For Turkey and U.S., at odds over Syria, a 60-year alliance shows signs of crumbling

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Washington Post:

Liz Sly

October 29 2014

 

ANKARA, Turkey — The increasingly hostile divergence of views between Turkey and the United States over Syria is testing the durability of their 60-year alliance, to the point where some are starting to question whether the two countries still can be considered allies at all.

 

Turkey’s refusal to allow the United States to use its bases to launch attacks against the Islamic State, quarrels over how to manage the battle raging in the Syrian border town of Kobane and the harsh tone of the anti-American rhetoric used by top Turkish officials to denounce U.S. policy have served to illuminate the vast gulf that divides the two nations as they scramble to address the menace posed by the extremists.

 

Whether the Islamic State even is the chief threat confronting the region is disputed, with Washington and Ankara publicly airing their differences through a fog of sniping, insults and recrimination over who is to blame for the mess the Middle East has become.

 

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[Valin]

Get Tough with Turkey
Tell the Turks to stop supporting terrorism — or get out of NATO.
Conrad Black

Oct. 30 2014

 

The time must have come to consider whether it is really acceptable to retain Turkey as a member of NATO. At various times in the history of its membership, dating back to 1952, Turkey, though effectively rescued from threats from Stalin by the Truman administration in 1947 and 1948, was a double agent between the Soviet Union and the United States, taking substantial aid from both. For decades, on the strength of that NATO membership, Turkey knocked noisily on the door of Europe but was generally rebuffed as a nation of Muslims unassimilable to the pretensions of the surging Euro-federal ideal. This remained true in the brief shining but somewhat infamous moment when most of the West European leaders thought that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States could be eased out of Europe, and the Germans, French, British, Italians, Spanish, and others could stand on one another’s shoulders and Europe would become the centre of the world again, after the aberrant century that started with World War I in 1914. In these circumstances, NATO eroded, first into the enfeebled “coalition of the willing,” which isn’t an alliance at all, just an assertion that if one country in the group wishes to do something, another, if it is in its interest too, might join in. And in these temporarily relaxed times, when European officialdom was aflame with the anticipatory joy of being the world’s greatest power again, it was an affordable luxury to brush off the heirs to the “Abominable Porte,” the “sick man of Europe”; and to do otherwise, as Gladstone said of Disraeli, would be “backing the wrong horse.”

 

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Where it all began to become very complicated was with the elevation as prime minister of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2003. Erdogan, a former soccer player who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, formed a modestly Islamic party with the eminent moderate Muslim theologian Fethullah Gulen, who approves of secularism as long as it isn’t rampant materialism, supports good relations with other faiths including Judaism and Christianity, and has a relatively enlightened view of the status of women. Gulen departed for the United States in 1999 for specialized medical care but was shortly after accused of calling for a more Islamic government than the Turkish constitution permitted. He claimed to have been taken out of context but has remained since in the United States, at Saylorsburg, Pa., where he continues to exercise great influence in Turkish politics. Erdogan was removed as mayor of Istanbul, imprisoned for ten months, and banned from public life for publicly reciting a Muslim poem that the chiefs of the army considered subversive. The plodding and corrupt course of the Turkish government enabled Erdogan, with Gulen’s support, to win the 2002 elections, although Abdullah Gul, one of their supporters, was prime minister until the ban on Erdogan was lifted. Erdogan was prime minister from 2003 to 2014, cleaned house effectively, purged the army of its more political senior officers, negotiated a partial settlement with the semi-terrorist Kurdish independence movement (PKK), ramped up economic growth, and pursued membership in the European Union.

 

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