in the Sinjar Mountains, in the southern city of Jalawla, and in the Bashiqa area on the Plain of Nineveh, which the Kurds only just reclaimed from Islamic State.
And now, scandal mounts around the fact that Kurdistan’s so-called friends, the countries that for two years running relied on it to keep the Islamic State at bay and then to defeat it, the people who swore by the Peshmerga, by its heroes and by its dead, have, as I write these lines, responded with nothing more than deafening silence, appearing willing to abandon to their fate the men and women who fought so valiantly for them.
Whether one agreed or disagreed with the referendum that President Masoud Barzani consistently described as a democratic prelude to negotiation with Baghdad, it is completely unacceptable that the response to that referendum should be an act of force piled onto the blockade of Irbil’s skies and borders, the relentless economic and political pressure, and the transformation of Kurdish territory into an open-air prison over the past three weeks. In the face of this unprecedented act of punishment, the international community should have immediately sounded a solemn warning to Iraq (and to its Iranian masters and their ally of convenience, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan): Cease the aggression. Pull back the militias and the regular forces supporting them to the lines that existed on Oct. 15.
In response to an advance aimed at choking Kurdistan’s second-largest city and at breaking through the Peshmerga’s lines with support from Iraq’s 9th Armoured Division, the federal police and counterterrorism units, the West – notably the United States and France – should have called immediately for a ceasefire and denounced this replay of Danzig in the Middle East. And, seeing that the Iraqi forces and the militants of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq did not stand down, the international forces that were deployed in the area as part of the battle against the Islamic State should have been positioned to help our oldest and bravest ally in the region. For two years now, the Kurds have stood against the Islamic State almost alone along a 1,000-kilometre front line, serving as the West’s rampart against barbarism.
When the Iraqi army fled before the caliphate’s troops in the summer of 2014, it was the Kurds who held on and retook the territory. And if they were in Kirkuk on Monday it is, first of all, because they had been a majority there until the Arabization imposed by Saddam Hussein, but also because it is thanks to the Kurds – and the Kurds alone – that the city did not become a fiefdom of the Islamists like Mosul and Raqqa. In other words, coming to their rescue was a matter of honour and justice.
On one side we had the sinister new Gang of Four (Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq), who are bound together by their hatred of democracy and human rights; on the other we have a small but great people who aspire only to liberty, ours as well as their own, and who harbour no aim to divide neighbouring empires. What form of blindness – or what base calculations – could have caused us to hesitate for a second between the two?
I repeat: on one side, a clutch of dictatorships with which the United States and Europe are engaged in a delicate balance of power that permits no lowering of our guard and no concession on matters of principle; on the other, a proud people who for a century have resisted successive attempts at subjugation and whose crime today is to have voiced a desire to live in a society guided by the very same principles that we in the West embrace. Who in Washington, Paris or London could have had any doubt? Who would have dared oppose calling the UN Security Council into emergency session for a resolution to halt a war launched by Baghdad while the corpse of the Islamic State was still twitching? We should not have abandoned Kurdistan – the only real pole of stability in the region…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
The American Alliance With Turkey Was Built On a Myth : Steven A. Cook, Foreign Policy, Oct. 12, 2017—This week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed the U.S.-Turkey relationship from bad to worse. On Tuesday, he claimed that “spies” had infiltrated U.S. missions in Turkey and said that Turkey didn’t consider the U.S. ambassador to Ankara, John Bass, to be a legitimate representative of the United States.
Bernard-Henri Lévy Slams Turkish President Erdogan for Pushing ‘Crudest, Worst’ Antisemitic Campaign in Wake of Kurdish Independence Vote: Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, Oct. 9, 2017—Leading French-Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on Monday slammed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for orchestrating “the crudest, the worst” antisemitic campaign against him over his support for the September 25 independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan — in which 93 percent of voters declared their backing for the creation of a sovereign Kurdish state.
‘We Don’t Trust Americans Any More’: Roadblock on Kurdish Quest for Independence in Iraq: John Beck & Loveday Morris, Telegraph, Oct. 22, 2017—Solemn protesters holding aloft Kurdish flags surrounded the U.S. embassy and UN consulate here over the weekend, while a man scaled the walls of the Iranian embassy to tear down its flag. United in their anger, they chanted “Yes, yes, Kurdistan” and carried signs saying: “We want our country.”
The Kurds: Neither the Twin of Palestine Nor the Clone of Israel: Jose V. Ciprut, BESA, October 23, 2017—Not all Kurds seek sovereignty. Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria differ from one another and from the Kurds of the Diaspora (western Europe and the Americas). It is not inconceivable that Turkish, Iranian, and Syrian Kurds would be content with autonomy alone, provided it were real. Nor is it unthinkable that they might be citizens of a single Kurdish state but permanent residents elsewhere, or might benefit from dual nationality.