Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Karagül is overtly nuts. He has always sounded like this. And so, frankly, has Erdoğan. Stick with me for this thread.

yenisafak.com/en/columns/ibr…

2010: U.S. President Barack Obama called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday to congratulate him on the “vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy” after results indicated a comfortable victory for the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

“The president acknowledged the vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy as reflected in the turnout for the referendum that took place across Turkey today,” the White House said in a press release after the leaders’ conversation, AFP reported."

I wrote this at the time: ricochet.com/98679/archives…

“Turkey is now a vibrant, competitive democracy….” —New York Times, June 8, 2010

“A vibrant democracy…an example of reform in the region….” —Foreign Policy, May 26, 2011

“Regionally, a vibrant, democratic Turkey no longer under the military’s thumb, can offer the Arab world a true model…. The Turkish model could also provide a model of how Islamic factions can coexist alongside liberal and secular groups, despite their clashing worldviews….”

(Haaretz, August 15, 2011)

“A vibrant democracy…led by Islam’s equivalent to the Christian Democrats….” —Financial Times, September 15, 2011

“A template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics….” — New York Times, February 5, 2011

“Turkey is poised to become one of the most successful countries of the 21st century, a model of Muslim democracy and a powerful force for regional peace… —Boston Globe, June 14, 2011

“One of the most remarkable success stories of the past decade…a vibrant democracy and dynamic economy under the Muslim equivalent of Christian Democrats”…—Financial Times, April 19, 20121

The Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP and widely (if meaninglessly) described as a “moderately Islamist” party, came to power in 2002, at which point the rubicund encomiums from the press and foreign spokesmen began.

The West’s collective assessment of Turkey throughout that time, displayed in official diplomatic statements, the mainstream press, and just as often in the specialized media, was notably weird and notably wrong.

It was either the cause or the consequence of an exceptionally poor understanding of Turkey by Western publics and their policymakers. It resulted in the crafting of policies toward Turkey that were neither in Turkey’s interests nor the West’s,

and helped, at least to some extent, to usher in the disaster before us today.

The AKP early on grasped the jargon of structural reform and the hypnotic power it had over the international finance community.

Within a month of the AKP’s inauguration, the IMF declared Turkey a success story and the senior managers of the World Bank welcomed it as model for other Islamic countries. “While other Muslim societies are wrestling with radicals,” reported the New York Times,

“Turkey’s religious merchant class is struggling instead with riches.” The government claimed that it had trebled the size of the Turkish economy in a decade. Everyone began repeating this, including the Economist, even though it was not only untrue, but absurd.

The phrase “privatization,” too, so beloved by authors of investment-advice newsletters, really meant the sale of state assets to Erdoğan’s relatives and sycophants. Anyone who agreed in exchange to lend their political and financial support to the party could buy stuff up;

anyone who didn’t, couldn’t. “Improving the investment climate” meant improving it for AKP loyalists. For everyone else, there were punitive tax fines and exclusion from public procurement and tenders.

Now, no doubt, the AKP’s Sunni majoritarian politics are a real part of the problem. But this element of the party’s nature has been for a very long time now overstated compared to its far more significant problem;

to wit, Erdoğan’s drive to bring the entire Turkish state apparatus under his personal control. While Turkey under the AKP became dangerously different, it was not, mainly, because it became more Islamic. Islamist politics were not the end, but the means.

POWER was the end.

“Everything seemed to be going so well in Turkey,” wrote Howard Eissenstat, Amnesty International’s Country Specialist on Turkey, in September 2013, “until this past summer when popular protests broke out and were met by a violent government crackdown.

2013 ? Really? By 2011, wives and daughters of the military officers arrested in the Balyoz trials had been begging Amnesty International to take up the plight of their fathers and husbands.

They had presented the organization with hundreds of pages of evidence of the trial’s legal flaws and improper procedures. Amnesty didn’t want to know. Perhaps coruscating condemnation from human rights groups would have shamed or deterred the government;

that’s the raison d’être of such groups, after all, and it’s been known to work.

Nothing can be said to be “going so well” when a government is holding massive show trials. These trials could have been sound; the sinister events to which they were a response really happened;

a credible investigation that unearthed the truth about those years would have served the country. But the trials held instead were notable for their contemptuous—and obvious—mockery of the principles of sound jurisprudence.

The international media—prompted or echoed by timid, blind, or corrupt Western politicians—found this unworthy of remark.

That the United States failed to express displeasure about this was particularly bizarre given that many of those arrested were senior figures (to be cont.)

That the United States failed to express displeasure about this was particularly bizarre given that many of those arrested were senior figures in the Army and Navy. Turkey’s NATO allies had every right, if not an obligation, to ask what effect this would have

on the alliance’s military preparedness. Clearly, it couldn’t have been enhanced with some 10 percent of the land and air force officers and as many as 80 percent of the naval officers charged with defending NATO’s southern flank in prison.

Perhaps this question was posed in private, but journalists from NATO countries neither asked the question nor speculated about the answer. Our Ambassador, Frank Ricciardone, offered only that he was “confused” by the trials.

I am sure he wasn’t confused when a senior AKP official retorted that he shouldn’t “piss on a mosque wall”—an idiom meaning, roughly, that his demise was coming and that he had hastened it.

In the wake of this failed putsch, the government undertook a fresh set of purges, targeting a different group of military officers, bureaucrats, judges, and civilians. You read all about these purges, I assume. But why, actually?

That our media put these purges on the front pages when it was blasé to the point of stone silence about the earlier ones leaves many Turks with an odd taste. It doesn’t suggest to them that we’ve suddenly developed an abiding interest in the integrity of their justice system and

and the quality of their democracy. The conclusion they draw from this is wrong, but it is natural. They figure our boys lost. They reckon we’re infuriated by it.

Does it matter? Well, consider that 2013’s massive protests against the government, and the crackdown that ensued, came as a surprise to senior figures in the U.S. policymaking establishment. If we’d had in mind a realistic portrait of Turkey,

we would have known this kind of explosion was possible and known how harshly it would be repressed. Turkish police had been behaving like this for a decade. The crackdown was bigger only because the crowds were bigger, but,

said Senator John McCain, “None of us expected this in Turkey.”

To be so misinformed is dangerous. Still, why would he have thought otherwise? He reads the same papers we all do. Thus Reuters from June 10, 2011:

A rising power with a vibrant, free economy and a U.S. ally that aspires to join the European Union, Turkey is held up as an example of marrying Islam and democracy and has been an oasis of stability in a region convulsed by ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings.

"AK has also overseen the most stable and prosperous period of Turkey’s history with market-friendly reforms…."

These news outlets were literally parroting the language the AKP used about itself.

Here is the Turkish President at the College of Europe at Natolin, Poland, on June 7, 2011: “Turkey is also becoming a source of inspiration of a vibrant democracy…”

You can read the whole article here. Then re-read Karagul. Do you see why I felt I'd fallen down the lookin glass? That something was *mad* about pretending this was business as usual?

I tried in so many ways, to explain how this government thought Here's an article about the government's Ottoman revanchist fantasies: berlinski.com/2016/09/13/ott…

It is certainly true that the AKP’s senior figures grandly imagine themselves as the heirs to Ottoman statesmen. They promote this understanding of their behavior at every opportunity. “You forget,” many an AKP spokesman has said to me,

“that we’ve been in this region for years. We know it better than you do. Trust us.”

But the Ottoman Empire to which they are appealing exists in their fantasies. They do not, in fact, know much about the real Ottoman Empire. Nor do they possess the Ottomans’ knowledge

of the region, nor do they exhibit the Ottomans’ diplomatic sophistication. If they did, the lessons they would draw would be entirely different.

Much like its domestic policy, the AKP’s foreign policy focuses on the short-term. The party seeks to stay in power from election to election while making itself and its supporters as wealthy as possible as quickly as possible. Its policies are grounded in wishful thinking, greed

grandiosity, naiveté and emotion. They are not grounded in logic, and they are certainly not grounded in a “realistic, rational analysis of the strategic picture.”

These policies are not merely annoying to the West—they are in the long term economically and strategically suicidal for Turkey, be that Turkey a secular state or a theocracy.

Both the AKP and foreign observers have become so smitten with the AKP’s own legend that they have failed to notice this.

e vibrant democracy lie was especially galling to Turks who were struggling against the strangling of democracy because it was so resistant to contact with reality. Perhaps it would have helped if everyone who applauded Turkey’s vibrant democracy instead complained

with the same regularity that Turkish politicians enjoyed virtually unlimited immunities that made them untouchable and unaccountable, or lamented that the corruption and cronyism with which Turkey had long been plagued had become worse under the AKP.

Turkish journalists were afraid to report on this corruption for fear of losing their jobs or their liberty, and many did. But foreign journalists could have stepped up to the plate, and they mainly didn’t.

Only in 2013 did the Committee for the Protection of Journalists at last usefully declare Turkey one of the world’s largest jailers of journalists.

"But Turkey’s vibrant democracy is an inspiration to Arab countries throwing off their autocratic yoke and their Western patrons…. the openness of the Turkish press cannot be denied.” —Middle East Online, June 16, 2011

You can read the rest here. berlinski.com/2016/09/13/ott…

There are certain figures, like Karagul, whose success can't be ignored: It is a sign of profound rot, of profound stupidity, that has entered public discouse.

His analogue, perhaps, is Steve Bannon.

And Erdogan and Trump, of course, are bog-level authoritarians, who may be expected to behave as these figures always do.

Losing power? Are people beginning to suspect your magic has run its course? Why, start a bloody and unnecessary war! That will get them rallying around the flag Losing it? Squandering the flower of your youth to your vanity and narcissism? Inconceivable.

Once I saw us as so different, in this respect, from Turks. We were logical. We cared whether what we said made sense.

But I couldn't have more deeply misunderstood my own country had I tried.

We're very much the same.

And with every day Trump stays in the White House, we'll become more like that.

That's all.