Six Discontents and The Resurrection of Hayek!

This is not very long, but very informative. Read the catalogue of events and then, ask yourself how anyone can take the position that all we have to do is bring our troops home from Iraq & Afghanistan, then sit back, reset the snooze alarm, go back to sleep, and no one will ever bother us again

In case you missed it, World War III began in November 1979... That alarm has been ringing for years.
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Be careful where you cross illegally you might get more than a ticket. (See 2 below.)
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Hayek resurfaces because Glenn Beck recently urged people to read: "The Road To Serfdom.".

In many ways what is happening to America validates what Hayek wrote, ie. Socialism is the evil of freedom. Unbridled private sector freedom, however, can also become a threat. Intelligent restraint and moderation are critical elements to ward off unwanted government intrusion and bureaucratic efforts to control behaviour.

Obama's revolutionary thinking and planning is a threat to our nation, to our individual liberty and our nation's economic status. That said. the cumulative excesses of believing there ever was a free lunch provided the grease for Obama's election among other reasons.

I will have more to say about my reasoning behind why I consider Obamism a danger later in this memo and my six discontents with our president.

If you are interested in an excellent article about Europe's Economic Decadence I urge you to read James Glassman's essay in the July/August issue of Commentary Magazine, pp 71.

In the article Glassman suggests an improved standard of living comes through work. Alas, prosperity seems to bring sloth and eventual decadence.(See 3 below.)
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Though I have posted several articles about Obama's recent recess appointment of Dr. Berwick, I consider this additional article worth posting because it epitomizes Obama's disdain and contempt for our form of government. (See 4 below.)
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If the Saudis had been able to nominate an American president they could not have done a better job than to select Obama. That said, there has evolved a downside for the Saudis because Obama is neither willing nor able to defend the Saudis against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In the previous memo a friend indicated there is talk why some extreme Liberals have begun to disassociate themselves from Obama and the rationale is that they are willing stalking horses for Hillary.

Since the Clintons cannot surface and express their distaste for Obama, it is argued, they are doing so through close surrogates ie. Streisand, Zuckerman, Carville among others.

Certainly "Aw Shucks" Bill would love the limelight of being "The First Man." In his recent eulogy of Sen. Byrd, Bill laid the predicate why his own aberrant behaviour should be excused. Clinton said, in effect, in touching on Byrd's Klanmanship, that, as a young man, Byrd understandably pursued public office by taking the lesser road and that he should be excused if, in later life, he did good deeds.

After all "Aw Shucks" has told us: "You gotta do what you gotta do." The same shoe fits Obama whose campaign reflected his character which was a patchwork of lies for any who wished to open their eyes. Eighteen months has shown, Obama lacks any resolute principles and his own own personality is a quilt of disingenuousness.

Let me deal with six specifics.

Obama seems to believe, and perhaps sincerely, that soft-power will bring about a greater degree of world stability and tranquility.

American ideals and the very principles expressed in our Constitution will be willingly embraced by those who accord with our Constitutional dictates but what about those who hate us, who want to destroy us and who do not buy our principles of freedom etc.? Soft power, in these instances, is more a provocation than an invitation according to Abe Greenwald.

To simplify, parents used to have authority over their chidlren until PC'ism took over.
Nations do not have such authority over other nations. Nations can persuade and they can impose when the need arises. Empty threats neither work with nations or children. I faulted GW for this and Obama as well.

If our failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions and failure to support their own citizens revolting against the injustices of their current regime is not evidence of why soft power does not work, then I cite appeasement of N Korea as a second piece of evidence.

Another reason why I am turned off by Obama is his attitude towards Israel.

Problems in the Middle East stem more from Arab/Muslim disunity than anything Israel has done and I am not excusing Israeli mistakes and heavy handedness.

Because of historic Western anti-Semitism, Western energy dependence and a desire to atone for Colonial past practices the emphasis on Israeli intransigence fails to pinpoint the true nature of where the blame lies. If Israel were to disappear does anyone in their right mind believe Arab/Muslim tribal antipathy would also disappear? Does anyone believe Iran would not continue to pursue its goal of regional dominance?

Yes, many Arabists in our State Department believe the Middle East would turn Westward. Certainly Obama, in his Cairo speech, and subsequent actions believes as much.

Obama's handling of the Palestinian-Israeli statehood matter has backfired causing him to flip flop like a beached whale. First Obama thought by attacking Israeli settlements he could bring Netanyahu to his knees. Using the word settlements simply inflamed Israelis, caused them to rally round Netanyahu and to distrust Obama. Settlements of 20,000 people is equivalent to calling New York hickville and proves you do not know what you are talking about.

Furthermore, Obama's actions readily gave Abbas an excuse not to negotiate which Abbas quickly embraced and then Abbas added more demands without comparable concessions.

So a second reason I am discontented with Obama is his naivety, ignorance of history and arrogant unwillingness to learn from his mistakes.

If it partly because of his Muslim family background it has proven unhelpful.

A third discontent has to do with Obama's equally arrogant imposition of his brand of 'shariah' with respect to health care. His unwillingness to listen to the opposition and his lying about his true intentions alone leave me with a feeling of contempt and I am not alone judging by the ground swell of opposition as evidenced by Obama's declining poll numbers and rising anger amongst the 'tea totallers!'

A fourth reason for my Obama discontent has to do with his economic policies.

Yes, as with all presidents, Obama inherited a batch of problems. But he has made them worse and is well on his way to adding a level of debt that will crush our nation. Obama can blame GW til the cows come home but he cannot deny that, numerically, he has burdened this nation with debt, has failed, in the process, to demonstrate where it has been effective in raising employment, our competitiveness or our nation's psyche.

Obama has used mirrors to explain employment has risen because it has not dropped worse. Obama complains about our nation's overweight youth yet he has added untold numbers of red tape agencies and filled them with tons of do nothing bureaucrats. And what of his own staff of Czars and Czarinas and Michele's out sized personal staff?

Like a champion prize fighter, the Obama's have an entourage of hangers on that is obscene, costly to tax payers and shows an indifference and hypocrisy that undercuts his rhetoric of sacrifice.

A fifth reason of discontent with Obama is his lack of principles that demonstrate he neither understands what is special about being an American nor cares a whit about the legitimate way a president should govern.

Obama's early attempt at currying favor by appeasing rhetoric may have won him some personal accolades among European Socialists and chaos theorists and even a premature Nobel Peace Prize but it has not healed our nation nor brought us together as a people. In fact, Obama's style of leadership has thrown more unwanted salt on a society struggling to shuck the corrupting effect of entitlements, welfare, poor education and the dumbing down of our society.

His support of Atty. General Holder's dismissal of club wielding Black Panthers, the recent law suit against Arizona and his inept handling of the BP Gulf oil spill supports a valid claim of his incompetence.

A sixth, but not final reason, for personal discontent has to do with Obama's partisanship. The office of the president is a political one and partisanship is a given. However, the degree of Obama's partisanship suggests he never had any intention of healing and in fact has willingly embraced Emanuels' suggestion 'never let a crisis go to waste.'

Obama's Chicago thuggery partisanship, his need to find scapegoats, his willingness to throw those who earlier befriended him under the bus suggests an immaturity and pettiness that is beneath the dignity of both the office as well as its occupant.

As always I invite rebuke and criticism but I have been up front and specific and frankly could have continued but moderation holds me back.

I am re-posting this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUc8nuo7HI
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Michael Rubin has written an excellent article documenting why Turkey has moved from Ally to Enemy. Rubin has traced the rise of Erdogan, the failure of the West and many of our own diplomats who served as Ambassador etc. to call attention to Turkey's slide towards radical Islam. (See 5 below.)

Dick
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1)WW III Started - 1979

Captain Ouimette, U.S. Navy, is the Executive Officer of the Naval Air Station, Pensacola , Florida .

Here is a copy of the speech he gave in 2003.


"AMERICA NEEDS TO WAKE UP!"

That's what we think we heard on the 11th of September 2001(When more than 3,000 Americans were killed) and maybe it was, but I think it should have been 'Get Out of Bed!' In fact, I think the alarm clock has been buzzing since 1979 and we have continued to hit the snooze button and roll over for a few
more minutes of peaceful sleep since then.

It was a cool fall day in November 1979 in a country going through a religious and political upheaval when a group of Iranian students attacked and seized the American Embassy in Tehran. This seizure was an outright attack on American soil; it was an attack that held the world's most powerful country hostage and paralyzed a Presidency The attack on this sovereign U. S. Embassy set the stage for events to follow for the next 25 years.

America was still reeling from the aftermath of the Vietnam experience and had a serious threat from the Soviet Union, when then-President Carter had to do something. He chose to conduct a clandestine raid in the desert. The ill-fated mission ended in ruin, and stood as a symbol of America's inability to deal with
terrorism.

America 's military had been decimated and down sized/"right sized" since the end of the Vietnam War. A poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly organized military was called on to execute a complex mission that was doomed from the start.

Shortly after the Tehran experience, Americans began to be kidnapped and killed throughout the Middle East. America could do little to protect her citizens living and working abroad. The attacks against US soil continued.

In April of 1983 a large vehicle packed with high explosives was driven into the US Embassy compound in Beirut When it exploded, it killed 63 people. The alarm went off again and America hit the Snooze Button once more.

Then just six short months later in 1983 a large truck heavily laden with over 2500 pounds of TNT smashed through the main gate of the US Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, and 241 US servicemen were killed. America mourned her dead and hit the Snooze Button once more.

Two months later in December 1983, another truck loaded with explosives was driven into the US Embassy in Kuwait , and America continued her slumber.

The following year, in September 1984, another van was driven into the gate of the US Embassy in Beirut, and America slept.

Soon the terrorism spread to Europe. In April 1985 a bomb exploded in a restaurant frequented by US soldiers in Madrid.

In August 1985, a Volkswagen loaded with explosives was driven into the main gate of the US Air Force Base at Rhein-Main, killing 22, and the snooze alarm is buzzing louder and louder as US interests are continually attacked.

Fifty-nine days later in 1985 a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro was
hijacked and we watched as an Jewish American in a wheelchair was singled out of the passenger list and executed.

The terrorists shifted their tactics to bombing civilian airliners when they bombed TWA Flight 840 in April of 1986 killing 4, and then the most tragic bombing, Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie , Scotland in 1988, killing 259.

The wake up alarm is getting louder and louder.

The terrorists decided to bring the fight to America. In January 1993, two CIA agents were shot and killed as they waited at a traffic light to enter CIA headquarters in Langley ,
Virginia.

The following month, February 1993 , a group of terrorists
are arrested after they drove a rented van packed with explosives into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City . Six people were killed and over 1000 injured. Our government decides this is a crime, and not an act of war. The Snooze alarm is depressed again.

Then, in November 1995 a car bomb exploded at a US military complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing seven service men and
women.

A few months later in June 1996, another truck bomb exploded
only 35 yards from the US military compound in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia. It destroyed the Khobar Towers , a US Air Force barracks, killing 19 and injuring over 500. The terrorists are getting braver and smarter as they see that America does not respond decisively.

They move to coordinate their attacks in a simultaneous attack on two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These attacks were planned with precision. They kill 224. America responded with cruise missile attacks, and went back to sleep.

The USS Cole was docked in the port of Aden, Yemen for refueling on October 12,
2000, when a small craft pulled along side the ship and exploded, killing 17 US Navy sailors. Attacking a US warship is an act of war, but we sent the FBI to investigate the "crime" and went back to sleep.

And of course you know the events of 11 September 2001. Most Americans think that was the first attack against US soil or in America. How wrong they are. America has been under constant attack since 1979 and we chose to hit the snooze alarm, roll over, and go back to sleep.

In the news lately we have seen lots of finger pointing from every high official in government over what they knew and what they didn't know. But if you've read the papers and paid a little attention I think you can see exactly what they knew. You don't have to be in the FBI or CIA or on the National Security Council to see the pattern that has been developing since 1979.

I think we have been in a war for the past 25 [now 30+] years, and it will continue until we as a people decide enough is enough. America needs to 'Get out of Bed' and act decisively now. America has been changed forever. We have to be ready to pay the price and make the sacrifice to ensure our way of life
continues. We cannot afford to keep hitting the snooze button
again and again, and rolling over to go back to sleep.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said '... it seems all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant.' This is the message we need to disseminate to terrorists around the world.

This is not a political thing to be hashed over in an election year, this is an AMERICAN thing. This is about our Freedom and the Freedom of our children in years to come.
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Make sure you understand this...

IF YOU CROSS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YEARS HARD LABOR.

IF YOU CROSS THE IRANIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU ARE DETAINED INDEFINITELY.

IF YOU CROSS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY, YOU GET SHOT.

IF YOU CROSS THE SAUDI ARABIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE JAILED.

IF YOU CROSS THE CHINESE BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU MAY NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.

IF YOU CROSS THE VENEZUELAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE BRANDED A SPY AND YOUR FATE WILL BE SEALED.

IF YOU CROSS THE CUBAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE THROWN INTO POLITICAL PRISON TO ROT.

IF YOU CROSS THE U.S. BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET

1 - A JOB,
2 - A DRIVERS LICENSE,
3 - SOCIAL SECURITY CARD,
4 - WELFARE,
5 - FOOD STAMPS,
6 - CREDIT CARDS,
7 - SUBSIDIZED RENT OR A LOAN TO BUY A HOUSE,
8 - FREE EDUCATION,
9 - FREE HEALTH CARE,
10 - A LOBBYIST IN WASHINGTON
11 - BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRINTED IN YOUR LANGUAGE
12 - AND THE RIGHT TO CARRY YOUR COUNTRY'S FLAG WHILE YOU PROTEST THAT YOU DON'T GET ENOUGH RESPECT


I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU HAD A FIRM GRASP ON THE SITUATION...
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Hayek: The Back Story
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Last month, a funny thing happened on the way to the best-seller list. A 66-year-old treatise by a long-dead Austrian-born economist began flying off the shelves, following an hourlong endorsement from a right-wing television host better known for pumping political thrillers than for rocking political theory.

The economist was Friedrich von Hayek, the book was “The Road to Serfdom” and the host was Glenn Beck, who compared Hayek’s book to “a Mike Tyson (in his prime) right hook to socialism in Western Europe and in the United States.” As it happens, “The Road to Serfdom” — a classic attack on government planning as an inevitable step toward totalitarianism, published in 1944 and kept in print since then by the University of Chicago Press — had already begun a comeback of sorts. It sold 27,000 copies in 2009, up from about 7,000 a year before the inauguration of Barack Obama. But Beck’s endorsement catapulted the book to No. 1 at Amazon.com, bringing a temporary end to at least one tyranny, that of Stieg Larsson. Since the program was broadcast on June 8, 100,000 copies have been sold.

That’s an impressive number for an academic-press book, if a bit anemic compared with the 1.2 million views for “Fear the Boom and Bust,” a Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes rap video that went up on YouTube in January. (Kickoff line: “Party at the Fed!”) But in fact “The Road to Serfdom” has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.

When Hayek began formulating his ideas in the early 1930s, he was an émigré professor at the London School of Economics, watching events in both Europe and Britain with alarm. Like many others, Hayek was frightened by the rise of Nazism. He interpreted it, however, in an unorthodox way, not as the defeat of democratic socialism but as its logical culmination. Hayek started writing the book after World War II began, as a contribution to the war effort. Looking ahead, “Hayek was also worried about what would transpire if the Allies won,” as Bruce Caldwell puts it in his introduction to “THE ROAD TO SERFDOM”: Text and Documents — The Definitive Edition (University of Chicago, $17). In ominously titled chapters like “The Totalitarians in Our Midst” and “Why the Worst Get on Top,” Hayek laid out his case against “socialists of all parties” who he believed were leading the Western democracies into tyranny that mirrored the centrally planned societies of Germany and the Soviet Union.

This theme, being taken up today by Beck and other anti-government sorts, had a plausible basis at the time. Caldwell quotes a 1942 Labour Party pamphlet that declared, “There must be no return to the unplanned competitive world of the interwar years. . . . A planned society must replace the old competitive system.”

When it appeared in 1944, “The Road to Serfdom” received a courteous if mixed reception in Britain (where paper shortages limited the print run). Keynes, Hayek’s friend and lifelong intellectual opponent, called it “a grand book,” adding, “Morally and philosophically, I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it.” George Orwell, more equivocal, conceded that Hayek “is probably right” about the “totalitarian-minded” nature of intellectuals but concluded that he “does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state.”

It was in the United States, however, that Hayek met with his greatest success — and the most intense hostility. Rejected by several trade publishers, “The Road to Serfdom” was picked up by Chicago, which scheduled a modest print run. It got a boost when Henry Hazlitt, a prominent free-marketeer, assessing it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in September 1944, proclaimed it “one of the most important books of our generation,” a call to “all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen.” The political scientist Herman Finer, on the other hand, denounced it as “the most sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country for many years.” But the most important response came from the staunchly anti-Communist Reader’s Digest, which ran a condensed version of the book in April 1945, with reprints available through the Book of the Month Club for 5 cents each. The condensation sold more than a million copies.

Reading the book today, it’s easy to see why Hayek’s message caught on with a public divided over the New Deal, struggling with the transition from a regulated wartime economy and concerned about rising Soviet power. But unlike some of his champions in 2010, Hayek didn’t oppose all forms of government intervention. “The preservation of competition,” he wrote, is not “incompatible with an extensive system of social services — so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.” This qualification, however, was left out of a comic-book version of “The Road to Serfdom” printed in Look magazine in 1945 (and distributed as a pamphlet by General Motors), which showed well-intentioned regulation giving way to more sinister forms of control. “In an unsuccessful effort to educate people to uniform views,” one caption read, “‘planners’ establish a giant propaganda machine — which coming dictator will find handy.”

While Hayek, who moved to the University of Chicago in 1950, built an ardent following of admirers (including Milton Friedman),? his fame gradually waned. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1974 he was largely forgotten by the public and marginalized within his profession. In graduate programs in the early 1980s, the economist William Easterly recalled recently on his blog, “Hayek was seen as so far right that you would be considered a nut to read him.” (His sunny view of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet probably didn’t help.)

Today, Hayek continues to inspire noisy ideological debate. In his recent book “Ill Fares the Land,” a passionate defense of the democratic socialist ideal, the historian Tony Judt writes that Hayek would have been (justly) doomed to obscurity if not for the financial difficulty experienced by the welfare state, which was exploited by conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The economist Paul Samuelson, in a reminiscence of Hayek published last December, was more dismissive still. “Where are their horror camps?” he asked, referring to right-wing bugaboos like Sweden, with its generous welfare spending. Almost 70 years after Hayek sounded his alarm, “hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.”

Hayek also cropped up in the recent controversy over the Texas Board of Education’s new high school curriculum, which will now include him and Friedman alongside Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Keynes. In a post on The Times’s Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers, a professor at the Wharton School, noted that a search of scholarly literature found Hayek, with a mere 1,745 references, lagging far behind Smith (25,626), Keynes (4,945), Friedman (8,924) and even Lawrence Summers (2,064). “The message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up,” Wolfers wrote, adding sardonically, “I don’t think Hayek would approve.”

Another blogger, redoing Hayek’s count, tallied 9,385 citations. But intellectual legacies don’t stand or fall on such bean-counting. Besides, Hayek, whose later work on the self-organizing nature of information has been influential far beyond economics, himself said “The Road to Serfdom” was more a “political book” than an economic one.

But how relevant is the book to Glenn Beck’s America? In his 1960 essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek observed, “Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.” Then again, his own strange road to best-sellerdom illustrates that a book’s reputation can be determined not just by its contents but by the company it keeps.


Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.
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4)Obama Appoints His Rationer-in-Chief
By Grace-Marie Turner

President Obama is making a huge end-run around the American people with his recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick.

“This recess appointment is an insult to the American people,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), a physician and leading Berwick opponent. “Dr. Berwick is a self professed supporter of rationing health care, and he won’t even have to explain his views to the American people in a hearing. Once again, President Obama has made a mockery of his pledge to be accountable and transparent.” Berwick will have authority over an agency with the largest single budget in the entire U.S. government and over implementation of the most sweeping legislative overhaul of our health sector ever — without so much as a congressional hearing!

Berwick will run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), giving him control of its $800 billion budget during the crucial months when thousands of pages of regulations will be written, determining how Obamacare will be run. The recess appointment lasts through the first session of the next Congress in 2011, after which Berwick will have to be renominated and would likely face even greater opposition, assuming Republicans make expected gains in the Senate.

The reason Berwick’s nomination was so highly controversial: numerous statements he has made professing his love for socialized medicine.

In speeches and articles celebrating the 60th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service in 2008, Dr. Berwick said, “I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.” He not only loves it, he says it is “an example for the whole world — an example…that the United States needs now.”

“The NHS is not just a national treasure; it is a global treasure,” Berwick wrote.

Berwick’s suggestion to the British: “Please don’t put your faith in market forces.”

“In the United States,” he wrote, “competition is a major reason for our duplicative, supply-driven, fragmented care system.”

He has publicly saluted Britain’s socialized NHS for rejecting the “immoral” American system and “the darkness of private enterprise.” He said that “the Holy Grail of universal coverage” cannot be achieved with consumer-centered health care, but only through “collective action overriding some individual self-interest.”

In an interview last year in the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, he said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Even the New York Times has taken notice of Berwick’s controversial nomination. Robert Pear reported last month: “Long before the uproar over ‘death panels’ last year, Dr. Berwick was urging health care providers to ‘reduce the use of unwanted and ineffective medical procedures at the end of life.’”

Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with Dr. Berwick’s home-town newspaper, the Boston Globe, also took direct aim at Berwick, noting that Obama has been adamant that his health-care overhaul would not put Americans “on the road to British-style, government-run medicine.” Jacoby continues: “No one can deny that America’s health care system is flawed in many ways. But when it comes to the standard that matters most — the quality of health care provided — our haphazard, expensive, insurance-based system towers above the NHS. By one metric after another — cancer survival rates, performance of diagnostic tests, availability of CT and MRI scanners, consultation with specialists — U.S. health care is superior.”

Berwick’s nomination hearings were certain to shine a bright public light on those comments; alas, he is now certain to gain the title of rationer-in-chief, and the president has appointed to implement his health-care plan a man who has a love-affair with the NHS.

“Don Berwick is going to have a tough time at first, but members are going to be calling him for local favors,” says former GOP Hill staffer and current health strategist Alec Vachon. “The best thing he can do is return those calls within ten minutes. It’s the quickest way to build bridges.”

With power over an agency whose budget is larger than all but 15 of the world’s economies, Vachon could be right. But let us hope and pray that he is wrong and that principle will prevail over politics.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)Turkey, from Ally to Enemy
Michael Rubin


Traveling abroad on his first trip as president, Barack Obama tacked a visit to Turkey onto the tail end of a trip to Europe. “Some people have asked me if I chose to continue my travels to Ankara and Istanbul to send a message,” he told the Turkish Parliament. “My answer is simple: Evet [yes]. Turkey is a critical ally.” On the same visit, however, the president showed that he considered Turkey more firmly part of the Islamic world than of Europe. “I want to make sure that we end before the call to prayer, so we have about half an hour,” Obama told a town hall in Istanbul. Obama was not simply demonstrating cultural sensitivity. The fact is that Turkey has changed. Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.

The story of Turkey’s Islamic revolution is illuminating. It is the story of a charismatic leader with a methodical plan to unravel a system, a politician cynically using democracy to pursue autocracy, Arab donors understanding the power of the purse, Western political correctness blinding officials to the Islamist agenda, and American diplomats seemingly more concerned with their post-retirement pocketbooks than with U.S. national security. For Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it is a dream come true. For the next generation of American presidents, diplomats, and generals, it is a disaster.

The Middle East is littered with states formed from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I. Most have been failures, but in Anatolia, one has flourished: in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey and, soon after, abolished the Ottoman Empire and its standing as a caliphate, a state run according to the dictates of Islamic law. In subsequent years, he imposed a number of reforms to transform Turkey into a Western country. His separation of mosque and state allowed Turkey to thrive, and he charged the army with defending the state from those who would use Islam to subvert democracy. While Middle Eastern states embraced demagogues and ideologies that led to war and incited their peoples to hate the West, Turkey became a frontline Cold War and NATO ally. Turks faced down terrorists, embraced democracy, and dreamed of full inclusion as a nation of Europe. No longer.

Turkey’s Islamic revolution began on November 3, 2002, when Erdogan’s Justice and Reconciliation Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey’s elections. Through a lucky quirk of the Turkish election system, the AKP’s 34 percent total in the popular vote translated into 66 percent of the Parliament’s seats, giving the party absolute control.

Initially, Erdogan kept his ambition in check. He understood the lessons to be learned from the undoing of his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, the first Islamist to become prime minister. After taking the reins of power in 1996 with far less power in Parliament, Erdogan’s predecessor sought to shake up the system—to support religious schools at home and to reorient Turkey’s foreign policy away from Europe and toward Libya and Iran. This became too much for the military, which exercised its power as guardians of the constitution and demanded Erbakan’s resignation. Afterward, Turkey’s Constitutional Court banned the party to which Erdogan belonged because of its threats to secular rule.

Erdogan himself had been banned from politics because of a 1998 conviction for religious incitement. And so he initially managed the newly created AKP from the sidelines only, working through Abdullah Gul, the lieutenant who served as caretaker prime minister after the party’s 2002 victory. Gul pushed through a law to overturn the ban against Erdogan, and the latter became prime minister in March 2003. Learning the lessons of Islamist failures of the past, Erdogan sought to calm Turks who feared the AKP would dilute Turkey’s separation of mosque and state. As mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan described himself as a “servant of Sharia,” or Islamic canon law. But after his party’s 2002 victory, he declared that “secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that.” He took pains to eschew the Islamist label and instead described his party as little more than the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Democrats in Europe—that is, all democracy and religious in name only.

Both Turks and Westerners can be forgiven for taking Erdogan at his word. He had cultivated an image of probity as a local official that stood in sharp contrast with the corruption of many incumbent Turkish politicians. Rather than upend the system or pursue a divisive social platform, as prime minister Erdogan first sought to repair the Turkish economy. This was an attractive prospect for Turks across the political spectrum, since in the five years prior, the Turkish lira had declined in value eight-fold, from 200,000 to 1.7 million to the dollar, leading to a ruinous banking crisis in 2001. A Coca-Cola cost millions. Erdogan stabilized the currency and implemented other popular reforms. He cut income taxes, slashed the value-added tax, and used state coffers to subsidize gasoline prices. The Turkish electorate rewarded his party for its efforts. The AKP won 42 percent of the vote in the March 2004 municipal elections and placed mayors in four of Turkey’s five largest cities. In July 2007, it increased its share of the popular vote to 47 percent.

But there was far less here than met the eye. Rather than base economic reform on sound, long-term policies, Erdogan instead relied on sleight of hand. He incurred crippling debt and, in effect, mortgaged long-term financial security of the republic for his own short-term political gain. Deniz Baykal, the former leader of the main opposition party, has said that the state debt accrued during Erdogan’s first three years in power surpassed Turkey’s total accumulated debt in the three decades prior.

And that was only official debt. Outside of public view, Erdogan and Gul, now his foreign minister, presided over an influx of so-called Green Money—capital from Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Persian Gulf emirates, much of which ended up in party coffers rather than in the public treasury.

And here begins the tale of the interweaving of Turkey’s destiny with the nations to its east and south, and to the Muslim world rather than with the West.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Turkish Central Bank’s summary balance of “payments for net error and omission”—which is to say, money that appeared in the nation’s financial system for which government reporting cannot account—increased from approximately $200 million to more than $4 billion. By 2006, Turkish economists estimated the Green Money infusion into the Turkish economy to be between $6 billion and $12 billion, and given the ability of the government to hide some of these revenues by assigning them to tourism, that is probably a wild underestimation. Some Turkish intelligence officials privately suggest that the nation of Qatar is today the source of most subsidies for the AKP and its projects.

Thus, if Iran’s Islamic revolution was spontaneous, Turkey’s was anything but: it was bought and paid for by wealthy Islamists.

AKP officials are well-placed to manage the Green Money influx. Throughout much of the 1980s, Erdogan’s sidekick, Gul, worked as a specialist at Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Development Bank. Before the 2002 victory, he criticized existing state scrutiny of Islamist enterprises. Senior AKP advisers made their fortunes in Islamic banking and investment. Korkut Ozal, for example, is the leading Turkish shareholder in al--Baraka Turk, Turkey’s leading Islamic bank, as well as in Faisal Finans, which also has its roots in Saudi Arabia.

Erdogan has systematically placed Islamist bankers in key economic positions. He appointed Kemal Unakitan, a former board member at both al--Baraka and Eski Finans, as finance minister and moved at least seven other al-Baraka officials—one of whom had served as an imam in an illegal commando camp—to key positions within Turkey’s banking regulatory agency.

Erdogan also reoriented Turkey’s official foreign trade. In 2002, bilateral trade between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates hovered at just over half a billion dollars. By 2005, it had grown to almost $2 billion. That same year, Kursad Tuzmen, the state minister for foreign trade, announced that United Arab Emirates ruler Sheik Khalifa bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan would invest $100 billion in Turkish companies. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia’s finance minister announced earlier this year that Saudi Arabia would invest $400 billion in Turkey over the next four years. In contrast, in 2001, Turkish-Saudi trade amounted to just over $1 billion. When Turkish-Iranian trade surpassed $10 billion in 2009, Erdogan announced a goal to increase it to $30 billion. Whether or not Turkey and its Persian Gulf allies are exaggerating their figures, the trajectory of trade is clear.

For wealthy donors, the conversion of Turkey has been a good investment. For decades, Turkey stood out like a sore thumb for Islamists. Here was a majority Muslim country which, even lacking oil, was far more successful than any Arab state or Iran. No sooner had Erdogan stabilized the economy and solidified his political monopoly than he turned to changing Turkey’s social order and reversing its diplomatic orientation. Erdogan’s strategy was multi-tiered. He endorsed the dream of Turkey’s secular elite to enter the European Union but only to rally European diplomats to dilute the role of the Turkish military as guardians of the constitution.

While Turkish liberals, businessmen, and Western diplomats took solace in Erdogan’s outreach to Europe, his motivation was cynical. His ideological constituents had no interest in Europe, and Erdogan himself is intolerant of European liberalism and secularism. He criticized the European Court of Human Rights for failing to consult Islamic scholars when it upheld a ban on headscarves in public schools—a ban that dates back to Ataturk’s original reforms.

Erdogan’s ambitions to remake Turkey, however, reached far beyond superficial issues such as the veil. He sought to revolutionize education, dominate the judiciary, take over the police, and control the media. Erdogan worked to achieve not short-term gains on hot-button issues like the headscarf but rather a long-term cultural revolution that, when complete, would render past battles moot.

Erdogan attacked the secular education system at all levels. First, he loosened age restrictions on children who attend supplemental Koran schools—restrictions intended to prevent their indoctrination. He also undid content regulation meant to counter the ability of Saudi-funded extremists to teach in Turkish academies. Those schools that break the remaining regulations need not worry: Erdogan’s party eviscerated penalties to the point where unaccredited religious academies now advertise openly in newspapers.

Simultaneously, he equated degrees issued by Turkish madrassas—Islamic religious schools—with ordinary high school degrees. This bureaucratic sleight of hand in theory enabled madrassa students to enter the university and qualify for government jobs without ever mastering or, in some cases, even being exposed to Western fundamentals. When such students still fumbled university entrance exams, the AKP provided them with a comparative bonus on their scores, justifying the move as affirmative action. Erdogan made little secret of his goals: in May 2006, he ordered his negotiator at European Union accession talks to remove any reference to secularism in a Turkish position paper discussing Turkey’s educational system. Over the past year, the Ministry of Education has gutted the traditional high school philosophy curriculum and Islamized it.

Moreover, the judiciary is no longer independent. Erdogan’s initial attempts to lower the mandatory retirement age of judges (a move that would have seen him replace 4,000 out of 9,000 judges) foundered on constitutional challenges. More than a year later, the Supreme Court of Appeals chided the AKP for attempts to interfere in the judiciary. When Gul, Erdogan’s closest ally, assumed Turkey’s presidency in 2007, there was no longer any check on his party’s authority. The president selects the Higher Education Board, appoints a quarter of the justices on the Constitutional Court, nominates the chief public prosecutor, and officially confirms the commanding general of the Supreme Military Council. Now, on the rare occasion when the high court levies decisions not to the prime minister’s liking, the prime minister simply refuses to implement them. In any case, after almost eight years in power, the AKP has been able to remake the courts. The government can now assign sympathetic judges to hear highly politicized cases. And in March 2010, the AKP unveiled proposed constitutional reforms that would make it easier for political leaders to appoint judges.

In any other democracy, discussion and debate about government abuse of power and societal change would saturate the news. Not so in Turkey. No prime minister in Turkish history has been so hostile to the press as Erdogan. What had been a vibrant press when Erdogan took over is now flaccid. The prime minister has sued dozens of journalists and editors, sometimes for nothing more than a political cartoon poking fun at him. When a Turkish media group pursued a story about a Turkish-German charity transferring money illegally to Islamists in Turkey, tax authorities punished it with a spurious $600 million lien. When it continued to report critically, the group received an additional $2.5 billion tax penalty. And, in a strategy borrowed from Iran, Erdogan has confiscated newspapers—the high-circulation national daily Sabah most famously—that he deemed too critical or independent, and transferred their control to political allies.

With the independent press muzzled and almost all print and airtime dedicated to his agenda, Erdogan upped his campaign against both the political opposition and the military. Whereas the Interior Ministry would once root out Islamists and followers of the anti-Semitic Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gulen, the AKP filled police ranks with them. Even AKP supporters acknowledge that the Interior Ministry regularly eavesdrops without warrants and leaks embarrassing transcripts to the Islamist press without consequence. “For 40 years, they have kept files on us. Now, it is our turn to keep files on them,” AKP deputy Avni Dogan recently said.

The real coup against democracy, however, came on July 14, 2008, when a Turkish prosecutor indicted 86 Turkish figures—retired military officers, prominent journalists, professors, unionists, civil-society activists, and the man who dared run against Erdogan for mayor years earlier—on charges of plotting a coup to restore secular government. The only thing the defendants had in common was political opposition to the AKP. The alleged conspiracy grabbed international headlines. At its root, the 2,455-page indictment alleged that retired military officers, intellectuals, journalists, and civil-society leaders conspired to cause chaos in Turkey and to use the resulting crisis as justification for a military putsch against the AKP. In February 2010, the prosecutors revealed a 5,000-page memorandum detailing coup plans.

The documents are ridiculous. The indictment was paper-thin. Security forces rounded up most suspects before it was even written. And as for the smoking-gun memorandum, the charge is risible: coup plotters do not write plans down, let alone in such detail. The indictments had a chilling effect across society. Turks may not like where Erdogan is taking Turkey, but they now understand that even peaceful dissent will have a price. Turkish politics had always been rough and tumble, but except at the height of the Cold War, it had seldom been lethal.

Nor can liberal Turks rely on the Turkish military to save them. Bashed from the religious right and the progressive left, the Turkish military is a shadow of its former self. The current generation of generals is out of touch with Turkish society and, perhaps, their own junior officers. Like frogs who fail to jump from a pot slowly brought to a boil, the Turkish general staff lost its opportunity to exercise its constitutional duties. Simply put, the Turkish military failed in its job. Obsession with public relations and media imagery trumped responsibility.

A decade ago, Turks saw themselves in a camp with the United States, Western Europe, and Israel; today Turkish self-identity places the country firmly in a camp led by Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Hamas. Turkey may be a NATO member, but polls nevertheless show it to be the world’s most anti-American country (although, to be fair, the Pew Global Attitudes Project did not conduct surveys in Libya or North Korea). Nor do Turks differentiate between the U.S. government and the American people: they hate Americans almost as much as they hate Washington. This is no accident. From almost day one, Erdogan has encouraged, and his allies have financed, a steady stream of anti-American and anti-Semitic incitement. Certainly, many Turks opposed the liberation of Iraq in 2003, but this was largely because Erdogan bombarded them with anti-American incitement before Parliament’s vote, which withdrew the support promised to the operation. Much of Erdogan’s incitement, however, cannot be dismissed as a dispute over the Iraq war.

In 2004, Yeni Safak, a newspaper Erdogan endorsed, published an enemies list of prominent Jews. In 2006, not only did Turkish theaters headline Valley of the Wolves, a fiercely anti-American and anti-Semitic movie that featured a Jewish doctor harvesting the organs of dead Iraqis, but the prime minister’s wife also publicly endorsed the film and urged all Turks to see it. Turkish newspapers reported that prominent AKP supporters and Erdogan aides financed its production. While much of the Western world boycotted Hamas in the wake of the 2006 Palestinian elections in order to force it to renounce violence, Erdogan not only extended a hand to the group but also welcomed Khaled Mashaal, leader of its most extreme and recalcitrant faction, as his personal guest.

The question for policymakers, however, should not be whether Turkey is lost but rather how Erdogan could lead a slow-motion Islamic revolution below the West’s radar. This is both a testament to Erdogan’s skill and a reflection of Western delusion. Before taking power, Erdogan and his advisers cultivated Western opinion makers. He concentrated not on American pundits who found U.S. policy insufficiently leftist and sympathetic to the Islamic world but rather on natural critics, hawkish American supporters of Turkey and Israel who helped introduce Erdogan confidantes to Washington policymakers.

After consolidating power, however, the AKP did not cultivate Jewish and pro-Israel groups, but they did little to sever the relationships. Turks traditionally looked kindly on Israel and Jews; of all the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews in Palestine were one of the few who had not revolted against the Ottoman Sultan. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkey and Israel had much in common: both were democracies amid a sea of autocracy. They enjoyed close diplomatic, economic, and military relations. So many Israeli tourists visited Turkey that Hebrew signs became ubiquitous in Turkish cities. It was not uncommon to hear Hebrew in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar or in restaurants along the Bosporus.

Against such a backdrop, many Jewish groups turned a blind eye to warning signs of Erdogan’s antipathy and rationalized Turkey’s outreach to Hamas and Hezbollah, Syria, Sudan, and Iran. It was not until Erdogan exploded at the 2009 Davos World Forum, telling Israeli President Shimon Peres “you know well how to kill,” storming off the stage, and subsequently accusing Israel of genocide, that Jewish groups awakened to the change that had come over Turkey.

Much of the blame for failing to recognize Erdogan’s agenda also lies in the West’s intellectual approach to radical Islam. For too many, the headscarf was the only metric by which to judge Islamist encroachment. For Erdogan, however, the scarf was a symbol; the state was the goal.

Even after Erdogan began to eviscerate the checks and balances of Turkish society, European officials and American diplomats remained in denial. Certainly moral equivalency played a role: as Erdogan asked last October, why should Turkey accept the Western definition of secularism? For too many Western officials, however, to acknowledge Turkey’s turn would be to admit the failure of moderate Islamism. To criticize Erdogan’s motivations would be racist.

Many diplomats and journalists inserted into this situation their own disdain for any military, let alone Turkey’s, and embraced a facile dichotomy in which Islamism and democracy represented one pole, while the military, secularism, and fascism represented the other. Hence, they saw the AKP as democratic reformers, while the military became defenders of an anti-democratic order. Certainly, the healthiest democracies have no room for the military in domestic politics, but by cheering the AKP as it unraveled the military’s role in upholding the constitution without simultaneously constructing another check on unconstitutional behavior, the European Union and Western diplomats paved the way for Erdogan’s soft dictatorship.

Alas, when intellectual smoke and mirrors were not enough to deceive the West, Erdogan and the AKP used more-devious tactics. Just as many American diplomats retired from Saudi Arabia to serve commercially their former charges, since the AKP’s accession every retired U.S. ambassador to Turkey—Eric Edelman being the exception—has entered into lucrative business relationships with AKP companies. Mark Parris, who led the U.S. Embassy from 1997 to 2000, just prior to the AKP’s rise, and has served in various positions at several think tanks, cultivated a business relationship with the AKP and helped with stories in Turkey’s anti-Semitic press about neoconservatives and coup plots. Throughout the first four years of AKP rule, Yeni Safak columnist Fehmi Koru, an outspoken Erdogan supporter, published more than a dozen columns accusing American Jewish policymakers, led by Richard Perle—who was not then a government official—of both manipulating the press and plotting a coup in Turkey. Both charges were not only false but also consistent with anti-Semitic refrains about Jewish control of the press and Protocols of the Elders of Zion–like plots. And, indeed, they served their purpose: the AKP used the columns to rally both nationalist and anti-Semitic feelings. Koru would often refer to a well-placed Washington diplomatic source. In a November 2006 column, he revealed Parris to be his source, a charge Parris has neither explained nor denied.

Turkish Islamists also cultivated academics. After Georgetown University’s John Esposito received donations from the Gulen movement, he sponsored a conference in the Islamist cult leader’s honor, whitewashing both Fethullah Gulen’s Islamism and his anti-Semitism. The University of North Texas similarly received Gulen’s largesse, as does Washington, D.C.’s Brookings Institution, which has long peddled a soft line toward Erdogan and his agenda.

Turkey today is an Islamic republic in all but name. Washington, its European allies, and Jerusalem must now come to terms with Turkey as a potential enemy. Alas, even if the AKP were to exit the Turkish stage tomorrow, the changes Erdogan’s party have made appear irreversible. While Turkey was for more than half a century a buffer between Middle Eastern extremism and European liberalism, today it has become an enabler of extremism and an enemy of liberalism. Rather than fight terrorists, Turkey embraces them. Today’s rhetorical support may become tomorrow’s material support. On the world stage, too, Turkey is a problem. Rather than help diffuse Iran’s nuclear program, Erdogan encourages it.

Turkey’s anti-Americanism, its dictatorship, and the inability of Western officials to acknowledge reality endanger security. Hard choices lay ahead: as a NATO member, Turkey is privy to U.S. weaponry, tactics, and intelligence. Any provision of assistance to Turkey today, however, could be akin to transferring it to Hamas, Sudan, or Iran. Does President Obama really want to deliver the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to a hostile Turkey, Iran’s chief regional defender, as promised in 2014? Should Turkey even remain in NATO? After all, half a century ago, NATO learned to live without France.

Losing Turkey is tragic, but failing to recognize its loss can only compound the tragedy. The worst outcome, however, would be to let strategic denial block assessment of lessons learned. As mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan quipped, “‘Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” Perhaps, in hindsight, the West’s mistake was to ignore the danger of Erdogan’s ascendance into the driver’s seat.
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