Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
were found, roughly coincided with the realization that Turkey would not be admitted to
the EU. The upshot of these dramatic events—coming at a time when Turkey had a new,
popular, and deeply entrenched Islamist government—was to shift the political and cultural
pendulum dramatically in the country toward the Middle East and away from the West for
the first time in literally centuries.
In a sense, as I've said, the United States was hoist on its own petard. For decades
American leaders had proclaimed democratic Turkey as a NATO, pro-Israel bastion in the
Middle East, even as they knew that Turkish foreign and security policy was in the hands
of its military. Finally, in the early twenty-first century, Turkey had emerged as truly polit-
ically, economically, and culturally democratic, reflecting the Islamic nature of the mass of
Turks, and the result was a relatively anti-American, anti-Israeli Turkey.
In the autumn of 1998, in Kayseri in central Anatolia, I interviewed leading Turkish
Islamists, including Abdullah Gul, Turkey's current president. The occasion was a meeting
and rally of the Virtue Party, which later disbanded and reorganized itself as the Justice
Party. The Virtue Party was itself a reincarnation of the Islamic Welfare Party, which had
been untainted by corruption and sought to bring about the social justice that had existed
under Ottoman Islam. In my report on those meetings, published in 2000, I got a big thing
right and a big thing wrong. The big thing I got right was that these people, though a minor-
ity party, were about to be become a majority in a few years. And their fundamental theme
was democracy: the more democratic Turkey became, the more their Islamist power would
increase; for they linked the West with Turkey's autocratic military power structure, which
was ironic, but true.
“When will the United States support democracy in Turkey?” the man next to me at the
Virtue Party dinner had asked. “Because until now it has been supporting the military.” Be-
fore waiting for my answer, he added: “I have been to Israel, and there, democracy is more
developed than in Turkey.”
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And that was the big thing I got wrong. Because moderate Turkish Islamists were then
relatively open-minded about Israel, I assumed they would always be so. In fact, circum-
stances would change dramatically: the result of the Turks' own historical evolution as
electronic communications brought them into closer contact with pan-Islamist thought (the
defeat of geography in other words), and the specific actions and mistakes of both the
American and Israeli governments in the coming years.
