I’ve been kind of privately, and ambivalently, hoping for another military Atatürkian coup in Turkey for about half a decade now. It’s too early to say whether I’ve been right to long for such a thing or even if what we’re seeing is what I was hoping for.
My ambivalence is mainly a basic respect for representative government combined with a conservative bias against rooting for situations that may involve a lot of unpredictability and potential loss of life.
So, no, this isn’t the kind of thing I had enough confidence to advocate. That’s why I never advocated it.
I just thought it was probably needed as Erdogan had gone off in the wrong direction in so many ways.
Our government may publicly decry this. They have to be officially against military coups in most instances. I kind of doubt that they’re behind it, or gave any kind of wink or nod. I wouldn’t necessarily be upset if they did, but my preference would be for this to be 100% organic.
But Turkey has been through this before, and the Atatürkians are generally the good guys, in my opinion. They’re certainly preferable to Erdogan from the perspective of the West, and I think probably for the people of Turkey as well.
But, again, I’m ambivalent about it. It’s not my country.
Update [2016-7-16 8:9:48 by BooMan]: The worst of all worlds is a failed coup.
Up until Erdogan/AKP pissed on the Kurdish talks I’d guess many of the Turkish ethnic and religious minorities would disagree with you that Ataturkians (pretty sure most refer to them as Kemalists) are good guys. Currently, in this case, I can’t really argue though. Turkey has been getting further and further off the tracks domestically and being a thorn regarding US regional foreign policy. Even if this coup is successful it’s no guarantee ANYTHING involving Turkey will be better for quite some time.
Fake Trump tweet:
Just brash and dumb enough to sound like something Trump would tweet. But maybe not today as he’s busy crying about not dominating the news cycle with his own big news.
Actually Trump and Pence are busy celebrating the T(Toilet) P(Paper) logo for their campaign.
and wondering how to kill the gif version of it.
Or at least trying to tamp down the Cornholio references 🙂
What no wink or nod from the USA for a military coup in Turkey? I wonder how our own military feels about it?
US News —
RED LIGHT (h/t Billmon) Coup plotters (whoever they may be) are not gaining any support.
Possible scenarios:
I’m starting to get a pretty strong vibe from #2.
The so-called coup attempt seems to have been poorly planned and poorly executed, and it crumbled way too fast and easy. One fuzzy Facetime appeal from Erdogan and within hours the streets are filled with flag-waving civilians. Less that 24 hours and thousands suspected ‘coup plotters’ are purged from the military and the judiciary. Now the guy who many saw as a strong man with fascist tendencies seems to be the champion of freedom and democracy, hero of the day.
What’s wrong with this picture?
That would be my thought. just hoping Kerry and Lavrov took a few minutes out from getting things done to telephone Erdogan with some strong warnings
Yes, seems like Erdogan had a list of people to arrest in hand before the coup “happened”. The two thousand judges seems to be curious. Was there a corps of judges with assault rifles on the front lines?
I think the photos are being photoshopped as we speak.
Well, David Ignatius and Steve Clemons just went on MSNBC, claiming to have spoken with senior intelligence and military officials. They summarized that the officials have talked about how disappointing Erdogan has been in his domestic policies and how problematic he has been for the U.S. to work with on foreign and military policies.
Former ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns also got on the air and was slightly less critical of Erdogan, but he didn’t ring the bell to lead us to anticipate the U.S. would be taking military action to defend the elected government of a NATO member.
I think we can guess where we’re heading to in our government’s responses to this. I’m not sure that the outcome is certain, based on what is being shared with us at this early hour of an attempted coup which, if it succeeds, will never be called a coup by our government. Such is realpolitik.
Erdogan has been pissing off the West and others for a while. If you hear mention of the Gülen movement you might reasonably assume it was a foreign inspired or at least tolerated. Where’s Erdogan now?
Note also that he pissed off the Islamists recently too. Mere days ago.
Like most such things, it’s deeply Turkish and foreign-manipulated at the same time. Nothing really new for Turkey, though. Google “grey wolves”, gladio, pan-turanianism, etc.
Yes. I have gone on record here in recent memory as suggesting Erdogan was the most dangerous man in Europe; his enemies would need to queue up. Personally I believe he created the European migrant crisis as a matter of policy to leverage power in Europe. I’m convinced his security organs were responsible for a number of ‘terrorist’ acts domestically, at least those attributed to the Kurds.
Shooting down Russian aircraft, openly supporting ISIL’s economy, extra-judicial prosecution of his opponents, aspirations of becoming Sunni Caliph of a new Ottoman Empire… The man is an Islamofacist with levers of power extending into Western financial markets and NATO. A very dangerous man.
I’m sure that high level US military officials are pondering what they would do if TP wins and Der Drumpf orders nuclear strikes on China (or whomever). A coup might look pretty good then.
Why a nuclear strike on China? That’s where they manufacture the junk with the Trump label.
And why is there a fear of Trump as a warmonger? That’s not praise for his foreign policy, if one exists at all. However, there’s no way that Trump would be able to change the direction of US foreign policy, which relies on military conquest and coups. But he wouldn’t be the initiator. US foreign policy has been mostly bi-partisan with a few exceptions for the last fifty years.
Good question. I think it’s an inescapable truth that our ability to maneuver freely in the Middle East is extremely dependent on our relations with Turkey.
That reality, and how our military sees the actors, determines the answer.
And it dawns on me that I have just added bupkis to the conversation.
Erdogan has made peace with Netanyahu and Putin in recent days.
Erdogan has made war with Syria (Assad) and could not compromise with the Salafists of KSA, UAE and Egypt. Syria stayed a mess because of the ambivalence in Turkey’s support for the jihadist rebel groups, just like the Republicans and Democrats of U.S. Congress.
○ Secr. Clinton’s Embrace of Erdogan, Muslim Brothers and Chaos
○ Erdogan: A New Hitler Stands Up
Erdogan was the poster boy of the Hillary Clinton years at State. After the failure of Morsi and Muslim Brothers in Egypt, it’s the authoritarian Erdogan usurping all power of all branches of government. He went too far, however he felt assured by unlimited support from NATO as a key ally.
○ Sultan Erdogan of the Emirate of Turkey – June 2013
○ Muslim Brothers Axis Egypt – Turkey – Qatar Faces Defeat – July 2013
From my diary – BREAKING: Military Uprising Underway In Turkey.
How does the military feel about Syrian refugees? (Serious question, I have no idea.)
Yeah, I’m on VFR, at best, on this.
My limited sense is that the refugee crisis has severely taxed Turkey’s resources and political flexibility.
There are also the Kurds to consider.
I can think of few countries as strategically positioned as Turkey, or as vulnerable to being pulled in at least two different directions. They have one foot in Europe, and one foot in the Middle East. Meaning, they are out of feet. (That sounded nowhere near as pithy as I thought it would, but, well, there you are.)
Military factions blame politicians [re: Erdogan] for failed foreign policy and on domestic issue using attacks on Kurds for political gain [read: subvert democracy for authorianism]. The support of the Erdogan regime with its intelligence services MIT are responsible for their support of jihadists [Islamic extremists] having freedom to cross border into Syria. The blowback has been numerous bomb attacks inside Turkey from the Islamic State and the militant Kurdish factions.
I understand the coup military attacked the HQ of MIT at the start of their action and also the building of parliament. There seems to be some resistence by military surrounding the presidential palace in Ankara.
The military coup stated they wanted to preserve democracy and secularism. Erdogan and the AKP want to progress towards a state on Islamic law and principles.
○ Post Terror Islamophobia: A Rebuttal
○ NATO Partner Turkey Bombing Kurds in Iraq and Not ISIS
How is this ever supposed to endear Erdogan to the EU? I have been reading such speculation…
Looks like the coup is failing. People are surrounding tanks and disarming soldiers. Erdogan and ministers are still free and calls for resistance.
Have you seen this, which is apparently going around?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/turkish-police-fethullah-gulen-network
Yup — see my comment below, posted about 20 minutes after yours (but I hadn’t seen yours).
Interesting, thanks. My general ignorance of foreign policy really shines through with Turkey: I have absolutely no framework, there, from which to even try to understand this stuff.
Sounds like the coup–leaving aside that it’s a coup–is either a better thing or a worse thing, and either succeeding or failing, which is probably an improvement and likely a deterioration.
” … the Atatürkians are generally the good guys, in my opinion.”
With all respect, Booman, you need to learn more about the history of Turkey. Not that I like Erdogan either, but the Ataturkians are exactly why Erdogan came to power.
There’s too much to go into here, but I suggest you google, in various combinations, Gulen, “Grey Wolves”, Ataturk, Operation Gladio, Pan-Turanianism. It’s all blowback from “The Peace to End All Peace”, the NAzis, the Cold War, etc.
It’s British and American counterintelligence at its worst, and it’s been going on for upwards of a century now. Remember, I’m not saying this because I have any liking for Erdogan. Both sides can wear black hats.
There are rarely any ‘good guys’ in Turkish national politics; any which survive very long, at any rate.
More importantly, I have no confidence our ability to separate the good guys from the bad guys is superior to the operation of that country’s democratic decision making.
#LonNol
#Allende
#Mosaddegh
#Arbenz
#Hussien
But this time it is different. I am sure of it.
This time is different.
It just might be. Or it might not be. But, though I freely admit to not possessing an even minimal understanding of the situation, I am nonetheless leery of “those who forget the past…” arguments.
I don’t mean to oversimplify your position. I’m just saying that I find such arguments to be glib, and usually wrong. Truly horrible consequences are often truly horrible in their own particular ways.
Eh, as has become clear to me Erdogan was going to get to military gov. levels of nasty soon and when thats fused with religion it is far worse.
F16 has shot down a military helicopter
At security HQ reportedly 17 policemen shot and killed
Erdogan’s call for people to walk the Streets and defy the military participating in the coup attempt seems to have effect
Governor of Istanbul days the military are doomed to fail
A crowd has taken over Ataturk airport and told military to leave within one hour
People in the street oppose the coup
Young Turks Live stream
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appears on television through a Apple FaceTime video connection to address the nation.
“FaceTime isn’t available or might not appear on devices purchased in
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates, including Dubai”
They probably lost. Too bad.
From watching RT and reading Zero Hedge I am wondering if this might even have Russian fingerprints on it.
The hell with the Russians… has anyone seen Victoria Nuland? Or Samantha Power?
Coups don’t just ‘happen’ — they’re all hatched in Northern Virginia.
Sometimes supporting a coup in a dangerous state is just due diligence. It’s always a crap shoot.
Unlikely given that Erdogan just apologized to the Russkies for shooting down their jet, and Russian tourists are being allowed to travel once again to Turkey.
More likely either home-grown splinter-group coup attempt, a false coup attempt by Erdogan to gain more power, or they are in cahoots with Langley, possibly because of Erdogan’s recent rapprochement with Russia.
So many choices. Russian outlets seemed to be cheer-leading the coup but as you correctly point out their are a host of enemies to consider.
This.
Erdogan’s plane was still sitting on the runway at Istanbul twenty-eight minutes ago. Now we’re hearing of an explosion at the same airport.
Reporters Without Borders: Turkey #151 out of 180. (Finland ranked #1.)
The Guardian Live Feed:
Questions — when did Gulenists infiltrate the military? Understand that they were strong within the police — at least until 2013 when corruption was exposed and Erdogan allegedly purged them from the ranks of the police. If successful that could explain why the coup leaders didn’t find support among the police. Or …
The Gulenists used to be Erdogan’s allies; that’s how they’re all over state apparati. They didn’t support him once he started turning authoritarian, so he turned on them, “exposed” their corruption, threw the leadership which didn’t escape in jail, and shut down their papers.
I rather doubt he actually knows who’s behind this. Most likely, he wanted to pin it on an unpopular enemy to a) discredit the coup and b) excuse further actions against the movement.
What we should probably not do is confuse the young men mobilised in the street with pro-democracy protests; they are likely pro-AKP Islamists. As you say, Erdogan’s enemies are so many he probably does not know himself who were the perpetrators; or care at this point. His official media has been demonising the Gülen movement and the CIA, whom they blame for the Istanbul Airport bombing, of all things. It is a strange place, Turkey, politically. And the media is like reading Alex Jones all day long.
Isn’t blaming the CIA a default PR response just about every time?
In the US the default PR blame is Putin.
Links do exist between the USG and the Gulen Movement. Whether that’s specifically and wholly the CIA or other USG agencies, nobody seems to know. What has yet to be satisfactorily explained is how the Gulen Movement became a huge US charter school operator. IOW, US taxpayers are supporting Gulanist who are Islamicists.
Gulen schools are a two-fer — they’re charter schools, and they’re anti-evolution.
They’re also confessional in practice, if not openly so, and that would also make them popular — more popular if they were only the right confession.
But these are accusations from the state affiliated outlets of the mainstream press. Turkey is a surreal media market.
Doesn’t address or answer my question, but I didn’t frame it well. Allow me to try again. Traditional, in modern times, the military in Turkey has been secular. More recently the judiciary, including police, has become a seat of power for the Gulen Movement. That institution allied with Erdogan and AKP in their rise to power. Both favored a non-secular government.
On the military
Thus, Erdogan came into office as an authoritarian. However, cultures live on after senior officials are removed and Erdogan has continued his fights with the military that was not keen on Erdogan supporting and arming the Syrian “rebels.”
How soon Erdogan began bristling at the institutional authority of the Judiciary and vice versa came later, but the split came in 2013 over a major government corruption scandal. Erdogan and the non-Gulen faction of the AKP survived by pinning the corruption on the Gulenists and senior members/officials were then purged. That should still have left Gulen Movement supporters and/or members in the Judiciary.
So, if the military coup was a Gulen Movement plot, as Erdogan said it was, when did those people infiltrate the military and in sufficient numbers to mount a coup? And if such a faction perpetrated the coup, why did the police not join them?
Erdogan dealt with the Gulenist police and judiciary not long ago. That the military was behind this suggests to me it wasn’t a Gulenist attempt, as you hinted.
While newer and therefore not as burrowed into the institutional structure as the secularists in the military, find it difficult to believe that Erdogan purged all the Gulanists from the Judiciary.
But thanks for appreciating my point that the coup plotters were unlikely to be Gulanists.
Make your own assessment:
These Gulenists are not secularists, are they? Gulen is a cleric after all. So how much difference is there between his goals and Erdogan’s? They both want to destroy the secular state….
I think that Marie was contrasting the Gülenists with the long-standing role of the secularist military.
This guy’s Twitter feed is beyond disturbing.
Holy smokes, I won’t be forgetting some of those images, ever.
I certainly hope we develop clarity about who ordered these horrors and why. Right now, it’s not terrifically comprehensible to me. And, given the motivations of all direct actors in Turkey and outside interests like the U.S. and Russia to not tell the entire truth about what is happening, I worry we’ll never get a truthful recounting.
Ataturk’s ideals sound good with its aims of balancing a religious society with secularism but military coups are not good for democracy.
I’ve seen the images of the Turkish military faction attacking civilians. Look at the behavior of the military during the latest coup in Egypt and the increased repression under Sisi. As detestable as the Muslim Brotherhood was in Egypt, there is no doubt that democracy in Egypt suffered as a result of the coup.
Turkey has regressed under Erdogan in many areas but he has done that with popular support. This attempted coup likely provides him with the pretext needed to consolidate power and crush dissent.
We have our own nutjobs who think the military should step in to remove a government at odds with their interpretation of the constitution. It’s a bad precedent to encourage such action by the military so we should not be ambivalent about it.
I’m in agreement with this. It’s dangerous to decide that military coups might be OK on a case-by-case basis, no matter how horrible a particular elected government might be.
Last time I checked, military governance in Egypt appears to be running the economy into the ground, along with being cruel, oppressive and regressive. It’s significant that they’re maintaining the peace agreement with Israel, but what happens if there’s a coup within the military against Sisi?
○ European Turks demonstrate in support of Erdogan during coup attempt
it appears the coup has failed and that it wasn’t really much of a military coup than a failed mutiny
many theory ponit that the coup in an hidden action of current prime minister | luck patcher
Please elaborate.
that’s a bot, some garbled sentence[s] with a link; requires someone else also to smite
A failed coup – – all of which shows if you call one you better have arrested the top man and his staff and keep the people out of the streets, as well as arrange to stop all communication like media and internet. Sounds kind of basic to me. Otherwise you get to kill thousands to make it stick.
I fail to see that anyone involved with the Turkish mess is wearing a white hat. They all seem to have black hats. Erdogan is an autocrat who for his entire time in office (president or PM) has been attacking other branches of the government, and the secular foundations of the state, in order to build up his own power. He had a good chance at a peaceful deal with the Kurds (20% of the population), but cynically threw that all aside in order to stoke Turkish nationalist sentiment and win back his parliamentary majority. His government was literally giving a free pass to jihadist wannabes from Europe so they could enter Syria to join ISIS. Meanwhile the people who staged the coup attempt killed a bunch of civilians. That guy Gulen is a piece of work who, if he happened to be in power, would be working to subvert the secular Turkish state himself.
With you totally on this one, Boo.
When you think of Ataturk, think of Peter the Great.
But also think of the wave of anticlericalism that swept France and many Latin American states from the last decades of the 19th century through the Spanish Second Republic of the 1930s.
Our own on-going sexual revolution in the law is an aspect of a broader revolution against clericalist control of American law that began about the middle of the 20th Century.
Just as there were more and less crazy and democidal variants of Marxist-Leninism there are more and less crazy variants of Islamism.
It may seem to many that democracy is inevitable in Muslim lands – or at any rate that the US and the Occident cannot morally or practically oppose it and indeed morally and practically should support it – and with it the triumph of Islamism, in which case, among the most popular players, the least evil for everybody in Sunni territory may well be the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is entirely possible that is President Obama’s thought, and John Kerry’s, and perhaps Mrs. Clinton’s as well.
That would certainly explain reports of the presence among their advisers of people close to the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood are Islamists in their domestic policies, which means they are hell on apostasy, blasphemy, women, and gays and dead set against secularity in government or in social life.
But they are not as radical as ISIS, what with the commitments of the latter to Jihader conquest, violent restoration of the Caliphate, terrorism, and outright enslavement, massacre, or ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims.
All the same, there are many in those same Muslim lands who prefer to take the risks of temporary, even relatively long-lasting, departures from democracy in order to avoid not only worse Islamisms but even that of the Brotherhood, itself.
These are people, Muslim or not, who aim at as much freedom from religious domination as they can manage for themselves, for their governments, and for their societies and cultures.
And many of them still hope, eventually if not immediately, to successfully make that compatible with democracy in Muslim countries through constitutional constraints not the same as but similar in intent and effect to our own First Amendment prohibition of establishment of religion.
Sometimes they win in open political conflicts with Islamists, as they did in Algeria and Egypt.
Sometimes they lose, as they did in Iran.
And the struggle continues, and will continue for a long time to come, to dominate politics in the Muslim lands.