WHAT TURKS ARE WATCHING
By Richard Morgan

Slate

Jun e 14 2006

A new wave of anti-American pop culture.

Allies aren’t supposed to behave like this. In Turkey-a stable
secular Muslim democracy that’s practically European-the country’s
biggest-budget-ever movie, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, is preparing to
hit shelves on DVD and is scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release this
summer. Based on a television series that has been a record-breaking
hit for four seasons, it’s a military thriller about an elite
Turkish intelligence officer who near-single-handedly smites a group
of reckless U.S. soldiers who make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday
picnic. The film, which received some press coverage in the States,
is only part of a wave of anti-American pop culture that’s sweeping
the country.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq starts off factually enough, with a
depiction of a July 4, 2003, incident in which around 100 soldiers
from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade stormed the barracks
of a Turkish special forces office in Iraq, arresting 11 Turks who
allegedly were planning to assassinate the Kurdish governor of the
oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The Americans not only handcuffed the Turks
but also forced hoods over their heads and held them in custody for
more than two days. The U.S. government later apologized, explaining
that its soldiers couldn’t tell the difference between Turks and Iraqi
insurgents because the Turks were not in uniform. Turkey didn’t buy
it, and this blockbuster is the payback.

As the flick takes a sharp turn toward fiction, one of the 11 Turks
in the 2003 debacle commits suicide to regain his warrior honor. His
suicide note is sent to Polat Alemdar, the Turkish intelligence
officer who stars in the Valley of the Wolves television show.

Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William
Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described
"peacekeeper of God," is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire
on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a
facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls
out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats
in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers
expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too
tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the
trailer and its human cargo. "I was making sure they could breathe,"
he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

The snide James Bond tone isn’t totally out of place. This is, after
all, a movie, where the American soldiers-in their black tank tops
and cutoff khakis-look more like characters from video games like
Street Fighter. And the dialogue is cartoonish, Western capitalist
chest-thumping. In one scene, Alemdar asks Marshall: "Isn’t the boss
of American soldiers the American capitalism?" Marshall counters: "The
United States has been paying for your nation for the past 50 years. We
send you the elastic for your panties. Why can’t you produce anything?"

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called
the film "pure fiction." But when Turkey’s speaker of parliament,
Bulent Arinc, attended a premiere of the movie in Ankara, he said it
was "a great film that will go down in history." When asked whether
the movie meshed well with reality, Arinc told Anatolia, the state
news agency: "Yes, exactly."

Naysayers and diplomats can say that Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is
just one film, but it’s also part of a larger pop-culture trend that
has taken root ever since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,
a hugely unpopular war in Turkey, which borders Iraq. All last year
Turkish bookstores were hard-pressed to keep the best-selling novel
Metal Storm on shelves. The novel, written like one of Tom Clancy’s
international potboilers, depicts a U.S. invasion of Turkey in March
2007. Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are characters, although
the U.S. president is a nameless, nap-loving warmonger who defers
most of his decision-making to fellow members of Skull and Bones. In
the book, whose title is America’s name for its invasion, the U.S.
military swiftly bombs then overtakes Ankara and Istanbul (the U.S.
president, who is also deeply evangelical, aims to restore Istanbul
to its Christian Byzantine glory). It’s like a nightmare version of
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Americans’ motive is Uncle Sam’s lust for the country’s rich
borax supply (Turkey is home to 60 percent of the world’s borax, a
mineral used in weapons, radiation shields, and space technology). In
the second phase of its invasion, Operation Sèvres (named after the
World War I treaty in which the West gutted the Ottoman Empire),
the United States creates a Kurdish state and lets longtime Turkish
enemies Greece and Armenia ravage what’s left of the country. A
lone Turkish secret agent counters by stealing a nuclear weapon and
vaporizing Washington. First published in December 2004, the book
has surpassed 150,000 copies sold-unheard of in Turkey. "This novel
is not just another conspiracy theory; it’s a possibility theory,"
Orkun Ucar, one of the book’s authors, told Al Jazeera.

This wave of anti-American Turkish pop culture is so widespread
that it has been the sole topic of its own Senate foreign relations
committee hearing; Turkey is, after all, a key NATO ally. But if the
senators aren’t interested in reading Metal Storm, watching Valley
of the Wolves: Iraq, or listening to the Turkish rock group Duman
(sample lyrics: "What kind of excuse is this? You’re after oil again")
here’s a simpler explanation of what’s going on in Turkey: It’s not
all that dissimilar to what’s going on in the United States.

Anti-Turkish pop-culture references turn up in, for example, episodes
of 24, which started last season with a Turkish national kidnapping
the secretary of defense; or The West Wing, in which an international
incident centered upon Turkey’s beheading of a woman accused of having
sex with her fiance. (Turkey, one group pointed out, doesn’t have a
death penalty anymore and hasn’t executed anyone since 1984.)

Or maybe the memories go back further than that. During a recent
vacation to Istanbul, I did hear one complaint more than a few times,
a long-lingering wound to their national pride: the hugely popular 1978
American film Midnight Express, which was nominated for six Oscars and
won one for its writing. In it, Billy Hayes, an American tourist jailed
for smuggling hashish, tells a Turkish court, "For a nation of pigs,
it sure seems funny that you don’t eat them! Jesus Christ forgave the
bastards, but I can’t! I hate! I hate you! I hate your nation! And I
hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re
pigs! You’re all pigs!" So perhaps one good movie deserves another.

Not that all this is about visceral bitterness; culture-especially
pop-is by nature a knot of influences with everything becoming a
fad sooner or later. "For years, we, the people of this area, Turks,
Arabs, Iranians, Russians, or people further away, such as Vietnamese
and Chinese, were always characterized as bad in Hollywood movies,"
Bahadir Ozdener, one of the writers for Valley of the Wolves: Iraq,
told me. "We are accustomed to this, we do not show any social
reactions to this, and we just watch them as movies and place them
in our movie archives. We think that democratic societies should get
accustomed to being shown as bad people because of what they have
done." Widespread Turkish antagonism toward America may just be a
bit of nationalist whimsy, the way Americans occasionally haze their
French allies. It’s not like we actually despise the French … oui?

Richard Morgan is a freelance writer in New York and a contributing
editor at Topic magazine.

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