Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Notes on Turkey, the Kurds, Incirlik, and ISIS
I’ve refrained from writing much about this past week’s news for a number of reasons. The first is that I’ve been deeply depressed about it, which doesn’t make for sober analysis. The second is that there are many elements of this story I don’t yet understand. I’ve been hesitant to make a categorical judgment about many of the rumors I’ve been hearing from Turkey, since I’m not there to evaluate any of them myself. The third is that there are so many aspects of this I do understand that I’m tempted to write too much, drowning everyone here in detail that’s essential — yet failing to convey the essence. The fourth, as one (good) journalist in Turkey put it on Twitter, is “[redacted’s] just too complicated. Moving too quick.”
I’m also aware how difficult it is to write about this in a way that makes sense. I remember studying the Spanish Civil War as an undergraduate and feeling so overwhelmed by the number of acronyms that I decided my exam strategy would be to play the odds, skip the Spanish Civil War, and instead master every other topic that might come up on the Modern European History finals. To this day, I could tell you all about Béla Kun, but my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War remains limited to what I learned from reading Homage to Catalonia.
So I’m not going to try to write a definitive update. I’ll just direct you to three articles, open the floor to discussion, and try to answer questions, although I may not know the answers. I’ve extracted key quotes from the articles, but if you read them in full, they’ll make more sense — not least because all these beastly acronyms refer to things that are, in fact, very different.
The first is by Patrick Cockburn, in the Independent. Cockburn is, to say the least, a controversial journalist. My rule with him is that whatever he writes is worth reading, but requires confirmation by at least two independent sources before it should be considered accurate. I include this because he’s correct to point out the potentially huge strategic consequences of US policy here. Also, in this case, everything he’s written is correct. (I haven’t confirmed his quotes, of course, but those aren’t the essential points.)
The US denies giving the go-ahead for Turkish attacks on the PKK in return for American use of Turkish air bases, or of any link with Turkish action against Isis fighters and volunteers, who were previously able to move fairly freely across Turkey’s 550-mile border with Syria.
But whatever America was hoping for, initial signs are that the Turkish government may be more interested in moving against the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq than it is in attacking Isis. Ankara has previously said that it considers both the PKK and Isis to be “terrorists.” [my note — the US and Europe also consider the PKK to be terrorists. Having walked over their handiwork more than once, I can confirm that this is the correct designation.]
Meanwhile, Turkish police have stepped up suppression of all types of dissent – using water cannon against everybody from activists to members of the heterodox Shia Alevi sect, who number several million and claim they are discriminated against [my note — they claim it because it’s true]. …
The result is that the US may find it has helped to destabilise Turkey by involving it in the war in both Iraq and Syria, yet without coming much closer to defeating Isis in either country. If so, America will have committed its biggest mistake in the Middle East since it invaded Iraq in 2003, believing it could overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with a pro-American government.
The next is by Erik Meyersson. I almost wrote, “my friend Erik Meyersson,” but in truth we’ve never met. I’ve just been following his writing about Turkey and exchanging messages with him on Twitter for so long that I feel as if I know him. He’s a perceptive analyst of Turkish domestic politics, and this piece — Bombing the PKK: It’s the (domestic) politics, stupid! — struck me as dead on target, as his writing usually is:
The “peace talks,” “solution process,” “Imrali process,” or whatever you want to call the talks between members of the PKK and those of the Turkish government, was always an asymmetric engagement and, at best, a long shot … When the peace talks started in the late 2000s, PKK had its back against the wall, squeezed between Turkey, Iran, the KRG in Iraq, Assad in Syria, and a Europe that then still saw Turkey as promising and ripe for EU talks …
… With the Syrian civil war, Assad’s pulling back from Kurdish areas, and the rise of the Syrian Kurds, the PKK’s outside option improved markedly. With its success in Syria, PKK was no longer in such a bad state, with military successes in Sincar, and even greater political successes in its cooperation with US forces in beating back ISIS. Undoubtedly the terms demanded by the PKK likely swung into red territory for the AKP. To make things worse, the electoral success of the Kurdish party HDP made things even more complicated as the AKP would now have to negotiate with two organizations, each looking to claim specific concessions and each wanting to be seen as the main spokesperson for Turkey’s Kurds. But most damaging, the surge in “political Kurdishness” caused direct political harm to AKP in the last election, as HDP climbed above the ten percent threshold needed for parliamentary representation, scuttling an AKP supermajority in parliament and its plans for an executive-presidential constitution. As I’ve discussed previously on this blog, a large share of this surge came from Kurds previously voting for the AKP.
Bombing PKK camps in Iraq is unlikely to destroy the organization, or to weaken it to levels it can’t recuperate from. Turkey has witnessed multiple rounds of mass incarceration of Kurdish activists (recently in the KCK trials), and bombed Qandil mountains as recently as in 2011. The Turkish government probably knows it can’t defeat PKK military, so then why is it resorting to violence then?
The likely target here is instead the HDP. By striking hard at the PKK, the Turkish government is pressuring the HDP to pick a side. Either it denounces PKK to end violence, risking political blowback among its Kurdish base, or it adopts a more pro-Kurdish rhetoric, risking the ire of the Turkish public as well as the judiciary, which has a long history of banning Kurdish parties and politicians. The strain could furthermore risk breaking the HDP party, with its more pro-PKK members leaving to pursue its goals elsewhere.
As coalition talks to form a new government are stalling, Turkey may soon see another round of elections. If the current conflict results in HDP polling below the ten percent threshold, this could leave the field open for an AKP supermajority, an Erdogan presidency, and a new era of political AKP dominance in Turkish politics.
I add the third link with some hesitation, because it doesn’t begin to do justice to the complexity of Kurdish politics. But it’s a useful corrective to a tendency to romanticize an alliance with “the Kurds,” who are in fact anything but a single political entity. Let’s be realistic about Kurdistan; it’s a deeply unpleasant autocracy, writes Alastair Sloane:
Now, let’s be clear, the Peshmerga are certainly brave and they are certainly holding back ISIS, but their rulers, the Barzani clan, are dictators and gangsters. Masud Barzani isn’t meant to be president; there is a strict two term limit on the post, which he’s just ignored. When a Kurdish poet wrote a satirical piece recently poking fun at the Barzani family, he was arrested and executed. If Kurdish businessmen don’t pay the right bribes to the Barzanis, they too face arrest. Numerous journalists writing critically about the clan have simply disappeared.
“You son of a dog, if you publish that magazine tomorrow, I’ll entomb your head in your dog father’s grave,” one newspaper editor was told. Eighteen months later, he was shot dead outside his home. When Arab Spring-inspired street marches hit Kurdistan in 2011, there were over three hundred and fifty attacks on journalists by the Barzanis’ thugs. There have been hundreds more since then.
The Barzanis also appear to be overseeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing, both directly in Iraqi Kurdistan and via their affiliated fighters in Syria. They deny these charges, but diplomats and several aid workers attest to seeing Sunni Arabs driven from their homes in their thousands, their former dwellings burned to the ground. Many of the displaced Sunnis have lived there for decades, having been encouraged to move there by Saddam Hussein.
Looting, arson and forcible removal hardly seems a recipe for ongoing stability, and with the West simply standing by, often the only place for the Sunni Arabs to go is into ISIS-controlled territory.
I could clarify, update, and analyze all of this for pages and pages, but suspect it would be more confusing than helpful. The key point is that we’ve made a momentous decision — but it doesn’t seem to be one we’re much debating. And given our absurdly hesitant stance toward ISIS thus far, I want to know how we plan to use this access to Incirlik: Do we in fact plan to use it to wipe ISIS off the face of the map? If not, is it worth this price?
I’ll summarize with a comment sent to me by e-mail by a very reliable Western journalist in Turkey who doesn’t wish to be identified:
This morning was terrible. [Every time I tried to finish my article], I discovered that some even more absurd and terrible event has happened. … I was one of the first people to think that boots on the ground were needed for ISIS. But breaking an entire country, starting a war, wrecking a democracy, killing people and sending others to prison — all for what is ostensibly a desire to defeat IS but in reality a pursuit of domestic political goals both in Turkey and the USA?”
Photo credit: AFP/Ozan Kose. It was taken a few days ago in the Gazi neighborhood of Istanbul. Not Syria. Here’s some background on the neighborhood.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Yes, that would be a very big help.
Michael Totten is someone who writes exquisitely about these issues. Here is one of his offerings:
http://worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/turkey-chooses-isis-over-kurds
An excerpt:
“In Turkey, however, the conversation is different. The question over there is whether ISIS or the Kurds are the lesser of evils.
Twenty five percent of Turkey’s population is Kurdish, and Erdogan—like most of his ethnic Turkish countrymen—are terrified that Turkey may lose a huge swath of its territory if Syrian Kurdistan liberates itself alongside Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkish Kurdistan could very well be the next domino.
They are not crazy to fear this.
But they’re reacting by treating as ISIS the lesser of evils. If ISIS can keep the Kurds down, Turkey’s territorial integrity is more secure.
“ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all,” a former ISIS communications technician told Newsweek, “because there was full cooperation with the Turks and they reassured us that nothing will happen…ISIS saw the Turkish army as its ally especially when it came to attacking the Kurds in Syria. The Kurds were the common enemy for both ISIS and Turkey.””
He (Totten) adds a note suggesting that Turkey no longer qualifies for NATO membership:
“He (Erdogan) is not a state sponsor of terrorism. He is not championing ISIS, nor is he on side with them ideologically. He is not their patron or armorer. But he is letting one of our worst enemies grow stronger while stomping on one of our greatest allies.
We seem to be reaching the end of a road.
NATO was formed as an anti-Russian bulwark during the Cold War, and ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union many have wondered if the alliance has outlived its usefulness. That question has been put to bed to an extent with Russian malfeasance in Georgia and Ukraine, but it’s becoming clearer by the year that Turkey’s membership in NATO is a vestige of an era that expired a long time ago.”
Claire, your writing is superb. The deficiency is my base knowledge about Turkey and probably the region in general. After reading your analysis, I have a hazy understanding that there are some big and nasty problems that could easily get bigger and nastier, but have little to no real understanding of the problems themselves. I don’t know the players or any of their histories.
I’m probably like a lot of Americans and maybe other of your readers in terms of my actual current knowledge of Turkey .. 1) where it is on a map, 2) member of NATO, 3) member of EU, 4) long standing low grade warfare with Greece over Cyprus, 5) Turkey’s refusal to cooperate with the second Iraq war .. those kinds of general information.
If you could step back and think about with only that kind of general knowledge, that’s the deficiency some of us have.
I could use that too.
:-) easier said than done, true. But imho worth the price.
Claire, thanks for the updates and the analysis. I feel like I’ve been to a particularly high-quality seminar that covered in the space of several comments what others would have taken weeks to say.
Please continue to point us toward reliable sources of intel on this ongoing situation. We are talking about a very large and strategically important (and urgent) theater of operations, yet most of us have only a passing knowledge of the players.
This guide should take you through most of the major Kurdish political parties and groupings up until 2013. He refers to some of them as “parties,” but the PKK/PJAK/YPD isn’t a party.
The Turkish BDP was a political party when that article was written, but reorganized in 2014 and became the HDP. Political parties in Turkey have frequently been banned, especially Kurdish-oriented ones, so they tend to regroup and rename. Missing are the names of a number of PKK splinter groups, like the TAK, but as far as I can remember, they haven’t killed anyone since 2011. Kurdish Hezbullah is however still very much in existence — they aren’t related to the Lebanese Hezbullah, but they’re not something you want in to even think about. Hüda-Par is related to them and burgeoning.
This is a list of the recently-elected political parties in Turkey and their acronyms.
There are a number of leftist-terrorist groups that are significant here but aren’t covered in this list, like the DHKP/C, which among its other achievements is the group that bombed our embassy in Ankara in 2013; I wrote about that here.
(This diagram isn’t one you need to study, but it should give you a sense of the history of radical leftist groups in Turkey.)
This is a long report, but very worth reading, about the effect of arming Iraqi Kurds without a strategy, given the fractious state of Kurdish politics:
Although you can’t see all of it online, you can also read some of the sections I wrote for the AFPC’s 2014 World Almanac on Islamism: The chapters on Turkey and the Gülen movement are now slightly out of date, but should give you a guide to the major remaining players in Turkey.
The other acronym you’re apt to see a lot of is MiT — the Turkish intelligence service.
I’m sorry this is so confusing. I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to make it less confusing, but the truth is that this region is every bit as complicated as this sounds. It took Orwell to give me a sense of what the Spanish Civil War was about — and sadly, I’m not Orwell.
I’m in the group that has little understanding of this situation and it is not reported here in the US very well in MSM. This is what I found this morning:
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/turkey-bombing-both-isis-kurds-linked-forces-fighting-militants-n399626
I remember a couple months ago Claire, you said they were moving key archaeological and historical sites including an ancient tomb, and saw that as a big heads-up that something big was coming. We had Hillary and Kerry who did nothing to bring peace to the Middle East – I am confused why Obama has a Peace Prize.
The whole area is confusing because of the many warring tribes that have never gotten along – and the Arab spring backfired, so here we are. So many have also been trying to get Assad out and no one can seem to do it. I am sure Russia keeps the pot of turmoil stirring. I think the egos of some of the leaders, not wanting to participate in a coalition to solve the problems, made it worse.
I know from your writing that a big piece of your heart resides in Turkey, so this is very personal. I will sincerely pray for the Turkish people and if there is humanitarian aid that can help, please let us know. There has been too much suffering for too long.
Not a member of the EU.
I’m trying to think of the best general introduction to this subject, at article-length. Let me give this some thought: The problem with so many “introduction to the problem” articles is that they’re either boring and confusing — or wrong.
My huge concern is that we’re making decisions like this without public debate, without public oversight — so I have to figure out some way to make this comprehensible, because that’s the only role I can really play.
Here’s an excellent article summing up as many key points as anyone could in so few words. I know the correspondent. The correspondent knows this situation very, very well.
Claire,
It is beyond me to follow your full understanding of the Turkish-Kurdish problem. What my point of view is focused on is the military side. The air bases, the ISIS free zone and bringing in NATO are all the right moves. NATO is given a role that is a real responsibility. Maybe this will awaken them from their decades long slumber. The air bases allow for a major military build-up. Too often people take the build-up for granted. They don’t realize how much the logistics effect the end results. Meanwhile the zone keeps ISIS at bay both from attacking Turkey and from attacking our Turkish air bases.
The diplomatic side of the military is also very underrated. We sent people to Yugoslavia to contact Tito and his resistance during WWII. Churchill went to visit Stalin himself. We sent them weapons. We sent them P-36 tank killing aircraft which the Soviets just loved. It is inconceivable to me that we can’t make a truce with PKK and include the Peshmerga to fight the murdering, raping, monsters from Hell of ISIS. Perhaps this is beyond the trivial soft headed drips that infest the Obama State Dept. They are more concerned with what they are having for lunch at the local DC restaurant than what might be done to cement an alliance.
There is an old saying “You can’t nail into rotten wood. It won’t make any difference.” The rot is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. not in Turkey or Kurdistan.
Regards,
Jim
I find this all depressing. It seems as if there is no one to be rooting for in all this.
Additional questions. How much is Israel doing behind the scenes to arm the FSA? Is it in the US interest to keep the warring sides at parity while they continue to kill each other, since there really doesn’t seem to be a side we can support whose success would positively effect our interests. (i.e. stable, non-threatening, semi-democratic government)
Jim, I think you meant P-39
It doesn’t make it easier if Turkey’s bombing them.
If this results in a full-throated destruction of ISIS, of course it’s worth it. But as of now, neither Turkey nor the US has agreed to anything beyond the opening of Incirlik. The ROEs and scope of mission remain undefined. And as of now, the US is negotiating with a caretaker government.
And here’s the state of the Pentagon’s planning, from what we know:
That article should be read in full. If there’s a plan here, no one knows what it is.
Strangely enough, they haven’t told me. I doubt the Israelis would be dumb enough to put weapons into the hands of a now non-existent force; after all, these seem to end up with ISIS.
No. It is in anything but the US interest to destabilize Turkey and the KRG. You know how Jeanne Kirkpatrick drew the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian states? She should have added a third category: chaos. We have a huge interest in preventing chaos. ISIS and Iran will be the only powers that win from chaos.
Yep, sorry. P-39 Bell Airacobra. The Soviets did love them and we sent them lots of other goodies to keep them going. Here is Churchill visiting Stalin in 1942. Stalin was very agitated. He had hoped that the allies would invade Europe and create a second front in 1942. Again logistics made that foolhardy. Churchill told him of the North African campaign and that they had something major planned for 1943. Probably he was thinking Italy. The real invasion of Normandy didn’t happen until 1944. It takes work to hold a real alliance together.
Strange bedfellows or not. If you want to win you must pull together.
Regards,
Jim
Stalin was a self absorbed fool. The man personally oversaw the literal extinction of all opposing political variants in the Soviet Socialist Party (all of them being conveniently called reactionaries) and over a large degree of the military officer cadre (killing or imprisoning tons of experienced officers that had influence on all matters of military thinking) of the USSR which laid the bedrock foundation for the Ost Heer’s slaughter of the Red Army throughout WWII.
I think that analogy of supporting Stalin vs the Kurds though fails as Claire stated that a major difference in supporting the Peshmerga is that they are not a consolidated group like the Red Army was under Stalin, he had eliminated all political opponents and had the military under his will completely while the diverse Kurdish Paramilitary forces operate under different commanders for similar (in some cases) and drastically different (in other cases) goals with varying political ideologies.
Claire,
I was emailing a friend in Massachusetts, we were catching up on all sorts of things, and I mentioned your books – I looked up and sent her your link so she could educate herself about your writing, and found I had missed your blog area – never read – and just came across a certain story about a certain person living in the Poconos……….you are right, never heard of this……is he still here, and playing a part in this insidious situation in Turkey? It’s like an onion…you peel back a layer, and there are more layers – it is incredible how naive we are to what is going on, on the world stage. Truly incredible – it’s like there is a Soros behind every door.
Unfortunately, Stalin a murderous tyrant was necessary or the invasion of Normandy would not have happened for years longer or perhaps not at all. Tito in Yugoslavia was another example. They harassed Nazi invading armies for the entire war. If Erdogan wants to cross the border immediately with the Turkish Army then no need to worry. However, I’m not sure he is ready quite yet. Good partisans should not be wasted by bad leadership.
Regards,
Jim
Michael Totten relates how much the Kurds disdain ‘Arabs’, how severely they segregate out the latter in the interest of security from their own territory. It has enabled them to build a very safe territory. This ‘rapport’ seems noticeable for its absence.
I’d be willing to argue that the willingness of the Kurds to wrest control of territories away from ISIS gives them a certain priority over who is accorded dominion of the same.
This to me would be the most enlightening possible revelation – to find out how the Israeli’s view the various fighting groups and lines of conflict, what their objectives are, and what they forecast the future portends.
Then what is the US course of action? The parties all hate each other and have opposing, non-mutually satisfiable goals. We might be able to pick a winner, but from what you describe there isn’t anyone we’d want to win. Helping Turkey fight ISIS, they use it as an excuse to kill PKK, Kurds, etc. Help the Kurds/PKK/whoever, and they destabilize Turkey. Do nothing and either ISIS wins or Iran gets to play the role of hero in fighting them. I just don’t see any path forward. Help me out here Claire.
In the region, that qualifies one as a moderate.
Thank you for the post, Claire.
Plausible and frightening.
That is exactly how he (Putin) plays the game -creates the scene of aggression, then comes to the rescue – no fiction there. But there are so many bad eggs in this carton, he may meet his match. Meanwhile, the people suffer.
Interesting, I wonder exactly what type of protests the PUK is seeking to encourage.
Then there is Iraq’s largest pipeline where we have this:
Hmm, attacks on pipelines which affect many parties in the region Kuridstan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq but seem directed at Turkey. PKK retaliation perhaps?
Yes, seems like it.
I wish I could. A few problems for me in saying confidently, “Here’s what we should do.”
1) I don’t have access to anything like the information our policy-makers do. While it seems unlikely, it’s not beyond imagination that we’re planning to use every asset we have that could fly out that base to pound ISIS back into the sand from which it crawled out. That would change my assessment of the wisdom of taking this risk, although not my assessment of the wisdom of allowing Erdogan to use the deal as cover for his domestic politics.
2) I don’t know what’s being said behind the scenes, or why. I’m dependent on a diminishing pool of trustworthy reporters and a curated list of friends to know what’s happening on the ground. This likewise makes it hard for me to be entirely sure what’s going on.
3) There is one thing I feel very confident in saying. A decade in Turkey taught me that we do not even try to explain our policy to the Turkish people — we as much as mock them by refusing to speak to them and posting pictures of John Kerry celebrating International Gay Whale Day on our Twitter feed all day long at times like this. We should be forcefully speaking out about every single arbitrary arrest, every newspaper shutdown, every bombing raid that’s against our interest, Turkey’s, and the Kurds. This doesn’t necessarily mean using alienating language, diplomatically: It would be enough just not to say that “We support Turkey in protecting itself” — as we have been. Every time we do that, we create an enemy of the person who was just arrested for demonstrating peacefully, or the family of the kid who was shot and killed by cops because he was out buying a loaf of bread and got caught in the cross-fire. And we create enemies out of everyone who knows that happened. We don’t have to lecture or scold, it would be enough simply to say, “In the United States, we Constitutionally protect all forms of speech, even those opposed to the government.” Turks don’t know that, because no one has told them. Here’s an article I wrote about one instance of this that absolutely floored me: (Read the whole thing.)
So on this point, I am very confident. What we say matters, and matters more than most Americans could possibly imagine. That we’ve said nothing about the bombing of the PKK and the arrest of the internal opposition — and have in fact called to congratulate the government and publicly praised it — has been interpreted universally in Turkey as meaning that we deliberately cut an immensely cynical deal at their expense. It is not a stupid conclusion: It’s exactly the conclusion you’d draw under the circumstances. This is one reason for the kinds of poll results you often see that show Turks exhibit some of the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the world. (Then Americans see that and say, “Muslims. There’s just something wrong with Muslims. Well, yes: Some part of that is owed to the percentage of Turks who are hardcore Islamists and hate us because we’re gavur — infidels. But I’d guess the much larger part of it, as much as 60-70 percent, is owed to incidents like this, which happen so often that by the time I left Turkey, I felt I was the only American there who was trying to represent my country diplomatically — and it wasn’t even that hard; when people heard me out, they changed their minds — but I’m just one woman: I don’t have the platform, the authority, or the resources to do what our Embassy could do if they just spoke to people on the street, heard what they were saying, and gave it a minute’s thought.)
(I’m put in mind of our threads about “expert consultants.”)
We have many negotiating levers we could use to encourage Turkey to back off on these destabilizing, authoritarian excesses. So does the EU, which is in principle (but not in good faith) negotiating with Turkey for EU accession. Perhaps we apply them behind the scenes, but if so, we never tell the Turkish public, and it’s that public with whom we need a long-term relationship, not Erdogan. We should be screaming bloody murder about the attempt to shut down the HDP, the emergence of which was the goal of this whole “peace process” — to convert a violent terrorist movement into a legitimate, non-violent political party.
We should not provide targeting information to the Turkish air force for use against people who have been cooperating with us, and we should stop playing a game of pretending we’re not cooperating with the PKK, because we are: We should level with everyone and say, “We put this group on the terrorist list for a reason, and none of those reasons have changed, but this is a chance for the PKK to redeem itself and come off that list — we will help you defend yourselves against ISIS, gladly, but in exchange we need ironclad assurances that you will not attack our Turkish allies or each other, and there must be no ethnic cleansing in any areas you take.” We should say this publicly, to Turkey, the PKK, and the American people, and we should use every diplomatic lever we have to make sure that democratic behavior is rewarded with trade deals, legitimacy, and praise; but anti-democratic behavior is punished with ostracism, criticism, and, if ultimately needed, withdrawal of intelligence cooperation, without which none of these parties could hit the broad side of a barn.
And we need a strategy for Syria and ISIS: Are we serious about fighting ISIS? If so, we need to show it. We need to explain — to the extent we can without telegraphing our punches — what we plan to do, so that people who are terrified of them feel some hope that allying with us (rather than Iran) might be a better strategy for staying alive (not to mention not being raped, enslaved, tortured, and beheaded). Who can blame any party to this for turning to Iran for survival if all we do is hem and haw and talk about the “56 vetted members of the FSA” that it’s taken us a year to produce? If we allow Raqqa to fall with barely a desultory airstrike?
We need to contradict Erdogan when he lies and misrepresents our agreements — we do not need to be rude, just honest — and our Ambassador should be working the phones, calling every newspaper in Turkey and asking them why they published misleading information about what he or other US officials said. We don’t need to dictate what they write; we need only let them know that we read it and are puzzled, because it’s not what we said. Many of these editors, if they heard the Ambassador’s voice on the other end of the phone, would stand up and salute: If we act as if we’re a superpower, they’ll believe it.
We need to use social media effectively to get our message out — this is how Turks get the news, when it isn’t blocked — and we need to protest social media bans vociferously, and work with Twitter and Facebook to get them to stop cooperating with them. (Twitter and Facebook and many other sites immediately go dark the moment they’re served with Turkish court papers. Their official policy is that they “cooperate with the laws of local countries.” Well, in this case, we should be placing phone calls to their executives saying, “Cooperate if you must, but put please put a banner on top of the site saying that the United States government has nothing to do with these laws, and would never tolerate such laws on its own soil.”) We might ask them also to put up a notice saying, “Here’s are resources that will teach you how to circumvent the ban, courtesy of the United States government.” We should also ask them to explain prominently on their sites that the content in them is heavily censored: Most Turks don’t know this.
And we should be drowning the region in an updated version of VofA — one that looks like something someone might read in the year 2016, not 1977 — that provides honest, accurate information about what the US is doing and why. Not propaganda, just honest information. Because when you leave a huge information vacuum like that, it’s filled by Erdogan’s controlled press, and that’s the only story people get. This should, obviously, be in Turkish: That’s the language people in Turkey understand. If you go look at our US Embassy Twitter feed, your jaw will drop: If the Tweets are in English — and they almost always are — that means you are the object of our public outreach, not Turkish citizens. That Twitter feed should be a constant, non-stop source of accurate communication between the USG and the Turkish people. Not propaganda, just accurate information about what we’ve really said, what we really believe, and rebuttals of lies told by the Turkish state media — not rudely, just factually. And there should never be a lie or an exaggeration on it: It should tell Turkish people things that they can use to make sense of what’s going on, and it should speak to them like adults. (This will be hard for our officials to grasp, because they’re so used to speaking to us like children, but if you think you want to retch on seeing the latest updates about the “25th anniversary of Americans with Disabilities Act message,” or the rainbow flag on the White House, just imagine how Turks feel. This cannot be our message to them on a day when 1,000 political opponents have been hauled in for a mass arrest.)
This kind of thing matters, and matters so much more than people understand: When we fail to stand up for any of the values we supposedly believe in, or even to explain them, we look like exactly what our worst enemies in the region say we are: blundering, arrogant, hypocritical, warmongering imperialists. And from there it is not too distant a journey to believing that the bin Ladens, al-Baghdadis, or the radical left might be telling the truth about a lot of things. Given what I’ve seen of our diplomacy, I’m surprised that so few Turks have joined these groups: But the credit goes to them, their culture, and to their parents, who’ve taught them to strive for a somewhat decent life. If I weren’t an American, and if I weren’t reasonably well-educated, I suspect my time in Turkey could well have radicalized me. (In the hard-left direction; I can’t really see myself signing up for the way women are treated by Islamists. But without a considerable academic knowledge of what the hard-left really means and its historical record, I think I would have been quite vulnerable to propaganda about “imperialist American meddling and American hypocrisy.”)
Look, the US Embassy wasn’t even there for me when I was threatened by the Turkish state. I couldn’t even get them to answer my phone calls. What possible hope does the promise of America offer to someone who isn’t a US citizen?