Perhaps... but I hope you'll forgive me if the election of the AKP makes me a little wary.
I dunno. I just look at what's happening in the West, with second-generation minorities (and I'm not just talking about Muslims, either; in the U.S. we have a rising tide of Mexican gangs) being even more attracted to gangs than their parents. If something drastic enough were to happen, it's certainly possible to radically transform the political climate of a country very quickly. The Vietnam War is an excellent example; the particular subculture that rose out of that is now a part of the American mainstream, and the consequences for our lives have been... not pretty.
Daniel Pipes is a jerk, imo.. But he has an audience in people who are able to ask questions like "If we have any weaponry in Turkey left over from the Cold War.."
Turks have enemies in the US, who'd like to see her broken up. It's in their interest that articles such as this one are published to keep sowing the seeds of uncertainty among the quasi-educated readers in the US.
Though I readily concede that I'm "quasi-educated," with only a year of college under my belt.
Thanks for your points of correction, I guess.
College won't help with this..
I had a history prof at a us college with whom I had to argue that Turkey is not an islamic republic. That was 20 years ago. He gave me a very hard time after that, but f him.
Web search engines won't help either, unless you weed out all the hateful anti-turk propaganda. As Turkey and the US are very similar in many ways albeit at different points in time (economic powers, expansionist, multi-ethnic, multi-religious) there are those who are anti-American or Anti-Turkish all over the world. Watch what you read, most of what's out there is absolute crap.
You may want to look at the history of the articles by Robert Kaplan, who by no means started out as pro-Turk. Yet as the decades went by, his level of education on the topic was elevated.
There also quite a few books you'll find, yet many of them just plain suck, still influenced by the centuries of warfare driven by competing trade interests with the Europeans.
College will do little to help..