The Future Middle East: After the War is Won
"Don't you understand? They hate our guts and everything we stand for! They don't want us there and, believe me, we don't want to be there!"
These are the words a good friend of ours spoke to us during a friendly debate on the Iraq War over dinner here in the Near Abroad. Our friend is no liberal. Quite the opposite, in fact. What he does have is Middle Eastern experience like you wouldn't believe. A regular reader of the indispensable Little Green Footballs, our friend agrees with us that a sickness has spread among the world's Islamic civilizations.
It's like this, he explained: in the mid- to late-1930's the Germans were in a tough political situation. Defeated in war, humiliated in the world's rush to acquire colonies, the Germans were a proud people perplexed by their sudden and disastrous loss of power, prestige and wealth. With each passing month, the grievances that so haunted the German people grew more and more agonizing, until they burned brightly, a shining place for the Germans to deposit their hatred, their envy, their anger.
A small political movement quickly caught fire, and soon the fact of the rise of the German Worker's National Socialist Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, became the central fact of German political life. Here, finally, was a party and a leader who spoke openly about the real problems, about the German people's legitimate and urgent grievances: against the French, for imposing the humiliating yoke of Versailles, against the Russian bear for spreading sedition in their land, against the British, for not allowing them their fair share of colonies, against the hated Jews, for conspiring and plotting against them. The German newspapers burned with the weight of resentment, spreading the most fanciful conspiracy theories. German political leaders spoke with passion about the wrongs that had been visited against the German people, and about the need to correct those wrongs. With force.
Now, our friend argued, here we have one of the leading civilizations of the world, known for its art, philosophy, industry, music, religion, political science and military ability. By any measure, the Germanic people circa 1932 were one of the world's brightest stars. Yet, they so fell in love with their grievances, their hate, that they fell almost to a man for a murderous ideology of lies.
And here's the important part: it's not that the German people didn't have legitimate grievances. They did. It's how they used the fact of those grievances that gave the rest of the world the right to train their young men, arm them and send them across oceans to shoot as many Germans in the head as possible.
So, he concluded, if such a thing could come to pass, affecting an entire advanced civilization, might it not happen again? Might not we be witnessing the wholesale conversion of the Islamic world to a new type of fascism, one equally illuminated and powered by their grievances? If that could happen to the Germans, why not the Muslims? No one is immune to the allure of the powerful feeling of setting out to right wrongs done to one's people. You can see that feeling take new life with every "death to America" or "death to the Jews" rally. The language, the imagery, the motivations: they would all be familiar to Goebbels.
The Sickness in Turkey
We thought of our friends words as we read Robert L. Pollack’s “The Sick Man of Europe—Again” in today’s Wall Street Journal. Pollack’s dispatch from Ankara makes for both bracing and stark reading. He reports that the old Cold War era leftism of the political culture has mixed with the new Islamism, resulting in a wave of strong and seemingly inexplicable anti-Americanism.
Consider the Islamist newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite. A Jan. 9 story claimed that U.S. forces were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that mullahs there had issued a fatwa prohibiting residents from eating its fish. Yeni Safak has also repeatedly claimed that U.S. forces used chemical weapons in Fallujah. One of its columnists has alleged that U.S. soldiers raped women and children there and left their bodies in the streets to be eaten by dogs. Among the paper's "scoops" have been the 1,000 Israeli soldiers deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq, and that U.S. forces have been harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."
It's not much better in the secular press. The mainstream Hurriyet has accused Israeli hit squads of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul, and the U.S. of starting an occupation of Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. At Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his "ethnic origins"--guess what, he's Jewish--determine his behavior. Mr. Edelman is indeed the all-too-rare foreign-service officer who takes seriously his obligation to defend America's image and interests abroad. The intellectual climate in which he's operating has gone so mad that he actually felt compelled to organize a conference call with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey to explain that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the recent tsunami.
This is what defending Turkey for over 40 years through NATO has bought us. This is what years of massive foreign aid, innumerable USAID projects and decades of military-to-military exchanges and training have left us. The things Pollack reports could only be true if the sickness has spread wide and deep in the land of our erstwhile ally.
Entirely forgotten is that President Bush was among the first world leaders to recognize Prime Minister Erdogan, while Turkey's own legal system was still weighing whether he was secular enough for the job. Forgotten have been decades of U.S. military assistance. Forgotten have been years of American efforts to secure a pipeline route for Caspian oil that terminates at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Forgotten has been the fact that U.S. administrations continue to fight annual attempts in Congress to pass a resolution condemning modern Turkey for the long-ago Armenian genocide. Forgotten has been America's persistent lobbying for Turkish membership in the European Union.
Forgotten, above all, has been America's help against the PKK. Its now-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was expelled from Syria in 1998 after the Turks threatened military action. He was then passed like a hot potato between European governments, who refused to extradite him to Turkey because--gasp!--he might face the death penalty. He was eventually caught--with the help of U.S. intelligence--sheltered in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. "They gave us Ocalan. What could be bigger than that?" says one of a handful of unapologetically pro-U.S. Turks I still know.
Turkish opposition to the Iraq War cost American lives. By delaying the arrival of the 4th Infantry Division, Turkey made both the war and the following occupation more deadly and more dangerous. Turkey has proven to be a faithless and fair-weather friend. It seems our friend was right: they hate us and wish us only ill.
For Us, Not Them
Our friend and we, however, draw different conclusions from these undeniable facts. Where our friend sees a hopeless battle for hearts and minds in a region that is sick with implacable hatred, we see an opportunity.
For, you see, we are not there for them, but for us. We’re not in Iraq because we suddenly felt the urge to help the Iraqi people. We’re in Iraq, we’re supporting reformers and revolutionaries in Iran, we’re pressuring the Ba’athists of Syria, we’re squeezing the Saudi “royals” with their fanatical fascist religion and we’re changing the name of the game in Egypt because it is in our interest to do so.
Many liberal critics (and those of the paleo-right) sneer when speaking of Bush’s strategy, noting that democracy is only likely to produce even-more vehement anti-American regimes.
They miss the point entirely. We, too, understand the sickness. We, too, realize that it will be decades before it recedes. But in the meantime, freer and more democratic Islamic states will open up more domestic opportunity, even if they don’t produce governments that agree with us on many points.
Turkey is the new Middle East’s future. We are likely to be hated for some time to come. But we are hated in Spain and France as well. The hatred, by itself, the opposition to U.S. policies, by itself, is only of minimal import.
A nascent fascism has taken root in the Muslim world. There is no escaping the hate, the anger, the all-important grievances. But what we can escape is the full consequence of that hatred. By opening up a democratic space in the Middle East, we allow other, competing interests—like the interest of bettering one’s lives, of one’s children having a better life—to fight it out with the Grievance Party. By creating a context for the natural give-and-take of democratic politics we increase the likelihood that the hatred will be deflected and minimized until it recedes.
Make no mistake: Bush’s policy is designed to protect us specifically and the West in our interest. It’s nice when an Iraqi thanks us for their election day, but the truth is it doesn’t matter whether or not they are grateful.
The goal is Turkey: hate-filled, conspiracy-fuelled, but still democratic, moderately secular, peaceful and relatively prosperous. As bad as it is for us to look at squarely, a Middle East full of states like Turkey is the best we can hope for out of a terrible situation.
This is what victory looks like. They still hate us, they still despise us, but they also have their lives, other things to devote energies to.
Let the next generation work on their hearts and minds. Right now we must do everything we can to make this work. Fail, and we’re looking at a repeat of World War II.
Except this time, the enemy would be in his billions.
These are the words a good friend of ours spoke to us during a friendly debate on the Iraq War over dinner here in the Near Abroad. Our friend is no liberal. Quite the opposite, in fact. What he does have is Middle Eastern experience like you wouldn't believe. A regular reader of the indispensable Little Green Footballs, our friend agrees with us that a sickness has spread among the world's Islamic civilizations.
It's like this, he explained: in the mid- to late-1930's the Germans were in a tough political situation. Defeated in war, humiliated in the world's rush to acquire colonies, the Germans were a proud people perplexed by their sudden and disastrous loss of power, prestige and wealth. With each passing month, the grievances that so haunted the German people grew more and more agonizing, until they burned brightly, a shining place for the Germans to deposit their hatred, their envy, their anger.
A small political movement quickly caught fire, and soon the fact of the rise of the German Worker's National Socialist Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, became the central fact of German political life. Here, finally, was a party and a leader who spoke openly about the real problems, about the German people's legitimate and urgent grievances: against the French, for imposing the humiliating yoke of Versailles, against the Russian bear for spreading sedition in their land, against the British, for not allowing them their fair share of colonies, against the hated Jews, for conspiring and plotting against them. The German newspapers burned with the weight of resentment, spreading the most fanciful conspiracy theories. German political leaders spoke with passion about the wrongs that had been visited against the German people, and about the need to correct those wrongs. With force.
Now, our friend argued, here we have one of the leading civilizations of the world, known for its art, philosophy, industry, music, religion, political science and military ability. By any measure, the Germanic people circa 1932 were one of the world's brightest stars. Yet, they so fell in love with their grievances, their hate, that they fell almost to a man for a murderous ideology of lies.
And here's the important part: it's not that the German people didn't have legitimate grievances. They did. It's how they used the fact of those grievances that gave the rest of the world the right to train their young men, arm them and send them across oceans to shoot as many Germans in the head as possible.
So, he concluded, if such a thing could come to pass, affecting an entire advanced civilization, might it not happen again? Might not we be witnessing the wholesale conversion of the Islamic world to a new type of fascism, one equally illuminated and powered by their grievances? If that could happen to the Germans, why not the Muslims? No one is immune to the allure of the powerful feeling of setting out to right wrongs done to one's people. You can see that feeling take new life with every "death to America" or "death to the Jews" rally. The language, the imagery, the motivations: they would all be familiar to Goebbels.
The Sickness in Turkey
We thought of our friends words as we read Robert L. Pollack’s “The Sick Man of Europe—Again” in today’s Wall Street Journal. Pollack’s dispatch from Ankara makes for both bracing and stark reading. He reports that the old Cold War era leftism of the political culture has mixed with the new Islamism, resulting in a wave of strong and seemingly inexplicable anti-Americanism.
Consider the Islamist newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite. A Jan. 9 story claimed that U.S. forces were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that mullahs there had issued a fatwa prohibiting residents from eating its fish. Yeni Safak has also repeatedly claimed that U.S. forces used chemical weapons in Fallujah. One of its columnists has alleged that U.S. soldiers raped women and children there and left their bodies in the streets to be eaten by dogs. Among the paper's "scoops" have been the 1,000 Israeli soldiers deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq, and that U.S. forces have been harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."
It's not much better in the secular press. The mainstream Hurriyet has accused Israeli hit squads of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul, and the U.S. of starting an occupation of Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. At Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his "ethnic origins"--guess what, he's Jewish--determine his behavior. Mr. Edelman is indeed the all-too-rare foreign-service officer who takes seriously his obligation to defend America's image and interests abroad. The intellectual climate in which he's operating has gone so mad that he actually felt compelled to organize a conference call with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey to explain that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the recent tsunami.
This is what defending Turkey for over 40 years through NATO has bought us. This is what years of massive foreign aid, innumerable USAID projects and decades of military-to-military exchanges and training have left us. The things Pollack reports could only be true if the sickness has spread wide and deep in the land of our erstwhile ally.
Entirely forgotten is that President Bush was among the first world leaders to recognize Prime Minister Erdogan, while Turkey's own legal system was still weighing whether he was secular enough for the job. Forgotten have been decades of U.S. military assistance. Forgotten have been years of American efforts to secure a pipeline route for Caspian oil that terminates at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Forgotten has been the fact that U.S. administrations continue to fight annual attempts in Congress to pass a resolution condemning modern Turkey for the long-ago Armenian genocide. Forgotten has been America's persistent lobbying for Turkish membership in the European Union.
Forgotten, above all, has been America's help against the PKK. Its now-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was expelled from Syria in 1998 after the Turks threatened military action. He was then passed like a hot potato between European governments, who refused to extradite him to Turkey because--gasp!--he might face the death penalty. He was eventually caught--with the help of U.S. intelligence--sheltered in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. "They gave us Ocalan. What could be bigger than that?" says one of a handful of unapologetically pro-U.S. Turks I still know.
Turkish opposition to the Iraq War cost American lives. By delaying the arrival of the 4th Infantry Division, Turkey made both the war and the following occupation more deadly and more dangerous. Turkey has proven to be a faithless and fair-weather friend. It seems our friend was right: they hate us and wish us only ill.
For Us, Not Them
Our friend and we, however, draw different conclusions from these undeniable facts. Where our friend sees a hopeless battle for hearts and minds in a region that is sick with implacable hatred, we see an opportunity.
For, you see, we are not there for them, but for us. We’re not in Iraq because we suddenly felt the urge to help the Iraqi people. We’re in Iraq, we’re supporting reformers and revolutionaries in Iran, we’re pressuring the Ba’athists of Syria, we’re squeezing the Saudi “royals” with their fanatical fascist religion and we’re changing the name of the game in Egypt because it is in our interest to do so.
Many liberal critics (and those of the paleo-right) sneer when speaking of Bush’s strategy, noting that democracy is only likely to produce even-more vehement anti-American regimes.
They miss the point entirely. We, too, understand the sickness. We, too, realize that it will be decades before it recedes. But in the meantime, freer and more democratic Islamic states will open up more domestic opportunity, even if they don’t produce governments that agree with us on many points.
Turkey is the new Middle East’s future. We are likely to be hated for some time to come. But we are hated in Spain and France as well. The hatred, by itself, the opposition to U.S. policies, by itself, is only of minimal import.
A nascent fascism has taken root in the Muslim world. There is no escaping the hate, the anger, the all-important grievances. But what we can escape is the full consequence of that hatred. By opening up a democratic space in the Middle East, we allow other, competing interests—like the interest of bettering one’s lives, of one’s children having a better life—to fight it out with the Grievance Party. By creating a context for the natural give-and-take of democratic politics we increase the likelihood that the hatred will be deflected and minimized until it recedes.
Make no mistake: Bush’s policy is designed to protect us specifically and the West in our interest. It’s nice when an Iraqi thanks us for their election day, but the truth is it doesn’t matter whether or not they are grateful.
The goal is Turkey: hate-filled, conspiracy-fuelled, but still democratic, moderately secular, peaceful and relatively prosperous. As bad as it is for us to look at squarely, a Middle East full of states like Turkey is the best we can hope for out of a terrible situation.
This is what victory looks like. They still hate us, they still despise us, but they also have their lives, other things to devote energies to.
Let the next generation work on their hearts and minds. Right now we must do everything we can to make this work. Fail, and we’re looking at a repeat of World War II.
Except this time, the enemy would be in his billions.
