Bloomberg
Aug 23 2007
Turkey Is Central on World War IV’s Frontline: Frederick Kempe
By Frederick Kempe
Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) — For those who argue that Sept. 11 plunged the
U.S. and the West into World War IV, a long struggle against militant
Islam, this has been a dark summer.
Yet a Muslim-oriented party’s sweeping parliamentary victory in
democratic Turkey provides hope in a strategic place, provided
Europe, the U.S. and the Turks themselves don’t squander the
opportunity.
“Turkey is to our national security now what Germany was in the Cold
War,” says Richard Holbrooke, a veteran U.S. diplomat who served as
ambassador to Germany and is now adviser to Hillary Clinton. “It is
our new frontline state.”
Former Afghanistan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani sees Turkey’s
centrality emerging from its position on the three critical fault
lines of our times: between order and disorder, between moderate and
extremist Islam, and between the Western and Islamic world.
Those fault lines have never looked more perilous. Iraq is sliding
toward a vicious civil war abetted by American domestic politics that
don’t grasp the stakes. Iran is advancing its malignant regional and
atomic ambitions. A nuclear-tipped Pakistan grows more unstable,
while al-Qaeda and the Taliban regroup within its borders.
Afghanistan is slipping, Hamas has taken Gaza, and Hezbollah
threatens Lebanon. European-based Muslim extremists struck the U.K.
again and promise to elsewhere.
That only heightens the importance of the July 22 parliamentary
victory of Turkey’s Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party, or
AKP, giving it unprecedented political dominance. It gained some 47
percent of the vote, adding 12 points to its 2002 victory and landing
341 of 550 seats.
Falling Short
In that victory lies a rare example of a Muslim-oriented party
leading a lively, democratic system that continues to separate mosque
and state and protects secular and minority rights.
That is also why the current debate in Turkey falls too short. It
focuses on whether the AKP should install as president, the bastion
of its national secularism, a pious Muslim whose wife wears a
headscarf. Buoyed by its victory, the party renominated Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul, whose presidential candidacy the military
blocked in April. He will probably be elected by the time of the
parliament’s third round of voting Aug. 28, assuming the military
doesn’t risk the social and economic cost of intervening again.
Yet the point isn’t what his wife wears but what the Turkish
political transformation from military-enforced secularism to
Muslim-oriented leadership means to our fragile times.
Soft Power
Many dislike the notion of Turkey as a player in World War IV,
following World Wars I, II and the Cold War. That’s partly due to the
term’s roots among neoconservatives and the false inference that
President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” has a military solution.
Johns Hopkins University Professor Eliot A. Cohen, writing in the
Wall Street Journal two months after Sept. 11, argued that World War
IV — like the Cold War — would be global, have ideology at its core
and above all require the mobilization of soft power: skills,
expertise and resources.
The Bush administration has failed most profoundly in underestimating
the ideological challenge and overestimating the effectiveness of
force. Anti-Americanism has grown rapidly in Turkey, with only 9
percent of Turks having a favorable view of the U.S., according to a
Pew Research Center poll, down from 52 percent in a 2000 survey by
the U.S. State Department.
Favoring bin Laden
Turks are three times as likely to have a favorable view of Osama bin
Laden as they are of Bush. The European Union has also suffered due
to its own reluctance to embrace Turkey. Turks’ favorable view of the
EU has fallen to 28 percent this year from 57 percent in 2004.
So with that in mind, here’s what Europe, the U.S. and above all
Turkey must do to ensure this summer’s shift has a happy ending.
EU leaders and citizens must agree that Turkey is the most critical
geopolitical challenge and that the only thing riskier than absorbing
it as an EU member would be to shut it out on religious grounds.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy must reflect on the broader
consequences of his dangerous opposition to Turkey’s membership.
More Damage
The U.S. must avoid more damage during the Bush administration. That
will require providing Turkey with help combating PKK Kurdish
terrorist cells operating along its border with northern Iraq, if
only to ensure the Turkish military itself doesn’t do so. Congress
must also resist the temptation to pass pending bills branding the
Ottoman Empire’s actions against Armenians as genocide. Irrespective
of the facts of the argument, such resolutions have been blocked
before by U.S. presidents and the timing now is particularly
inopportune because it could inflame a country that is critical to
U.S. supply lines for Iraq.
Yet the greatest responsibility rests upon the Turks, particularly
Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and his party. The irony is that the
AKP, whose predecessor parties were hounded and outlawed for being
too openly Islamic, remade itself as a pro- Europe, pro-secular force
and has now replaced the Turkish military as the guarantor of
Turkey’s democratic future. At the same time, secular parties must
regroup to provide a more viable opposition that keeps the AKP
honest.
Turkey’s historic shift, however, invests the AKP with greatly
increased responsibility. It must tame the extremists in its ranks
who prefer Islamic to constitutional law, and combat al-Qaeda cells
and assorted threats in the country. And even as it establishes
closer relations with the Islamic world, which can benefit the West,
it needs to preserve its ties to NATO and its EU membership
aspirations.
None of this means the West can afford to shift attention to Turkey
from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, any more than it could
ignore the Warsaw Pact and focus on Germany during the Cold War. But
just as Germany’s fate was crucial then, so too could Turkey’s be
decisive now.
To contact the writer of this column: Frederick Kempe in Washington
at [email protected] .
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