Turkey's last hope dies
By Ralph Peters
Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the
Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society.
Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to
understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of
Europe.
Our leaders no longer do their basic homework.The media relies on
experts-by-Wikipedia. Except for PC platitudes, our schools ignore the world
beyond our shores. Deluged with unreliable information, citizens succumb to the
new superstitions of the digital age.
So a great country is destroyed by Islamist hardliners before our
eyes—and our president praises its “democracy.”
That tragically failed coup was a forlorn hope, not an attempt to take
over a country. Turkey is not a banana republic in which the military grasps
the reins for its own profit. For almost a century, the Turkish armed
forces have been the guardians of the country’s secular constitution. Most
recently, coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 (with “non-coup” pressure in 1997) saw
the military intervene to prevent the country’s collapse.
Erdogan will use the coup as an
excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper
into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman
megalomaniac.
Each time, the military returned the government to civilian rule as soon
as that proved practical. My own first experience of Turkey came just
before the 1980 coup. Turkey was broke and broken. The economy was in such a
shambles that you could not buy a cup of Turkish coffee in Istanbul. I walked
because taxis and public transportation had no fuel. Murderous political
violence raged. Reluctantly, the generals stepped in and saved their country.
Friday night, mid-grade officers led a desperate effort to rescue their
country again. They failed. The West cheered. Soon enough, we’ll mourn.
The coup leaders made disastrous mistakes, the worst of which was to
imagine that the absence of President Erdogan from Ankara, the capital,
presented the perfect opportunity. Wrong. In a coup, the key is to
seize the leaders you mean to overthrow (as well as control of the
media). Instead of fleeing into exile, Erdogan was able to return in
triumph.
So who is the man our own president rushed to support because he was
“democratically elected?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is openly Islamist and
affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Obama appears to
believe represents the best hope for the Middle East. But the difference
between ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one of purpose, but
merely of manners: Muslim Brothers wash the blood off their hands before
they sit down to dinner with their dupes.
With barely a murmured “Tut-tut!” from Western leaders, Erdogan has
dismantled Turkey’s secular constitution (which the military is duty-bound to
protect). His “democracy” resembles Putin’s, not ours. Key
opposition figures have been driven into exile or banned. Opposition
parties have been suppressed. Recent elections have not been held so much
as staged. And Erdogan has torn the fresh scab from the Kurdish wound,
fostering civil war in Turkey’s southeast for his own political advantage.
Erdogan has packed Turkey’s courts with Islamists. He appointed
pliant, pro-Islamist generals and admirals, while staging show trials of those
of whom he wished to rid the country. He has de facto, if not yet de
jure, curtailed women’s freedoms. He dissolved the wall between mosque
and state (Friday night, he used mosques’ loudspeakers to call his supporters
into the streets). Not least, he had long allowed foreign fighters to
transit Turkey to join ISIS and has aggressively backed other extremists whom
he believed he could manage.
And his diplomatic extortion racket has degraded our own military
efforts against ISIS. That’s the man President Obama supports.
And the leaders of the ill-fated coup? What did they stand for?
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy and a secular constitution. One of the
great men of the last century, Ataturk (an innovative general by background)
pulled Turkey from the wreckage of World War One, abolished the caliphate,
suppressed fanatical religious orders, gave women legal rights and social protections,
banned the veil, promoted secular education for all citizens of Turkey,
strongly advocated Westernization and modernization…and promoted a democratic
future.
The officers who led the collapsed coup stood for all those things.
President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry opposed them.
By Saturday morning, it was clear that the mullahs and mobs behind
Erdogan had won. Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the
Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing
the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.
NATO, which operates by consensus, will find itself embracing a
poisonous snake. New crises will reawaken old fears in southeastern
Europe, which western European states will dismiss condescendingly, further
crippling the badly limping European Union. Syria will continue to
bleed. And educated, secular Turks will find themselves in a situation
like unto that of German liberals in the 1930s. We may see new and unexpected
wars.
A desperate, ill-planned coup has failed in Turkey. Here comes the
darkness.
Fox News Strategic Analyst
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and former enlisted man. He is the
author of prize-winning fiction and non-fiction books on the Civil War and the military.
His latest is "The Damned of Petersburg: A Novel"
(Forge Books, June 28, 2016).
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