Donald Trump’s Hanukkah Message
December 9, 2015 § 1 Comment
It was fitting and ironic that Donald Trump chose this week of all weeks to issue his monstrous missive calling for all Muslims – including citizens who have traveled outside of the country for work, vacation, or any reason at all – to be barred from entering the United States (you can read IPF’s official condemnation here). After all, this week Jews celebrate Hanukkah, the most minor of religious holidays on the Jewish calendar but the one that is actually most connected to religion. Casual observers know Hanukkah as the holiday that celebrates the miracle of oil that burned for eight days rather than just one, but Hanukkah is actually about the power of religion and the duality of that power, demonstrating that religion can be a force that motivates the good as well as the bad. In seeking to discriminate against an entire class of people on the basis of their faith and their faith alone, Trump demonstrates why the Hanukkah story is so important, both as a guide for how to respect religious difference and as a cautionary tale.
Hanukkah is the story of a Jewish revolt against the Syrian Greeks that was precipitated by a religious crisis. The Greek empire sought to impose cultural hegemony throughout all of the lands under its control by spreading Hellenism, and Judaism for a variety of reasons was viewed as incompatible with Hellenistic principles and ideals. Hellenism glorified the perfection of the human body, an idea that was challenged by the ritual of circumcision; Hellenism exalted the emperor as a deity, which Jewish monotheism could not accept. This fundamental clash led to the first recorded religious persecution in history and the denial of rights based solely on religion, a move which backfired on the Seleucids when the Hasmonean revolt dislodged them from Judea entirely and led not only to Jewish religious freedom – the purpose of the revolt to begin with – but Jewish political sovereignty as well.
The U.S. has a long record of protecting religious liberty, but it also has an unfortunate history of singling out entire classes of people, whether it be slavery and Jim Crow or internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Trump’s demagoguery harkens back to this latter darker legacy, and it is heartening to see nearly wall to wall condemnation of his comments. If the Hanukkah story can be distilled to its essence, it is about the downfall of an empire that singled out members of a religion on the basis of religious heritage alone, and Muslims can and should take heart in this Jewish story that has a universal message. Aside from being flat out morally reprehensible, Trump’s proposal would weaken this country rather than strengthen it.
There is another side to the Hanukkah story that is relevant here as well. As I have written about before, the epilogue to the Maccabean revolt did not have as happy an ending. The new Hasmonean kingdom of Judea emulated its predecessor’s tradition of religious intolerance and sought to forcefully convert its various subjects to Judaism or face expulsion, a policy that led to overreach, civil war, and the eventual subjugation of Judea by the Romans. It was a useful lesson that religion is not an unqualified force for good, and that fundamentalism and zealotry lead to chaos and destruction in ways that are predictable as well as ways that are unforeseen. It also bears noting that the Seleucid program of religious discrimination provoked a nationwide revolt, and pushed many ordinary Jews who would not have been inclined to fight under normal circumstances to go and take up arms in order to defend their religion from attack.
Many people have noted that Trump’s anti-Muslim broadside plays precisely into ISIS’s hands by giving the group a powerful recruiting tool. When perfectly ordinary and law-abiding Muslims are demonized because of the actions of a radical and demonic few, it increases the chances of the former group supporting the latter group out of a sense of tribal solidarity. One of the worst possible scenarios for Israel is for ISIS to train its sights on Israel and turn the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a much wider religious war, not because ISIS itself represents a serious military threat to the Israeli state but because the power of religion to radicalize and mobilize large numbers is unparalleled. The more that someone like Trump demonizes Muslims writ large, the greater the chances of that happening. The U.S. and Israel are often lumped together by extremist groups, and Trump has vowed to visit Israel and his self-claimed good friend Bibi Netanyahu later this year. There are all sorts of universal reasons for Americans who care about religious freedom and combatting prejudice to denounce Trump’s gambit, and there are more particular reasons for Jews who care about Israel to denounce it as well. Let’s absorb the many messages of Hanukkah, from religious tolerance to religion’s dangerous and unharnessable energy, and realize that Trump has now added moral and strategic bankruptcy to his long and undistinguished record of financial ones.
How Will Turkey Deal With Its 9/11?
October 16, 2015 § 3 Comments
Turkey has been the scene of terrorism and street violence off and on for decades, but the suicide bombings at a peace rally last Saturday that killed 97 people and wounded scores more is a new low, and has been rightly described as Turkey’s 9/11. As all who have been following Turkey’s descent into chaos know, the bombings came after months of political polarization between the government and everyone else but particularly the Kurds, fighting between the Turkish military and the PKK, Turkish airstrikes against ISIS, and a tightening crackdown on voices of dissent in Turkey of any sort. In the aftermath of the bombing, the government has issued a blanket media blackout, which is unlikely to help matters and will only sow more distrust and confusion. While no group has taken credit for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of ISIS and deliberately targeted Kurdish political parties at the rally, so this is the latest in the never-ending fallout from the fight for Kobani earlier this year.
Steven Cook wrote a good post on Monday summing up the various conflicts tearing Turkish society apart, and they range from the political to the ethnic. While sometimes tragedy can bring a country together, as it certainly did in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks, in Turkey that dynamic does not seem to be emerging. The government is still practicing the demagoguery that has become its hallmark, and its rhetorical flourishes are reaching new heights of absurdity. Yesterday, Prime Minister Davutoğlu claimed that there is a secret agreement between Assad, ISIS, and the PKK to eliminate all anti-Assad forces and share the Syrian border with Turkey. I’ll leave it to you to ponder for a moment how anyone can seriously think that ISIS is in league with the regime that it is trying to replace, or even more fantastically how ISIS and the PKK sat down in a room together and agreed to live and let live despite the raging war going on between ISIS and the Kurds in Kobani and other places. Given that Davutoğlu, in trying to demonstrate Turkey’s distance from ISIS in response to theories that the Turkish government was complicit in the rally bombings, said on Wednesday that the difference between ISIS and Turkey is 360 degrees, perhaps we should just assume that nothing he says is to be taken at face value.
Ribbing of the prime minister aside, the question facing Turkey is what comes next? This would be a challenge for any country that had just experienced a tragedy and was already riven by political and sectarian strife, but in Turkey’s case there is the added variable of the November 1 redo of June’s election. A combination of President Erdoğan’s refusal to let go of his dream of a super-empowered presidency and bad blood between the AKP and the other parties combined to prevent a government from being formed after the AKP failed to win an outright majority last time. If the polls are to be believed, Turkey is headed for the exact same result in November, and this time it will come with the added pressure of more bad blood between the AKP and HDP, more pressure from the government on journalists, a reinvigoration of the government’s war against the Gülenists, and conspiracy theories about the bombing flying fast and furious. One cannot discount either that there will be more terrorism in Turkey in the next two weeks, which would only add to the pressure building. It was obvious after June what Erdoğan’s strategy was for November, namely to ramp up the fight with the PKK and foster a sense of insecurity so that AKP politicians could then rail against what happens when voters do not hand the AKP a majority. The problem is that the tiger of violence and uncertainty is beyond the AKP’s control, and if anything discontent with the AKP has only deepened.
Should the AKP again fail to win a majority – the outcome that nearly everyone is expecting – there are two ways this can go. One is that Erdoğan and Davutoğlu will accept that the era of coalition government has returned, inject some humility into their pronouncements and actions both public and private, and figure out how best to work with some combination of the CHP, MHP, and HDP (if the latter is still even a possibility given the demonization of Kurds and HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş that has occurred) to get the country back on track. This can involve a step up or a step down in the battle against Kurdish nationalism depending on whom the AKP partners with, although I find the latter to be increasingly unlikely. The second way this can go is that Erdoğan and Davutoğlu can take the same path they took following the June vote, which is to blame all sorts of enemies foreign and domestic for their troubles, crack down further on internal dissent, continue to threaten the PYD – and the U.S. and Russia for allegedly supporting the PYD – and refuse to see the writing on the wall about Kurdish autonomy in Syria, and ally with the MHP in order to form a government and push an extremely narrow nationalist agenda.
One can look at Turkey’s history of democratic institutions and the recent kneecapping of the military in order to prevent its intervention into the political system and assume that Turkey’s history demonstrates that it will emerge from the darkness into the sunlight, that logic will prevail following the horrific Ankara bombings, and that Erdoğan and company will realize a losing hand they see one. Alternatively, one can look at Erdoğan and the AKP’s history, see what they have done once unencumbered by significant checks on their power, and observe their behavior in the last few months alone, and then come to the opposite conclusion about Turkey’s future.
After my assessment following the June election that it did not mean the end of Erdoğan’s domination of Turkish politics and that Turkish politics was not about to immediately change for the better, Cengiz Çandar took me to task in Al-Monitor for my prediction that Erdoğan had not been made irrelevant, writing, “The summer of 2015 may be messy and full of uncertainty, but Turkey will not be at the mercy of one man and one party.” As it turns out, Turkey in fact was at the mercy of one man and one party, and that one man and one party prevented a coalition government from forming, actively aggravated tensions with Turkey’s Kurdish minority through constant incitement against the HDP and its politicians, and has left Turkey in a much more dangerous position than it was four months ago. Turkish society is on the brink of eruption, and the specter of further ISIS terrorism, further PKK targeting of Turkish military and police, and the occasional leftist DHKP-C attack mean that the pressure is only going to increase. The aftermath of this election is going to recreate the precise environment as existed the day after the last election, and the open question is what Erdoğan – and Erdoğan alone – is going to decide to do, since much like last time, this hinges on whether he accepts the death of his presidential system and an AKP victory without AKP dominance with grace, or whether he continues to wield his authority in the service of himself and his party rather than his country. Given what we have seen so far, I am pretty sure I know which option he will choose.
Turkey’s Fight Against Kurdish Empowerment At Home and Abroad
August 3, 2015 § Leave a comment
I have a new piece in Foreign Affairs on Turkey’s recent agreement to engage in the fight against ISIS, and what Ankara is really hoping to accomplish, namely an assault against Kurdish nationalism both at home and abroad. While it is evident that Turkey’s airstrikes have so far been directed primarily at the PKK rather than at ISIS, Ankara is at the same time directing a political assault against the HDP, Turkey’s Kurdish political party, in the hopes of killing two birds with one stone. Here is my argument in Foreign Affairs:
On July 23, Turkey finally joined the fight against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and it did so with much fanfare. It began with a series of air and artillery strikes to push back ISIS forces in Syria and seal what has been a porous southern border. The Turkish government also gave the United States access to its Incirlik and Diyarbakir airbases, opening them up to support combat missions, not just surveillance operations.
This was a major win for the Obama administration, which, for months, had been negotiating with a reluctant Turkey to get it to recognize the ISIS threat. U.S. officials are now hopeful that ISIS can be set back on its heels, since Ankara will be able to wage a more robust bombing campaign given its proximity to the conflict. The U.S.–Turkish agreement about the Incirlik and Diyarbakir airbases apparently also involved the establishment of a safe zone in northwest Syria just north of Aleppo, something the Turkish government has long demanded, although Washington has refused to commit to it. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has argued that a safe zone would naturally emerge after removing ISIS forces from that part of Syria.
Yet all is not as it seems. Although Washington trumpeted the agreement as a potential game changer in the fight against ISIS, Ankara’s recent behavior suggests that its primary mission is to use the opportunity to simultaneously fight the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group that the government has been fighting for decades. The group, however, has also been on the frontlines battling ISIS.
As Washington celebrated Turkey’s new commitment, Ankara’s initial airstrikes last week targeted both ISIS and PKK positions, and, as some have noted, the United States has essentially enabled Turkey to cloak its primary objective—striking the PKK and its Syrian cousin, the People’s Protection Units (also known as the YPG)—in the general fight against ISIS. Turkey would also be able to ensure that U.S. strikes against ISIS positions do not benefit Kurdish fighters in the process by coordinating joint missions and moving Turkish troops into areas immediately following U.S. sorties. By conceding to Washington’s requests to do more against ISIS, Turkey is actually hoping to achieve its true goal, which is to prevent the autonomous Syrian Rojava canton currently controlled by the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) from turning into a truly independent Kurdish state and additionally, using the Kurdish issue to bolster its political standing at home.
Turkey has also targeted its own Kurdish population through heightened policing after the July 20 terrorist bombing in the border town of Suruc. Linked to ISIS, the attack was directed at pro-Kurdish activists and left 23 dead. Since then, Turkey has been conducting an anti-terror sweep that as of July 29 has resulted in the arrest of 137 suspected ISIS sympathizers and 847 suspected PKK members. Writing in the pro-government paper, Daily Sabah, the influential presidential foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalin explicitly linked ISIS and the PKK [6]. He essentially argued that the PKK and ISIS are two sides of the same coin because both groups use terrorism to achieve their political goals, and that PKK attacks are just as big a threat to Turkey as those carried out by ISIS.
Fighting the PKK and thwarting Kurdish ambitions in Syria are not the only dynamics driving Turkish actions. In addition to all of this, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is head of the current caretaker government that will rule the country until a new coalition is formed (or, if one fails to form, until new elections are held in the fall), is attempting to reverse the political consequences of its Kurdish Opening policy, which granted Turkish Kurds greater rights in using the Kurdish language and expressing their Kurdish culture. It brought momentary peace, but appears now to have weakened the AKP’s hold on power.
To read the rest, please head over to Foreign Affairs.
What Will Happen After Turkey’s Elections on Sunday
June 4, 2015 § 7 Comments
When Turkish voters go to the polls this Sunday, it will mark the end of what has been an interminable 15 month long election cycle in Turkey encompassing municipal elections, a presidential election, and finally parliamentary elections. This would be have been taxing under the best of circumstances, but given the factors involved – including but not limited to the transition of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from prime minister to president, the fate of Erdoğan’s desired constitutional overhaul and prospective presidential system, the pending forced retirement of term-limited AKP legislators, the ongoing fallout from the Syrian civil war, the Kurdish peace process hanging on by a thread, the increasingly nationalist tone of the government following the 2013 Gezi protests, the war between the AKP and its former Gülenist allies, worsening assaults on freedom of speech and expression, and allegations of rampant AKP corruption – the last 15 months have been rough on Turkish society and Turkey’s political system, to say the least. Many of my Turkish friends are eager for Sunday’s election to be behind them and hope that this will mark a turning point of some sort that puts an end to what has been a volatile time by any measure.
Despite this fervent wish, not only are the parliamentary elections unlikely to bring much stability, but there is a significant likelihood that the immediate and medium-term aftermath will be even stormier than the past couple of years. There are too many variables in play that hinge on the election’s results, and many of them will create chaos irrespective of the outcome. Rather than do a deep dive into what the actual outcome of the elections themselves will be – for that you can read excellent previews from Carnegie Europe, the Center for American Progress, and my friend Aaron Stein, and your first and last source for polling and polling analysis should be the indispensable James in Turkey blog – I thought I’d highlight some issues to watch out for that are main drivers of Turkish political volatility and that will be magnified in the election’s aftermath.
The most immediately pressing issue is the role of Turkish Kurds going forward. The outcome of the election will primarily hinge on the success or failure of the Kurdish HDP in passing the 10% vote threshold – the world’s highest such threshold – that is required for a party to sit in the Grand National Assembly, and nearly everything that happens is going to follow from this result. When the last legal polls were published last week (publishing polls is prohibited within ten days of the election), the HDP was hovering between 10.2% and 10.6%. For comparison’s sake, the HDP’s candidate in the presidential election, Selahattin Demirtaş, received 9.76%, which surprised most observers as he was not expected to do so well, and most analysts attributed his success to his personal appeal rather than to the party’s. Demirtaş is the party leader and is thus the public face of the HDP for this election as well, but he needs to improve his party’s performance by pulling off two difficult maneuvers that are diametrically opposed. He has to simultaneously attract disaffected liberals who voted for the AKP or CHP in past elections and attract religiously conservative Kurds who voted for the AKP in 2002, 2007, and 2011. Without siphoning off voters in both of these groups, the 10% threshold is going to be hard to crack as there is not a large enough base for the party to rely on its traditional Kurdish supporters alone. While I hope that the HDP makes it into the Assembly since it represents a new and important voice, my gut tells me that it will not. Aside from having a tough uphill climb, it is operating in an environment in which the AKP has an enormous incentive to ensure that the HDP does not make it in (more on that below) and is close enough to the 10% line that some well placed election fraud – such as occurred in last year’s municipal elections – will guarantee that it falls short.
If this happens, Turkey is going to experience protests and unrest on a scale that equals and likely surpasses those that rocked the country during the Gezi protests of June 2013. The southeast of the country, where the majority of Turkey’s Kurds reside, is going to be a disaster zone, since it will be impossible to convince Kurds that the HDP lost fair and square. Turkish Kurds are highly distrustful of the government and believe that the government has been supporting ISIS in an effort to stamp out Kurdish nationalism. Kurds blame the government for not actively aiding Kurdish fighters in the fight against ISIS for the Syrian town of Kobane and for preventing the fighters from being resupplied, and this resentment is not one that will merely linger and eventually dissipate. Kurds also see the handwriting on the wall of a potential coalition between the AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP if the AKP does not receive enough seats to form a government outright, and such a result will mean the cessation of any conciliatory moves in the name of the Kurdish peace process. In short, Turkish Kurds believe that the government has sold them out and will continue to do so in the future, and if the HDP does not receive a high enough vote share on Sunday, there is going to be unrest on a mass scale. It will also raise the question of how Kurds fit into Turkey’s political system, since the decision by the HDP to run as a party rather than as independents signals a Kurdish desire to renounce violence and separatism, and to work within the confines of Turkish politics. If this gesture is rebuffed in a way that convinces Kurds that the government is fraudulently trying to keep them out, it will be a terrible squandering of a historic moment in relations between Kurds and the Turkish state. It will tell Kurds that their grievances will never be redressed through politics, and it will empower the PKK and those who are inclined toward terrorism and separatism, unleashing a new round of violence similar to that which racked Turkey in the 1990s.
If the HDP does not crack the threshold, Kurds are not the only ones who will be upset. HDP votes will be reapportioned, with the AKP receiving most of them as the largest overall vote getter and the only other party that receives votes in the HDP’s stronghold of southeastern Turkey, and this could boost the AKP’s share to a 3/5 supermajority of 330 seats (the party currently has 311). This matters because Erdoğan’s single-minded focus since becoming president last summer has been on remaking Turkey’s political system into a presidential one, and 330 seats is the number he needs in order to submit a new constitution to a referendum. It is for this reason that he needs the HDP to fall short of the magic 10% number, and without that happening, not only is his dream of an empowered presidency dead in the water, the AKP is not guaranteed to reach the 276 seats it needs to form a government outright and may be forced to form a coalition for the first time since coming to power in 2002. The incentive for the party and for Erdoğan personally is to suppress the HDP’s vote, which is why both Erdoğan – who is constitutionally not allowed to campaign for any party and is prohibited from being a party member, but who in reality is still the de facto leader of the AKP – and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have been striking hard at the HDP and Demirtaş every chance they get. The prospect of an even more powerful President Erdoğan terrifies many non-AKP supporters, which is why if the HDP does not make it into the parliament, protests and unrest will not be limited to Kurds and southeastern Turkey. Anecdotally, there are a not insignificant number of erstwhile CHP supporters who are planning to vote for the HDP, and Istanbul and Izmir are likely to erupt should the AKP receive a supermajority on the back of a failed HDP bid. If I am right about the HDP ultimately falling short, Turkey is going to be in for a long and contentious summer, with all of the now-familiar scenes that have accompanied recent summers – tear gas, TOMA water cannons, police beating protestors, and mass arrests on vague and undefined terrorism charges.
Even if the HDP does garner 10%, another prevailing source of instability will be the continuing unraveling and unpredictability of Erdoğan, whose behavior has become nuttier as time goes on. If he does not get his presidential system, he is not going to react well to what will be his first real loss in over a decade, and for a guy used to getting what he wants – thousand room palaces, gilded drinking glasses, having his spy chief remain in his post despite said spy chief resigning and announcing a run for parliament – this will be a new reality for him. Erdoğan has built an independent power base of advisers and sycophants that make up a parallel government and that Turks now refer to in shorthand as “the Palace” and he intends to use it. If his presidential dreams are dashed, there is no telling what he will do and to what lengths he will go to try and get what he wants, but one can guarantee that whatever he does will be divisive and damaging to Turkish democracy, which as Erik Meyersson points out, is hanging on by a thread as it is even in the context of the very elections that purportedly legitimate Turkey as democratic. The perpetuation of Turkey’s current parliamentary system also means that the maneuvering between Erdoğan and the Palace on the one hand and Davutoğlu and the prime minister’s office on the other will continue, with jockeying between the dueling power bases. The AKP is already divided between the two camps, as personified by the spat between deputy prime minister and co-AKP founder Bülent Arınç and Ankara mayor “Mad” Melih Gökçek, and a setback for the prospective presidential system is not going to end this fight. It will continue to divide the AKP and prolong the Twilight Zone aspect of nobody knowing who is actually in charge and whether Erdoğan or Davutoğlu is running the country and the party. So long as the party controlling the government is unstable – and the AKP is as unstable as it has ever been – it is going to filter down into every aspect of governance, and while it may lead to the AKP’s downfall, which many will welcome, it may also lead to chaos for Turkey itself.
If the HDP does not get enough votes and the AKP does get to 330, this does not guarantee stability either. While Erdoğan has cowed dissident party members for years, there is significant dissension in the ranks. There is no guarantee that the AKP will march forward in lockstep toward unlimited Erdoğan despotism, and certainly the other parties are not going to lay down quietly without a fight. There will be nastiness ahead during the struggle over the terms of the new constitution within the Assembly, and then the real fighting will take place in the run-up to the referendum. As bad as things have been during the perpetual campaign of the past year and a half, it will be that much worse during the campaigning over the very future of Turkey’s political system. The talk of lobbies – Jewish, Armenian, interest rate, Greek, robot, preacher’s, blood, chaos, gay, atheist, and Alevi are among Erdoğan’s greatest hits – and foreign conspiracies will only intensify as Erdoğan seeks to paint all of his opponents as enemies not of him but of the “New Turkey” and of Turkish progress. If you think what has come up until now has been bad, just wait for what comes once Erdoğan really turns on the afterburners.
Finally, there is the question of whether the end of this seemingly perpetual election season will restore some stability to Turkey’s foreign policy and its relations with its once and future allies. There is certainly an argument to be made that if Turkey has some space to strategically reorient itself with regard to the U.S. and to the Middle East, it will undo some of the damage that has been done. Unfortunately, while Turkish domestic politics and the over-the-top rhetoric that has served the government’s domestic political needs have contributed to its foreign policy disarray, I don’t think that the end of Erdoğan and the AKP’s permanent campaign mode is going to be enough. Jon Schanzer and Merve Tahiroğlu take a quick glance around the region and convincingly argue that Ankara’s isolation is a permanent feature rather than a bug of its quest for regional dominance given the constraints under which it operates. I myself argued in World Politics Review earlier this week that Turkey’s relationship with Israel is doomed to the status quo for the indefinite future, and despite the nascent cooperation between the U.S. and Turkey on training and arming a subset of Syrian rebels, there is too much dividing the two countries for the relationship to be as robust as it appeared during President Obama’s first term. As much as Turkey is trying to create a new normal for itself in its neighborhood, its efforts can only go so far.
In sum, whatever happens on Sunday, Turkey is not about to enter a newly stable period. Turkish politics are in flux in ways that haven’t been seen in decades, Turkish society is reaching a boiling point, alarm bells are going off all over the economy, and Turkey is involving itself in proxy wars all over the Middle East. While it would be nice to chalk up the last couple of years to the constant electioneering, the fact is that Turkey is in a bad place, and nobody can confidently predict that it will get better with the advent of a new government.
We Have Lost
January 13, 2015 § 22 Comments
There’s been lots written about the Paris attacks, and I don’t feel the need to add much to the cacophony on the issue of what specifically motivated the attackers, or whether this represents a problem with Islam, or how best to respond. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts for a few days, and the one thing that I keep returning to in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher is not so much the attacks themselves, but the responses to the attacks, and I find it difficult to conclude anything other than the fact that we have lost.
The use of “we” here is somewhat loaded, and I don’t use it as a means of implying a Samuel Huntington clash of civilizations argument. I don’t think that the West is fated to clash with the “Muslim world” – however one wants to define such an amorphous term – and I also don’t think that vast hordes of Middle Eastern Muslims are seeking to overrun the West or reestablish a caliphate. Different people coming from different cultural environments are going to have different worldviews, and most just want to live their own lives according to their own values. There exists in France a cadre of extremely nasty, retrograde, barbaric, brutal Islamist terrorists, three of whose lives were thankfully extinguished by French security forces last Friday. There are more where those three came from, and the fact that they are Muslim is neither an irrelevant piece of information nor the only relevant piece of information one needs. The situation is bad enough; there’s no need to exaggerate it and extrapolate from Paris that all Muslims are terrorists, that all Muslims are responsible for the acts of some, or that holding intemperate views of Western society, Israel, or Jews automatically makes one a suicide bomber in waiting (although it certainly doesn’t speak well for most people who do hold those intemperate views). There is also no need to pretend that the Islamist views held by these three particular terrorists are simply a coincidence, that they were motivated solely by poverty and cultural alienation, and that their womanizing and weed-smoking pasts mean that their late-in-life religious awakening makes them completely unconnected from any authentic and authoritative version of Islam.
With that out of the way, by “we” I mean non-extremists of all stripes, and we are losing the fight against extremists. I don’t mean this in a military sense, as committed Western states will always be able to kill far more terrorists thugs than terrorists can kill civilians. As I wrote a few of months ago in relation to ISIS, the real fight here is against an ideology rather than against a specific group of people, and until the ideology itself becomes discredited, the symptom of jihadi violence is going to be here to stay. Contra Francis Fukuyama circa 1992, we have not yet arrived at the end of political history and reached some sort of political equilibrium, and until the ideology motivating jihadi extremism is defeated on the battlefield of ideas, we can kill as many al-Qaida leaders as we can find and station as many soldiers in front of synagogues and Jewish schools as we can manage, but it won’t end the problem. Ideas are defeated by more powerful ideas, not by military hardware and firepower.
This may be my own bias at work here given my obvious personal and professional interest, but the largest bellwether to me in illustrating the fact that we are losing is Turkey. You’ll never see me spout the simplistic platitudes about Turkey having one foot in the West and one in the East or using the metaphor of Istanbul being a land bridge between continents to glean some larger lesson, but it is highly relevant that Turkey is a Muslim-majority country that is part of NATO and is looking to join the EU, as these variables make it exposed to Europe and the West in a significant way. If Turkey buys into the extremist rhetoric and outlandish ideas rocketing around the Middle East, then we have little hope of convincing those who have less firsthand experience with the West that we aren’t evil personified.
So what do we see coming from Turkey? For starters, as Steven Cook highlighted yesterday, there’s the unwavering belief that jihadi terrorism is caused by Islamophobia, and thus victims such as the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have it coming to them due to their actions (never mind the inconvenient fact of Jews murdered in a kosher grocery store just for being Jewish rather than for anything they have allegedly done). This line of argument is spouted not just by uneducated Anatolian farmers, but by the president, prime minister, and foreign minister of Turkey. It is an argument that deeply believes free speech must have limits, and that when those limits are violated, the responsibility for any ensuing terrorism or violence primarily lies at the feet of those whose speech went too far. If you want a sense of the zeitgeist in Turkey with regard to this issue, Ibrahim Kalın – President Erdoğan’s top foreign policy advisor – has a column in this morning’s Daily Sabah that lays out the argument dominating the thinking of Turkey’s government and pro-government elites, in which he explicitly makes the case that Islamophobia is as large a problem as al-Qaida terrorism, and that stopping and condemning hate speech against Muslims is as important to preventing future attacks as is taking counter-terror measures. I do not mean to imply that Islamophobia isn’t real, or that it’s not a genuine problem, but when your initial reaction to a terrorist attack is, “that’s what happens when you let free speech get out of control,” I’d suggest that you are well outside the proper and appropriate Western consensus. I have a personal mantra that I am sure I have used on this blog and that my coworkers make fun of me for spouting ad nauseum, which is that the response to objectionable speech should always be more speech. It should certainly not be terrorist violence. I am a free speech absolutist and I do not believe that speech should ever be censored; if someone says something you don’t like, then use your right to free speech to argue with them and make sure that your speech, rather than theirs, wins in the marketplace of ideas. If you are not willing to unreservedly condemn terrorism against Charlie Hebdo, Jyllands-Posten, Theo van Gogh, and others because you are offended by what these publications and people had to say, then you’re doing it wrong. But the fact is that large swathes of people, not just in Turkey but also in countries ranging from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, disagree with me, and that means that we are losing.
Then there is the related idea that Islamophobes are the ones who actually carry out terrorist attacks and purposely frame Muslims in order to discredit Islam in the West. Just read this column from Ibrahim Karagül in Yeni Şafak – one of Turkey’s most prominent Islamist newspapers – in which he says that the attack was a false flag operation designed to discredit Muslims, that the global war on terrorism was concocted by the U.S. and Europe as a way to shape the 21st century, and that terrorist attacks in the vein of the Charlie Hebdo massacre share the characteristic of being linked to intelligence agencies. To quote from this vile abomination of a column directly: “In this context, an extremely strategic target was chosen in the latest attack. The perfect excuse has been handed to the rising racist tide by killing a magazine team with a previous record. No better target could have been chosen to spur the European public to action. No other place could be found to nourish hostility against Islam and spur the masses to action. No better example could be provided to depict the link between Islam and violence.” On second thought, don’t read the column, as Yeni Şafak doesn’t deserve any more clicks that it already gets.
Keep in mind that this is not coming from the fringe, but from one of Erdoğan’s favorite papers and a reliable government mouthpiece. While the esteemed Mr. Karagül never fingers the true Paris culprit or culprits by name, you can imagine whom he believes is responsible. Just in case your imagination has limits, we can thankfully turn to the always reliable AKP mayor of Ankara, “Mad” Melih Gökçek, who is happy to let us know that the Mossad carried out the attacks in Paris in retaliation for France’s recognition of Palestine, and that it is all part of an effort to stir up Islamophobia by framing Muslims for the attacks. That this attitude is widespread within the AKP should not be surprising, as the tone was set from the top in 2009 when Erdoğan insisted that Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir could not be responsible for genocide in Darfur because “it is not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide,” and therefore ipso facto it cannot have occurred. The same logic applies here, and thus it requires a search for the real killers, ignoring any shred of evidence that maybe, just maybe, the terrorist attacks in France were indeed carried out by Islamist jihadis inspired by ideas promulgated by groups like al-Qaida and ISIS.
I could go on, but hopefully by now you get the point. A NATO-member country, with massive commercial and defense links to the U.S. and Europe, whose leaders speak English and many of whom have been educated in the U.S. and Europe, should know better. It should know that terrorism against civilians must be condemned full-stop, that drawing offensive cartoons does not mean that you deserve to be killed, that the Mossad did not just engage in a deadly false flag operation, and that no government is killing its own people in order to gin up anti-Muslim sentiment and create a pretext for persecuting its own Muslim population. When it doesn’t seem to know these things, it means we have lost the battle of ideas, and the extremists are winning. Not insignificant numbers of educated and sophisticated people in the Middle East genuinely believe that what happened in Paris is part of a larger conspiracy to frame Muslims for violent acts, that the U.S. created ISIS as an excuse to launch new military operations in Iraq and Syria, that 9/11 was a false flag operation designed to further a clash between the West and Islam, and on and on. The debate over whether the appropriate approach to combating jihadi terrorism is a military one or a law enforcement one is the wrong debate, because it misses the point. Neither approach is going to do the job, because this is a war of ideas, and so killing or prosecuting terrorists will only get you so far. People need to be convinced that extremism is both futile and the wrong way of seeing the world, and I don’t know how best to wage that battle, but I am pretty confident it is the one that needs to be waged.
One of the widespread techniques used when teaching international relations to undergraduates is to look at the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War and apply different schools of international relations theory toward explaining this earth-shattering event. If you are a realist, you point to the fact that U.S. military spending and economic superiority were too much for the Soviets to overcome, and they were brought down by overwhelming American hard power that can be measured. If you are a constructivist, you look at the battle of ideas and trace the way in which Communism became so discredited in the face of Western liberal democracy and capitalism that the entire Communist edifice collapsed as it lost its legitimacy. I have always been more drawn to the latter explanation for a number of reasons, but most of all because it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that disappeared overnight, but Communism itself. Yes, small pockets of it remain (and no, China is not Communist today in any meaningful way), but for a political and economic system that controlled nearly half the world to just disappear is remarkable, and it wouldn’t have happened had the only blow been the fall of its largest state patron.
The same thing needs to happen when it comes to the philosophy of extremism motivating the type of jihadi terror as we saw in Paris last week. There is no way to prevent these types of attacks from a logistical perspective; Paris was not an intelligence failure, and while the French police can deploy thousands of soldiers and police to protect nearly every potential Jewish target in France, there is not enough manpower to sustain that permanently. Even if there was, it wouldn’t be a failsafe solution. Until attitudes change in a major way, until jihadi extremism is discredited, until more extremists believe that there is a better way, and until the ideas animating jihadi extremist terror are demonstrated to have failed abjectly and completely, we will continue to lose. Pretty depressing way to start the new year, huh?
Turkey’s Syria Spillover Problem
October 2, 2014 § Leave a comment
I wrote the following piece for Foreign Affairs, arguing that the true threat to Turkey from ISIS is not a military one, but is rather the spillover effects that are going to impact Turkish domestic stability as a result of ISIS’ rise.
To listen to officials from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and read Turkey’s pro-government press is to dive into a happy place in which Turkey has never been better. It is a democratic beacon shining its light on the rest of the Middle East, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is leading the charge to consolidate Turkish democracy and create a new regional order, the Turkish economy is humming along despite villainous credit rating agencies’ efforts to destroy it, and Turks of all stripes are united behind their government’s various initiatives. The official view from Ankara is sunny indeed — yet the clouds massing on the country’s border presage a hurricane.
AKP rule has brought a measure of stability previously unknown to Turkey. Here, a growing economy and concerted efforts to address Kurdish grievances have contributed. On a more disturbing note, so have the gradual reining in of the free press and open dissent. For better or worse, the country has become safely predictable and the AKP has been able to govern without seriously being challenged. Even those not in the AKP camp acknowledge that today’s Turkey seems eons removed from the days of terrorism and assassinations in the streets, military coups, and runaway inflation.
But the chaos on Turkey’s border with Syria threatens to upend all of this. The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has threatened Turkey’s internal balance in a number of ways. But the danger does not come from ISIS itself. Although the group has proved its military bona fides during its rampage through Iraq and Syria, it does not present a serious territorial challenge to Turkey, which has a large NATO-backed army, a modern air force, and the resources to hit back at ISIS should it choose. Rather, it is the follow-on effects of ISIS’ march through the region that may herald a return to the bad old days.
To read the rest, including my analysis of Turkey’s economic problems, burgeoning issues with the Kurds, and the rise of nationalism, please head over here to Foreign Affairs.
The Politics of the Anti-ISIS Coalition
September 23, 2014 § 4 Comments
Now that U.S.-led airstrikes – or according to the UAE’s press release, UAE-led airstrikes – have begun against ISIS positions in Syria, it seems we have an actual coalition to size up. Participating in one way or another were the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, with Qatar the only one of the six to not actually drop bombs or shoot cruise missiles. One of these things is obviously not like the others, and that is Qatar. Aside from the fact that Qatar’s participation is going to remain limited to logistics and support, Qatar’s inclusion in this group is striking given that the four other Arab states represent one distinct camp in the Middle East, while Qatar represents another. There has been lots of talk the past few years about a Middle Eastern cold war taking place between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but there is a separate battle taking place between what I’ll call status quo Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc. and revisionist Sunni states Qatar and Turkey. The latter are trying to upend the current regional order, and have thus spent lots of capital – both actual and rhetorical – supporting Muslim Brotherhood groups and other actors opposed to the current regional configuration. It is interesting to see Qatar openly participating in the anti-ISIS coalition, and it is likely a response to the charges that Qatar is tied to terrorism and has been funding shady jihadi and Islamist rebels. Qatar wants to demonstrate that it is not aiding ISIS, and this is the best way of going about that.
Far more intriguing is who is not part of this coalition, and that would be the other member of the Sunni revisionist camp. Along with Jordan, Turkey is the country most threatened by ISIS given its long border with Syria and the growing number of Turks being recruited as ISIS fighters. Turkey’s hostages have just been released by ISIS, so the biggest reason for Turkey’s hesitation has been removed, and yet Turkey is adamantly not joining the coalition. Aaron Stein has a good rundown today of what Turkey is doing behind the scenes to help out, but there are still reasons why Turkey is not going to publicly join the fight. The big one is that Turkey isn’t actually for a particular outcome; it only knows what it doesn’t want. It does not want Bashar al-Assad to benefit from any moves taken to degrade ISIS, but it also does not want ISIS to permanently control territory in Syria, but it also does not want the Kurds to benefit from ISIS being rolled back. Where Turkey runs into trouble is that not one of these outcomes can be realized in its entirety without limiting the success of the other outcomes. Eliminating ISIS will benefit Assad and the Kurds, while removing Assad creates a vacuum that will be filled by ISIS and/or the Kurds, and limiting any gains by the Kurds necessarily means that ISIS is maintaining its strength in northern Syria. Turkey wants a combination of goals that cannot be filled simultaneously, and yet it does not want to or cannot choose between which ones should be shunted aside.
The irony here is that by not throwing the full force of its weight behind getting rid of ISIS, it is risking a bigger domestic problem with Turkey’s Kurds, some of whom are crossing the border to fight with Kurdish forces against ISIS. Turkish Kurds blame Ankara for allowing ISIS to fester and even empowering the group with its previous see-no-evil-hear-no-evil border policy, and thus the more half-hearted the Turkish government behaves with regard to getting rid of ISIS, the harder any Kurdish peace process and any effort to fully integrate Kurds into Turkey will become. In trying to appease ISIS by not taking a public role in the fight against the group – and thereby attempting to head off any jihadi terrorism inside of Turkey’s borders – Turkey is going to reignite an entirely different type of domestic problem. It is also foolhardy to believe that ISIS is a fire that won’t burn Turkey if the country steps away from the issue. At some point, ISIS violence is bound to come to Turkey whether Ankara participates as a full in open partner in the fight against the group or not, and when that happens, the vendetta against Assad and the worries about Kurdish nationalism are going to seem myopic.
The other regional player absent – although this is altogether unsurprising – is Iran. John Kerry and others have expressed hopes that the U.S. and Iran can cooperate together against ISIS given that the group presents a common threat. While I don’t rule out an eventual U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement (although I am skeptical), there is never going to be open Iranian cooperation with the U.S. on any shared goal such as the fight against ISIS, despite the optimism running rampant today following Hassan Rouhani’s charm offensive in New York. Iran is an ideological state, meaning that it references explicitly ideological claims or a programmatic mission in justifying political action and allows those claims or mission to constrain its range of actions. Ideological states behave very differently from non-ideological states because ideology is used as a source of regime legitimacy, and so fealty to the state ideology is crucial for the regime to maintain its rule. To the extent that the ideology is institutionalized, its protection becomes vital, as a blow to the ideology is a blow to the state’s legitimacy among its citizens. The ideology also becomes the most important feature of the regime’s legacy, and no true guardians of the state ideology want to be responsible for its downfall or delegitimization. A large element of the Iranian regime’s ideology is opposition to the U.S.; it is the reason that the regime has harped on this point for decades on end. When you base your legitimacy and appeal in large part on resisting American imperial power, turning on a dime and openly helping the U.S. achieve an active military victory carries far-reaching consequences domestically. It harms your legitimacy and raison d’être, and thus puts your continued rule in peril. Iran wants to see ISIS gone as badly as we do, if not more so, and ISIS presents a more proximate threat to Iran than to us. Despite this, Iran cannot be seen as helping the U.S. in any way on this, and simply lining up interests in this case is an analytical mistake as ideological considerations trump all when you are dealing with highly ideological regimes. The same way that the U.S. would never have cooperated with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War to defeat a common enemy – despite being able to come to agreement on arms control negotiations – because of an ideological commitment to being anti-Communist, Iran will not cooperate with the U.S. against ISIS. Those naively hoping that ISIS is going to create a bond between the U.S. and Iran are mistaken.
