Turkey's Turning Point
Could there be an Islamic Revolution in Turkey?

by Michael Rubin
National Review Online
April 14, 2008
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Few U.S. policymakers have heard of Fethullah Gülen, perhaps Turkey's most prominent theologian and political thinker. Self-exiled for more than a decade, Gülen lives a reclusive life outside Philadelphia, Pa. Within months, however, he may be as much a household a name in the United States as is Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who was as obscure to most Americans up until his triumphant return to Iran almost 30 years ago.

Many academics and journalist embrace Gülen and applaud his stated vision welding Islam with tolerance and a pro-European outlook. Supporters describe him as progressive. In 2003, the University of Texas honored him as a "peaceful hero," alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. Last October, the British House of Lords and several British diplomats celebrated Gülen at a high-profile London conference. Later this year, Georgetown University scholar John Esposito will host a conference dedicated to the movement. As in 2001, Esposito will cosponsor with the Rumi Forum, an organization Gülen serves as honorary president.

The Gülen movement controls charities, real estate, companies, and more than a thousand schools internationally. According to some estimates, the Gülen Movement controls several billion dollars. The movement claims its own universities, unions, lobbies, student groups, radio and television stations, and the Zaman newspaper. Turkish officials concede that Gülen's followers in Turkey number more than a million; Gülen's backers claim that number is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Gülen members dominate the Turkish police and divisions within the interior ministry. Under the stewardship of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of Gülen's most prominent sympathizers, tens of thousands of other Gülen supporters have entered the Turkish bureaucracy.

While Gülen supporters jealously guard his image in the West, he remains a controversial figure in Turkey. According to Cumhuriyet, a left-of-center establishment daily — Turkey's New York Times — in 1973, the Izmir State Security Court convicted Gülen of "attempting to destroy the state system and to establish a state system based on religion;" he received a pardon, though, and so never served time in prison. In 1986, the Turkish military — the constitutional guardians of the state's secularism — purged a Gülen cell from the military academy; the Turkish military has subsequently acted against a number of other alleged Gülen cells who they say infiltrated military ranks.

In 1998, according to Turkish court transcripts cited in the Turkish Daily News, Gülen urged followers in the judiciary and state bureaucracy to "work patiently to take control of the state." The following year, the independent Turkish television station ATV broadcast a secretly taped Gülen telling supporters, "If they . . . come out early, the world will squash their heads. They will make Muslims relive events in Algeria," a reference to the Islamic Salvation Front's overwhelming 1991 election victory in the North African state. After party leaders spoke of voiding the constitution and implementing Islamic law, the Algerian military staged a coup leading to a civil conflict that killed tens of thousands.

Because of his statements and veiled threats, the judiciary in 1998 charged Gülen with trying to "undermine the secular system" while "camouflag[ing] his methods with a democratic and moderate image." Convicted in absentia, but free to run his organized from his U.S. exile, Gülen continues a rather inconsistent approach to tolerance and secularism. He often equates the separation of religion and state with atheism, an assertion many of Turkey's most secular officials find offensive: Believing that religion is best kept to the individual rather than state sphere does not equate with any lack of belief in God. In 2004, Gülen equated atheism with terrorism and said both atheists and murderers would spend eternity in Hell.

Gülen has received a legal break, however. In 2002, Erdoğan's Justice and Development party (Adalet ve Kakınma Partisi, AKP) won a plurality in parliamentary elections and, because of a fluke in Turkish election law, was able to amplify one-third of the popular vote into a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Erdoğan used this advantage to enact reforms which had the net affect of stacking not only the civil service, but also banking boards and the judiciary with his political supporters and religious fundamentalists. Erdoğan's judges wasted no time. They placed liens against political opponents' property, seized independent newspapers and television stations including, not by coincidence ATV, and assigned sympathetic judges to hear appeals against earlier decisions levied against Islamists. On May 5, 2006, the Ankara Criminal Court overturned the verdict against Gülen. While a public prosecutor — a secularist hold-out — appealed the court's action, the process is now nearing conclusion. Gülen's supporters are ecstatic. His slate wiped clean, Gülen has indicated he may soon return to Turkey.

If he does, Istanbul 2008 may very well look like Tehran 1979. Just as Gülen's supporters affirm his altruistic intentions and see no inconsistency between a secretive, cell-based movement and transparent governance, too many Western journalists also give Gülen a free pass.

If this sounds familiar, it should: Three decades ago, the same phenomenon marked coverage of Iran. "I don't want to be the leader of the Islamic Republic; I don't want to have the government or power in my hands," Khomeini told a credulous Austrian television reporter during the ayatollah's brief sojourn in Paris. In November 1978, Steven Erlanger, the future New York Times foreign correspondent, penned a New Republic essay arguing that Khomeini's vision for Iran was essentially a "Platonic Republic with a grand ayatollah as a philosopher-king," and predicting the triumph of an independent liberal left worried more about labor conditions in Iran's oil fields than pursuing any theological tendency.

In Tehran then as in Ankara now, U.S. ambassadors preferred garden parties with the political elite and maintained contacts with only a narrow segment of the population. They were blind. As the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency remained clueless or belittled concerns about Khomeini's intentions, millions of Iranians turned out to greet their Imam at Tehran's international airport. Turks now say that similar crowds might greet Gülen when his plane touches down in Istanbul.

Gülen is careful. He will not order the dissolution of the Turkish Republic. But, ensconced in his Istanbul mansion, he could simply begin to issue fatwas prying Turkey farther from the secularism to which Erdoğan pays lip service. As Khomeini consciously drew parallels between himself and Twelver Shiism's Hidden Imam, Gülen will remain quiet as his supporters paint his return as evidence that the caliphate formally dissolved by Atatürk in 1924 has been restored.

The secular order and constitutionalism in Turkey have never been so shaky. The government now controls most television and radio stations. Erdoğan has gained the dubious distinction of launching more lawsuits against journalists and commentators than any previous Turkish prime minister.

As Erdoğan discourages dissent, his and Gülen's supporters among prominent Turkish columnists and commentators equate Islamism with democracy, and secularism with fascism, a line too many Western diplomats eager to demonstrate tolerance with an embrace of "moderate Islam" accept. Erdoğan himself has argued that it was secularism which led to Hitler; that Islamism would never produce such a result.

Last month, after one of the few independent judicial authorities filed a lawsuit against Erdoğan and the AKP for violating constitutional provisions separating religion from politics, the prime minister responded with a midnight round-up of leading academics and journalists who had criticized him. Even Erdoğan's supporters were shocked to wake up on March 21 to learn that İlhan Selçuk, the bed-ridden octogenarian editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet described by Turks as their Walter Cronkite had been arrested in a pre-dawn raid on charges of plotting to launch a military coup; the police have yet to provide any evidence. Nor is Selçuk the only victim in the most recent intimidation campaign. A Hürriyet columnist, Ahmet Hakan, has received threatening phone calls from lawyer Kemaletin Gülen, a relative of Fethullah.

When Islamists pursue campaigns of hatred, Western officials not only pretend nothing is amiss but also, as in the case of Palestinian leaders, often increase their support. This week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will address the judicial case against Erdoğan and the AKP. Members of her staff suggest she will lend subtle support to the prime minister. Indeed, it may be tempting to condemn the court action as a political stunt: The prosecutor's legal brief is shoddily written and poorly argued. Despite its faults, however, the underlying legal issues are real.

Rice should be silent. Any interference will backfire: Turks, already upset that U.S. ambassador Ross Wilson seldom meets with opposition leaders, will interpret any criticism of the case as White House support for the AKP. Secularists will ask why Turkey's liberal opposition should not have the right to all legal remedies. They already ask why the West applauds legal action taken against Austrian populist Jörg Haider and French demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen, but the same U.S. and European officials appear to bless Erdoğan's legal exceptionalism. By undermining judicial recourse, Rice may accelerate violence and lead support to those who argue — wrongly — that the government's disdain for the law and constitution should be met with the same. On the off-chance, however, that Rice accepts that the court case should run its course, Turkey's religious conservatives will accuse her of masterminding the approach.

Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has made many mistakes. Bush was correct to recognize the importance of democratization; bungled implementation has turned a noble ideal into a dirty word. By equating democracy only with elections, the State Department and National Security Council fumbled U.S. interests in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon. One man, one vote, once; parties that enforce discipline at the point of a gun; and politicians who seek to subvert the rule of law to an imam's conception of God do little for U.S. national security. Never again should the United States abandon its ideological compatriots for the ephemeral promises of parties that use religion to subvert democracy and seek mob rather than constitutional rule.

Turkey is nearing the cliff. Please, Secretary Rice, do not push it over the edge.

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

April 14, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Obama’s Indonesian Lessons

By ROGER COHEN
JAKARTA, Indonesia

When Barack Obama’s Indonesian classmates are asked to recall the boy they all called “Barry” (pronounced “Berry”), their description is unanimous: “chubby.”

He was the tall, chubby kid in Bermudas who joined their 4th grade class at the Besuki elementary school in 1970, the boy with the white mother and Indonesian stepfather who brought his own sandwiches to school (odd to a noodle-eating crowd) and, strangest of all, wrote with his left hand.

“It was so weird that he was left-handed,” recalled Ati Kisjanto, now a marketing consultant. “That was considered impolite here, and you were forced to write with your right hand.”

A dozen of Obama’s classmates were gathered at the house of Sandra Sambuaga, exchanging stories over Indonesian delicacies. For two years after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, they were unsure this was the boy registered at their school as Barry Soetoro (the family name of his stepfather).

“We just couldn’t believe this skinny U.S. senator with another name was our chubby, hyperactive Berry!” said Dewi Asmara Oetojo, a politician. “We were only convinced when we saw a photo of him as a boy.”

The atmosphere at the gathering was raucous. The school was in the upscale Menteng neighborhood; everyone has done all right. A small crucifix hangs from Sambuaga’s wall: she’s a Christian. Most of the other classmates are Muslims in this country that is home to the world’s largest Muslim population.

Only Citra Dewi wore a headscarf. “I used to sit next to him and I’d say ‘Berry, move away, you’re sweating!’ ” she told me. “In Indonesia we say active boys ‘smell of the sun.’ ” Everyone laughed at that.

I listened and tried to imagine the 9-year-old Obama too embarrassed to sing, swapping his sandwich for sticky rice, enduring the fascination with his hair (“it kept curling back, like our noodles,” said Sambuaga).

No wonder Obama is adept at exploring the spaces in between, the areas that are neither black nor white, neither “with us” nor “against us,” neither red state nor blue state: he has spent his life building bridges to assemble a coherent identity. Only by uniting disparate threads could he become whole under the name of Barack Obama in a world experienced as defined by divergent truths.

One such many-shaded truth was religion. His stepfather, according to Obama’s memoir, “followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.” That tracks with the pliant, tropical Islam of Indonesia where a “you shall have your religion, and I shall have mine” tolerance dwarfs pockets of radicalism.

The United States has an Islam problem. Say the name of the religion of almost 20 percent of the world’s population and images of bearded, Wahhabi extremists surge. They reflect a reductive unease born of 9/11 and ignorance. A central challenge of the next president will be reinventing America’s relations with the Islamic world, and stimulating open dialogue between Muslims.

Obama has lived with Islam, from his boyhood Indonesia to a later encounter with the similarly malleable Islamic faith of Kenyan relatives. He can situate Saudi Wahhabism as one current among many. With Islam as with most things, it’s better to deal with a multi-faced reality than simplified demons.

I’m troubled by Hillary Clinton’s recent innuendo-dripping remark that her Christian faith “is the faith of my parents and my grandparents.” As opposed, of course, to Obama, who came to Christianity from a mother whose “secular humanism” held that “rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny,” and a Kenyan father born into a Muslim family, and a Muslim stepfather.

We live in the Age of Interaction. Fluidity and connectedness define the world, forging hybrid identities not fixed in formaldehyde. Clinton, on an Obama-is-aloof kick, now says she’s a pro-gun churchgoer. That may play in west Pennsylvania but won’t bridge the national and international chasms Bush bequeaths.

“I used to support Hillary, but now I look at her eyes and see someone always wired, always calculating, whereas in Berry I see some wisdom,” said Kisjanto.

I went to the school, where there’s a huge photograph of pilgrims at Mecca in the entrance; I imagined Fox News filming it one day to pronounce the place a Madrasa. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a state school whose students are 85 percent Muslim, a little below the national average.

There’s a mosque and a small Christian prayer room with a sign saying: “I understand we are all different and include everyone.” Kuwadiyanto, the principal, told me: “Christians and Muslim kids mix easily. Maybe more Americans should come here to see what’s really happening.”

Obama already has. He’s shed his chubbiness but not Indonesia’s lesson, emblazoned on the national coat of arms, of “unity in diversity.”

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Posted: Sun., Apr. 6, 2008, 2:45pm PT
'Four Girls' opens Gulf Film Festival
Event set for April 13 - 18
By ALI JAAFAR
Bahraini helmer Hussain Abbas Al Hulaibi's "Four Girls" will open the inaugural Gulf Film Festival, set to unspool in Dubai April 13-18.
Pic revolves around the struggles of four young women from different backgrounds who come together to solve their financial crisis.

Main competition includes Hulaibi's feature along with two features from Saudi helmers, Abdulla Abo Talib's "The Forgotten Village," a horror pic set in a sleepy village, and Mamoun Bonni's "Sabah Allil," which follows a truck driver through three important moments in Arab history; Iraqi helmer Mohammed Al-Daradji's "Ahlaam," shot on location in Baghdad; Kuwaiti Faisal Sham's preem of "Al Donjowana," and Kuwaiti Hasan Abdal's gangster thriller "One More Chance."

Winner lands a cash prize of $13,000, with $9,500 for the runner-up.

Fest, which spotlights films from across the Gulf region, is the first of its kind to be held in the Arab world. Organizers received more than 200 submissions, mostly shorts and docs.

"The selected films represent the growing community of filmmakers with a passion to showcase the diversity and breadth of creativity that exists within the Gulf, raising the profile of contemporary Arab cinema," said fest director Masoud Amralla Al Ali, who is also artistic director of the Dubai Intl. Film Festival.

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April 14, 2008
Iraq Dismisses 1,300 After Basra Offensive

By STEPHEN FARRELL
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government announced Sunday that it had dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen for refusing to fight or performing badly during last month’s offensive against Shiite militias in the southern city of Basra.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that 500 soldiers and 421 policemen were fired in Basra, including 37 senior police officers up to the rank of Brigadier General. Police officials said the remainder were fired in Kut, where fighting also spread.

“Some of them were sympathetic with these lawbreakers, some refused to battle for political or national or sectarian or religious reasons,” General Khalaf said in Basra.

The dismissals were an implicit admission of failures during the government offensive, which was widely criticized as being poorly planned. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s forces failed to disarm Shiite militias, in particular the Mahdi Army militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. However, they claim to have restored order to the streets, and the nearby ports vital to Iraq’s oil industry.

American officials, who praised the Iraqi forces’ progress in being able to move 6,600 reinforcements south to Basra so quickly, conceded that they had not been fully consulted in advance.

The Basra clashes pitched the country’s two most powerful Shiite forces against each other — the Mahdi Army and the government security forces dominated by Mr. Sadr’s most powerful internal Shiite rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

On April 3, Mr. Maliki promised to dismiss and prosecute the worst offenders among the more than 1,000 who deserted, laid down their weapons or refused to fight against their fellow Shiites and tribesmen. At the time one of his senior officials acknowledged that fear of the militias was a principal factor. “One of the main reasons is that they felt the other party was too strong, and too courageous and they couldn’t confront them,” he said.

Putting further political pressure on Mr. Sadr, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, said Sunday that the cabinet had agreed on a draft law that would ban any party from taking part in the October provincial elections unless they disband their militias. But it was unclear how much effect any law could have, given that the two dominant Shiite parties in government — the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq — are both closely affiliated with their armed wings.

In Baghdad, the Mahdi Army’s Sadr City stronghold was reported to be quieter on Sunday, after a week of heavy clashes with Iraqi government and American troops.

The Iraqi and American forces have taken control of southern neighborhoods in an effort to deprive the Mahdi Army of areas from which it can fire rockets and mortars at Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone three miles to the west.

Barnett: The wrench in the works for planning future wars

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, April 13, 2008

The current debate over Iraq, including the surge and new counterinsurgency strategy, is really a proxy for a larger contentious struggle within the Pentagon over future war planning: the mix of weapons and major platforms we buy and the way we organize the troops.

On one side are those who argue that Iraq is "ruining" the force, making it unprepared for major wars. On the other side are those who see Iraq as harbinger for a far messier global landscape.

Americans should pay attention to this larger debate because our nation's military capabilities determine the possibilities of its foreign policy and grand strategy.

As the owner of the world's biggest gun, the United States can view international affairs from a perspective afforded no other nation. Conversely, we're viewed by the world very differently because of that capability.

Each of our nation's four military services wants to remain as "full service" as possible, meaning able to fight wars both big and small. During the Cold War, that sort of redundancy made sense, but now military think tanks are increasingly arguing, as in a recent RAND report, for a clear division of labor.

Since air power defines modern war, the argument goes like this: Let the Air Force and carrier-centric Navy focus on responding to major war threats, like North Korea, Iran and China; and let the Army, Marines and Special Operations forces focus on counter-terror, post-conflict stability and counterinsurgency operations.

So we're talking a technology-intensive big war force complimented by a manpower-intensive small-war force.

The big shift here is between the Army and Navy, and both sides feel plenty of angst.

For the vast bulk of its history, the Navy, in combination with the Marines, has been that "everything else" force: Until World War II, America had a Department of War (Army) and a Department of Navy.

During the Cold War, the Navy became fixated on the Soviet threat like every other service, and submarine commanders dominated its leadership.

After the Cold War, the Navy and Marines made a doctrinal bid to manage the world. In a mini-me version of the Powell Doctrine, they promised to deal with smaller crises, leaving the Air Force and Army to worry about big wars.

But that combination proved insufficient across the 1990s, and once the global war on terror kicked in and America quickly became saddled with two long-term nation-building exercises, it became clear that the Army was looking at a back-to-the-future transformation.

By that I mean the Army returns to what it did prior to World War I, serving as the nation's primary constabulary/frontier integrating force. Think back to the post-Civil War Army "departments" in the trans-Mississippi West - basically forerunners to today's worldwide system of regional combatant commands.

Their jobs should seem familiar enough to today's troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan: protecting supply lines, enabling the construction of key infrastructure and fighting stubborn insurgencies.

That frontier-integrating focus ended with World War I, when the U.S. Army cavalry regiments, sized below 5,000 troops, were rolled up into giant 20,000-plus-man divisions so the force would be symmetrically arranged for the great war ahead.

The Army kept that force structure until Iraq, when incoming Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker broke all those divisions back down to regiment-sized "brigade combat teams" of 4,000-5,000 troops, each structured to act as independent units just as the divisions had been.

But here's the rub that connects these two debates: Many senior civilian officials and military officers fear ground forces will lose out in budgetary battles on big-ticket weapons systems and thus be left vulnerable to a shift in public opinion toward nonintervention in future small wars and civil strife abroad.

In short, the big-war Air Force and Navy will clean up while the Army and Marines, plus the reserve component, get used up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is the essential strategic choice America faces today: pulling back from a messy world to plan for brilliant, high-tech wars against major opponents or sticking with the effort in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

By sensibly splitting the difference with a division of labor among the services, both tasks can be adequately served.

But don't expect the ground services to accept this outcome without a struggle. Old Cold War habits die hard, and inter-service budget rivalries die harder.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.