You are wrong. Turkey is NOT a founding member of NATO.

You are also wrong about Libya. Please read about the initial disagreement among the alliance, especially France's stance. Learn that Turkey wanted NATO takeover to veto attacks and France was annoyed by this. Start by reading the latest New York Times article on Turkey's Libya policy. It mentions how Turkey pushed for diplomacy till the last minute.

We will have wait and see about Syria. Not a fan of fortunetelling if you ask me.

Therefore your furious conclusion is invalid.

completely contradicts every other article I read on Turkey's productive and peaceful efforts in the region. Which is right?

Turkey has been by far the most sensible power broker in the area. Iran is discredited. Egypt is weak. Saudi Arabia is even weaker. Pakistan has no foreign influence. The US is an enemy of the Arab world. So who would you choose if you were the leader of a lesser country?

Perhaps Nicolas19 should consider that there might be an underlying reason connecting the various "weak" leaders he cites. Egypt is the home of the Muslim Brotherhood; Saudi Arabia of the Wahabis; and Iran of the mad notion of forcing Allah to do the will of human beings by creating havoc. Each of these notions has at its center a concept at odds with core Islamic ideas.

The problem with the Iranian focus should be obvious; in Islam, man submits to Allah and not vice versa, yet the mullahs pursue their effort to force Allah to reveal the hidden imam. Presumably Allah adheres to His own plans.

The Brotherhood's objective is to restore the caliphate for purposes of conducting jihad. But is it possible that such a significant change to the structure of the umma as the abolition of the caliphate could occur against Allah's will? If yes, then Allah doesn't have much power. If no, then the Brotherhood's goal is to overturn Allah's will.

The Wahabis seek a return to the glorious days of the Prophet. But that is exactly the problem: what made the Seventh Century glorious was the presence of the Prophet. Unless they have a prophet to take Muhammad's place, they can't achieve their stated aim.

This leads to the conclusion that seeing the US as the enemy is part of the problem. Maybe all along the West has been advocating reforms that will make life better for Muslims. Instead, the fate of the Muslim world has been controlled by groups seeking objectives that can never come to be, guaranteeing a level of frustration that will boil over from time to time.

Regardless of the philosophies underlying some of the Kurdish resistance organizations, the fact is that the Turkish government for many decades has repressed the Kurdish people living in their midst and has murdered tens of thousands of them while the Western World stands by an watches silently. During the last decade or two Turkey has murdered approximately 40,000 Kurds. The Kurds are a distinct people living in oppressive conditions in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and currently doing okay in their rather peaceful, economically vibrant area of Iraq. Saddam Hussein previously used gas warfare against them.

The West promised the Kurdsa land of their own after World War I, but then abandoned them. The Kurds repeatedly fight the Turkish government in an attempt to obtain an owed degree of freedom. They recently demonstrated in large numbers, but they were ignored because the west believes it needs their airbase in Turkey and doesn't want to upset the de facto Islamic government of Erdogan. He and many of his followers believe they can recreate the (sick man) Ottoman Empire with an Islamic bent.
The Kurds are one of the few secular groups of Muslims without a radical bent. As they have proven in Iraq, they know how to create a vibrant economy, are fair minded towards all, and certainly not fanatical in any way. Their women are treated with equality, the schools are first class, etc.

It is time for the west to take up their plight and arrange for a separate Kurdish nation in the Middle East by taking land from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran where the Kurds are in the greater majority. Unlike the now failing Lebanese, who once had such promise, the Kurds would produce the Muslim worlds first modern and democratic state and the second such country int he Middle East--Israel being the first.

It is time for Obama, Clinton, and the UN to take up the Kurds plight and condemn Turkish government barbarisms.

I do think that at some point in recent times, Turkey's desire to become a power-broker morphed in a mythology that they were, in fact, a power-broker. They are not.

They do weigh influence, due to their central location between the Middle East / Arab world / Muslim world and Europe / the West, and the influences that define Turkish culture. But the connection between Turks and Arabs will always be tenuous, defined as much by their similarities as their differences, and the shared history of the Ottoman Empire.

For Palestinians, Turkey is a useful foil. For other Arab and Muslim affairs, less so, and it's starting to show.

Erdogan is a wolf in reformist clothing, who deals in anti-Israel propaganda for political gain.

The author's account shows a clear pattern, which his explanation is unable to explain.

Why all this multiplication of categories and epicycles, about seeming inexplicable contradictions and mistakes in Turkish policy, when there's no contradiction at all if we use the obvious paradigm? The appearance of contradictions or mistakes is only a result of a strained paradigm, one based on the Western investment in belief in Erdogan.

The existing paradigm of a purely benign rise of the AKP Turkey is hopeless at explaining the simple pattern shown in the article. It is rooted in the Western elite's considerable intellectual and moral investment in believing well of the AKP regime. It entails refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the regime could wish us ill.

The obvious explanation for the facts in the article is that the regime DOES in many respects wish us ill. Its concept of regional leadership includes a strong element of leadership against the West. The same goes for its concept of an enhanced global role,

This is a simple paradigm: a regime intent toward the West (and relation with the West) that is at least part adversarial, potentially primarily adversarial. it is most definitely not an intent or relation of unalloyed alliance.

On this paradigm, it is obvious why the AKP regime is happy to dump pro-Western leaders such as Mubarak (and why Western leaders, even the most naively pro-revolution ones, are more cautious about trashing such a good person). And why AKP is reluctant to see Gaddafi and Bashir go. Of course it wants pro-Western leaders to go, and more ambiguous or anti-Western leaders to remain. All the secondary factors of other Turkish interests in Libya and Syria are, in fact, secondary. One can always adduce secondary factors, as the author does, to explain away primary contradictions that emerge within one's paradigm; but this is an evasion. The need is to reexamine the paradigm.

The more sensible paradigm makes it also obvious why Turkey will unambiguously welcome electoral democracy in Egypt, where polls show a huge fundamentalist constituency, far more than in Turkey itself. It is a fact that forces Westerners -- even the most pro-revolution ones, such as the ones currently in power in the U.S. -- to feel a bit anxious and cast about for naive solutions such as Western-style checks and balances. Meanwhile Erdogan, with Western support, destroyed the crucial effective check and balance in Turkey -- the army -- and the U.S. is joining with those in Egypt who are pushing to do the same there, The mystery is not Erdogan's policy; it is Western policy. For which the explanation lies in the entrenchment of simplistic ideologies and policies of democracy-promotion in Western institutions and elites. Among these one can count the use of Copenhagen criteria for democratization, criteria that have sometimes been relevant within the European cultural framework but can be counterproductive for the long historical democratization process in some other contexts. The export of color-revolution methods to the Mideast, after nearly all the color revolutions in the ex-Soviet space turned out more harm than good for democratic evolution, is another case in point. Direct cause, direct effect. A simple, straightforward paradigm: people usually carry out their intentions. Including their delusory ones.

Why not stop piling more and more epicycles onto the old paradigm? Why not be a bit more scientific and grant credibility to the most credible hypothesis, which is that people act on their major intentions? Is it somehow an inconvenient truth to acknowledge that the Islamist government of Turkey bears some Islamist hostility toward us? To whom is it inconvenient? The public interest is to see reality. Whose interest -- I mean a political or psychological interest, not a material one -- is served by refusing to see it?

Only with a simpler, more honest paradigm will be possible to face some realities that have been staring us in the face for a decade. And that we need to see. And that the old paradigm has been determinedly excluding from view.

Time to apply Occam's Razor: use the obvious explanation for Turkish policy. (And for some other things, the harmful side of which our elite has become over-invested in explaining away, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.) And deal with it.

Ira Straus

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Even Turkey remains vulnerable to cyclical regression into militant Islamic fundamentalism; their military has had to intervene several times in modern history to maintain the secularity of their State, and I doubt that they are never going to have to do so again.

I don't agree.
First there is a conspiracy against libya.
Turkey has very good relationships with arab world and don't want to have any Ottoman background.
These good relations do not please Isreal, US and the arab countries of the golf.
As libya is concerned, Turkey kept saying there is no military solution and they proposed a roadmap to end the crisis but it seems that France and UK want Libya to be completely destroyed to rebuilt it by their companies as USA did with Irak.

The West promised the Kurd land James of their own after World War I, but then abandoned them. The Kurd repeatedly fight the Turkish government in an attempt to obtain an owed degree of freedom.

This leads to the conclusion that seeing the US as the enemy is part of the problem. Maybe all along the West has been advocating reforms that will make life better for Muslims. Instead, the fate of the Muslim world has been controlled by groups seeking objectives that can never come to be, guaranteeing a level of frustration that will boil over from time to time. mutual funds The existing paradigm of a purely benign rise of the AKP Turkey is hopeless at explaining the simple pattern shown in the article. It is rooted in the Western elite's considerable intellectual and moral investment in believing well of the AKP regime. It entails refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the regime could wish us ill.

I also do think that at some point in recent times, Turkey's desire to become a power-broker morphed in a mythology that they were, in fact, a power-broker. They are not. Only with a simpler, more honest paradigm will be possible to face some realities that have been staring us in the face for a decade. And that we need to see. And that the old paradigm has been determinedly excluding from view. mba The existing paradigm of a purely benign rise of the AKP Turkey is hopeless at explaining the simple pattern shown in the article. It is rooted in the Western elite's considerable intellectual and moral investment in believing well of the AKP regime. It entails refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the regime could wish us ill.