By Spengler
Turkey's integration into the global economy was sealed last week by
a billion-dollar offer by the American private-equity firm KKR for a
local shipping company. Days later, Turkish troops shelled Kurdish
villages in northern Iraq and prepared an incursion against Kurdish
rebels, a measure that would undermine Turkey's economic standing.
Whether Turkey will fling away its new-found prosperity in a fit of
national pique is hard to forecast, but that has been the way of all
flesh. Europe plunged into World War I in 1914 at the peak of its
prosperity for similar reasons.
News accounts link Turkey's threat to invade northern Iraq with
outrage over a resolution before the US Congress recognizing that
Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population in 1915.
American diplomats are in Ankara seeking to persuade the Turks to
stay on their side of the border. Why the Turks should take out their
rancour at the US on the Kurds might seem anomalous until we consider
that the issue of Armenian genocide has become a proxy for Turkey's
future disposition towards the Kurds. "We did not exterminate the
Armenians," Ankara says in effect, "and, by the way, we're going to
not exterminate the Kurds, too."
Nations have tragic flaws, just as do individuals. The task of the
tragedian is to show how catastrophic occurrences arise from hidden
faults rather than from random error. Turkish history is tragic: a
fatal flaw in the national character set loose the 1915 genocide
against the Armenians, as much as Macbeth's ambition forced him to
murder Banquo. Because the same flaw still torments the Turkish
nation, and the tragedy has a sequel in the person of the Kurds,
Turkey cannot face up to its century-old crime against the Armenians.
Shakespeare included the drunken Porter in Macbeth for comic relief;
in the present version, the cognate role is played by US President
George W Bush, who has begged Congress not to offend an important
ally by stating the truth about what happened 100 years ago. The
sorry spectacle of an American president begging Congress not to
affirm what the whole civilized world knows to be true underlines the
overall stupidity of US policy towards the Middle East. It is
particularly despicable for a Western nation to avert its eyes from a
Muslim genocide against a Christian population.
It offends reason to claim that the Turkish government's 1915
campaign to exterminate the Armenians was not a genocide. Documentary
evidence of a central plan is exhaustive, and available to anyone
with access to Wikipedia. It was not quite the same as Hitler's
genocide against the Jews, that is, the Turks did not propose to kill
every ethnic Armenian everywhere in the world, but only those in
Anatolia. But it was genocide, or the word has no meaning. To teach
Turkish schoolchildren that more Turks than Armenians died in a
"conflict" is a symptom of national hysteria. Hysteria, however, does
not occur spontaneously in countries with Turkey's record of national
success. One must dig for the root cause.
Turkey's tragedy is that the 11th Seljuk conquerors of the Anatolian
peninsula became masters of a majority Christian population, a cradle
of Greek culture for two millennia, in which the oldest and hardiest
ethnicity, the Armenians, held fast to the Christian religion they
adopted in 301 AD. Even after the forced conversion of Anatolia to
Islam, the Ottoman Turks comprised a minority. Turkey, so to speak,
was ill-born to begin with, and the Armenian genocide touches upon a
profound and well-justified insecurity in the Turkish national
character.
After the loss of the European part of its empire in the Balkans, in
the midst of World War I, the Ottoman Empire feared for its hold upon
Anatolia itself, and decided to settle the long-unfinished business
of conquest with a conscious act of genocide. But the Turks lacked
the resources to do so in the midst of war, and Turkey's military
leaders enlisted Kurdish tribes to do most of the actual killing in
return for Armenian land. That is why Kurds dominate eastern Turkey,
which used to be called, "Western Armenia". The Armenian genocide, in
short, gave rise to what today is Turkey's Kurdish problem.
Commentators close to the Bush administration allege that Democrats
in Congress are exploiting the Armenian issue in order to sabotage
America's war effort in Iraq. Ralph Peters writes in the October 14
New York Post, for example, "The Dems calculate that, without those
[US] flights and convoys [through Turkey], we won't be able to keep
our troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and strike missions
would disappear. It's a brilliant ploy - the Dems get to stab our
troops in the back, but lay the blame off on the Turks."
I am shocked, shocked to learn that the Democratic Party is engaged
in politics. Col Peters, though, misses the big picture. With or
without the Armenian resolution, conflict had to erupt with Turkey.
Far more threatening to Turkey than the resolution on Armenian
genocide was the 75-23 vote in the US Senate last month in favor of
dividing Iraq into Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish zones. Republicans as
well as Democrats supported this resolution, and with good reason. I
have advocated the breakup of the Mesopotamian monster named "Iraq"
for years, and do not think this step can long be withheld.
Kurdish nationhood will be the likely outcome of Iraq's breakup.
Ethnic Kurds comprise a full fifth of Turkey's population, and the
existence of a Kurdish nation will exercise a gravitational pull upon
Kurds in Turkey. Turkey fears with good reason for its national
integrity. If the American Congress accuses the Turkey of genocide
against the Armenians (as 22 countries already have), the Kurds will
have a stronger argument for autonomy - despite the fact that the
Kurds dominate eastern Turkey precisely because they slaughtered the
Armenians. The Kurds may not deserve nationhood, but "'Deserves' got
nothing to do with it," as Clint Eastwood's character offered in the
movie Unforgiven.
When the issue of Armenian genocide erupted, I immediately looked for
news about the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel
Prize for Literature, and the only Turk with a global voice. Pamuk
reportedly spent his prize money on a Manhattan apartment, suggesting
that he has no plans to return to a homeland that threatened to jail
him for mentioning the Armenian massacres to a Swiss interviewer.
That speaks volumes about the Turkish frame of mind.
Pamuk's novel Snow comes as close to a national tragedy as Turkey is
likely to produce. Set in the eastern border city of Kars, it shows
how Islam is filling the hollow spaces in the secular Turkish society
created by Kemal Ataturk, the great modernizer who fashioned the post-
Ottoman state. Young women hang themselves in protest against the
proscription of Islamic garb, and young men turn to Islamist
terrorism. The decaying mansions of the murdered Armenians of Kars
look down upon the tragedy like a spectral chorus. In past essays I
have recommended Pamuk's work to anyone who seeks to understand
Turkey (The fallen bridge over the Bosporus, Oct 31, 2006; In defense
of Turkish cigarettes, Aug 24, 2006). To his own chagrin, Pamuk has
become the conscience of his nation, and a nation that exiles its
conscience becomes a danger to itself and others.
Iraq never has been viable as a national entity, not when the British
Colonial Office cobbled it together out of former Ottoman provinces
in 1921, nor when Saddam Hussein ruled it by terror, and surely not
under the present American occupation. As the US Senate has had the
belated wisdom to recognize, it will break up. The Ottoman Empire
never was viable - at its peak half of its population was Christian -
and its Anatolian rump, namely modern Turkey, may break up as well.
Iran, the mini-empire of the Persians who comprise only half the
population, may not hold together, nor may Syria, a witches' cauldron
of ethnicities ruled by the brutal hand of the Alawite minority.
America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle
East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The
colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left
inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet
their reckoning. But America's obsession with the surgical implant of
democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-
mole with a welter of armed ethnicities.
How should American strategy respond to violent expressions of
existential despair by failing ethnicities? One approach was
suggested by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on October 14:
"A starting point is [former Carter Administration National Security
Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski's new book, Second Chance, which argues
that America's best hope is to align itself with what he calls a
'global political awakening'. The former national security adviser
explains: 'In today's restless world, America needs to identify with
the quest for universal human dignity, a dignity that embodies both
freedom and democracy but also implies respect for cultural diversity.'"
I suppose Brzezinski means that America should avoid offending
Turkish dignity when speaking about the Armenians, and do the same
with the Armenians when speaking of the Turks. What makes the appeal
to "cultural diversity" preposterous is that the self-expression of
Seljuk Turk culture is the suppression of the Kurds, the self-
expression of Sunni identity is to suppress the Shi'ites, and so on
and so forth. Ethnic tantrums in response to perceived indignities
are amplified by a sense of failure in the modern world that cannot
be assuaged by American "respect".
Live and let die, I propose instead. For the past seven years I have
argued that the West cannot avoid perpetual conflict in the Middle
East, and, rather than seeking stability, should steer the
instability towards its own ends. Washington should forget about
Turkish support in Iraq, allow the Mesopotamian entity to
disintegrate into its constituent parts, while helping the Kurds
maintain autonomy against Iraq. That would teach the Turks to bite
the hand that feeds them. A pro-Western Kurdish state would
strengthen Washington's hand throughout region, with adumbrations in
Syria and Iran as well as Turkey.
One should, of course, take Turkish interests into account. To
restore its national dignity, Turkey should be encouraged to
incorporate the Turkish-speaking ("Azeri") minority of Iran, and so
forth. Turkey ultimately may concede territory to an independent
Kurdistan, but more than replace it by annexing portions of Western
Iran. One cannot accord respect to failing nationalities; one can
only let them fight it out. Breaking up Iraq will not foster
stability. On the contrary, it will make the old instabilities a
permanent feature of the regional landscape.
In the case of Iraq, the danger associated with partition stems from
Iran's influence among Iraqi Shi'ites. But Iran, as noted, is just as
vulnerable to ethnic disintegration as Iraq, and Washington should do
its best to encourage this. If, as I expect, the West employs force
against Iran's nuclear weapons development capacity, the ensuing
humiliation of the Tehran regime would provide an opportunity to undo
some of the dirty work of World War I-era cartographers. All this is
hypothetical, of course; the little men behind the desks in
Washington do not have the stomach for it.
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