Turkey’s influence will grow for the better says Black

Conrad Black in his latest NRO article Surveying the Muslim World, opens with,

Most observers seem to be wearying of the Arab Spring, just as it is becoming interesting. The idea of a democratic contagion that would suddenly sweep away centuries of autocratic misrule and replace it with Tocquevillean civic-mindedness was too far-fetched for all but the most robustly wishful. But the notion that Mubarak in Egypt and Saleh in Yemen would be replaced almost magically by preferable people did enjoy wider currency than it deserved. Stretching the canvas across the Western and Near Eastern Muslim lands, more than a dozen countries can be seen, in snapshots, at widely differing stages of fermentation.

He goes on to take a dim view of Egypt,

Egypt is a shambles. Hillary Clinton is trying to open up relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, as if there were any possible rapport between those two sides, or as if the U.S. brought anything to the party anyway (a party it should be grateful not to have been asked to attend). It ditched Mubarak, and is anathema to the Brotherhood (which is still unrepentant about murdering Anwar Sadat); and its financial assistance, though significant, could be replaced by one or more of the Arab OPEC countries. Egypt is not ready for the September elections, and the army, trying to maintain order, is losing its popularity. The traditional Arab choice impends, between reasonable (in policy terms) armed force, with no aptitude for government, and Islamist lunacy, with an aptitude only for chaos.

He easily dismisses Qadaffi and Assad with this biting comment,

The Alawite regime, with Mrs. Clinton’s commendation of it as a vehicle for reform ringing in its ears, is now in a race with Qaddafi to see who goes first, and young Assad will be packing up his implements and returning to his optometrist’s practice in Ealing (East London).

But what I liked best was his take on Turkey , which I must say, was similar to mine.
[..]

Turkey is the Muslim superpower, thanks to the traditions of Suleiman the Magnificent, peer and contemporary of Charles V, Henry VIII, and Francis I — and, more particularly, the traditions of Kemal Atatürk. It is difficult to see what the Erdogan regime is aiming at, apart from cleaning up the corruption of the military-dominated autocracy of his Kemalist secular predecessors. This alone has unleashed high rates of GDP and per capita income growth, and it is always the case that the replacement of a regime 80 years in office (as the city of Chicago will discover eventually) improves standards of probity and effectiveness of government.

The anti-Israeli posturing is tedious, and Turkey historically has a great deal less regard for the Arabs than for the Jews. There is no evidence at this point that Turkey seeks more than a traditionalist reawakening, promoting pride of continuity and making itself more accessible to the importunity of the Arabs. Turkey could take over Syria and Lebanon tomorrow and almost everyone, including the Israelis, would be relieved. The Europeans, by their arrogant, condescending treatment of Turkey as a mendicant at their back door, are chiefly responsible for this distemper in Ankara and Istanbul. But Turkey has been a Great Power for most of the time since the rise of the nation state, before Russia, Prussia-(Germany), Italy, much less Japan and the United States, and it will not find Araby an adequately commodious pasture for long, any more than it did in earlier times. The West must keep a light in the window for the Turks, even if we have to throw it temporarily out of whatever NATO decomposes into in the meantime.

And in Afghanistan and Pakistan the insoluble riddles continue, of how to fight the terrorists, in pursuit of whom the U.S. has recruited most of its longstanding allies, while the Afghan and Pakistani governments, whom we are trying to protect from the terrorists, are in fact playing footsie with the terrorists whom they credit with more staying power than their distinguished Western helpers against them.

The ancient conundrum of these countries is imperishable: The Western Muslim nations, except for Lebanon (if foreign interlopers could be excised) and Jordan (and leaving Turkey aside), have only the armed forces, the Islamists, and secular leftists, none of which have the remotest notion of how to govern, generate economic growth, devise civic institutions, or even reinvest petroleum revenues, and seem even to have lost their greatest former talent, of suppressing street violence. Militant Islam is nonsense and the West should stop pandering to the barbarous elements of that religion. Of course there are rational versions of Islam that are unexceptionable and culturally legitimate notions of how to propitiate the presumed deity. But the self-conscious feebleness of almost all Western leaders opposite the murderous lunacy of terrorist Islam, from which only the Pope and a few secular leaders have dissented, is more demeaning and futile than any version of appeasement practiced by the originators of the expression. No one has any idea what is going to happen in these Muslim countries, and the West will have to do better than it has. The Arab Spring could be a crisis for all seasons.

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.