Turkey's drift away from the West

As long as we are speaking of logical fallacies, the above is an example of a fallacious appeal to tradition. Id est, you are assuming that something must be correct because it has been that way for a long time.

This isn't a lesson in logic, it is a reality. Turkey has been a steadfast member of NATO contributing more in many ways to the organization than some other members, e.g., France. The foolish assertion that we can just boot Turkey out of the alliance because they are now adjudged not to be European is just not realistic or desireable. This is not a matter of being correct or incorrect. It is a political reality.

The U.S. has had many strategic partnerships that ended up expiring once the conflict finished. My example of China in WWII is only one. Indeed, Russia itself was our ally during WWII--the very reason for the formation of NATO in the first place.

Both examples are not analogous to the circumstances surrounding Turkey's membership in NATO. To compare the US and the allies wartime relationship with China and the Soviet Union to the NATO alliance and Turkey is pure sophistry. As long as NATO exists, and it is growing, Turkey will remain a member of its own volition. Can you cite any NATO member calling for the removal of Turkey from the alliance? Putin and Russia remain a threat to Europe, which is why countries like Georgia and the Ukraine want to join the current 26 member countries. And Albania and Croatia will be joining in the not too distant future.

NATO, of course, was a strategic alliance to counter the threat of Russia.

No, the Soviet Union and communist expansion.

But it was (and is) more than just that. It's an alliance of kindred folk, ethnically closer to each other than any other population in the world.

Hyperbole. NATO was formed as a military alliance and many European countries did not join NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Washington D.C. - 4 April 1949

In any way that you can reasonably define, Turkey is foreign to Europe.

Foreign? I suggest you read the history of the Ottoman Empire and its influence on and role in European history.

NZ:Muslim Owned Businesses Stop Serving Israelis
Islam in Action | Jan. 15Th, 2009 | Christopher Logan
Posted on 01/15/2009 5:04:35 PM PST by Islaminaction
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2165433/posts

[snip] An Israeli family in New Zealand stopped into a local cafe to get lunch for their children, before placing their order the family was speaking in Hebrew. Hearing this the owner who is a Turkish Muslim asked them where they were from. [end]

A decade ago, Western and Israeli leaders could count on Turkey as an ally. A solid NATO member, Ankara took decisions based on pragmatic calculations of interest - and erred on the side of caution if at all. But under the rule of the Islamic conservative AKP, this has changed. In the face of Hamas rockets, Israel could have expected more understanding from a country long suffering from aggressive PKK terrorism. The vehemence with which Turkish leaders attacked Israel, and their apparent willingness to convey Hamas' position to the United Nations, came as a surprise to many. Some of this may be explained by pandering to the Islamic conservative AKP's hard-core base. But Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's words - that Israel's actions will be punished by God and help lead it to self-destruction - are too significant to be taken lightly. Indeed, they are part of the trend of a Turkish government guided more by Islamic solidarity and anti-Western sentiment than by pragmatic calculations of interest. Indeed, Turkey's international behavior suggests that its attachment to the West is tenuous at best - and eroding... When president Turgut Özal decided to participate in Operation Desert Storm in 1990, he made Turkey a regional power in its own right, putting an end to talk of the country's reduced strategic value in the aftermath of the Cold War. Under successive governments in the 1990s, Turkey built strong relations with Israel, which branched out from the defense sector to culture, trade and tourism. This served both countries well... When Erdogan's AKP came to power in 2002, it portrayed itself as a very different brand of Islamists - as post-Islamists, in fact. Where his predecessors had shunned the EU, Erdogan embraced it; his rhetoric was free of the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism of his forebears.

To keep in mind, many secular Turks were disillusioned with the U.S. government when it fully supported Erdogan’s AKP after it won re-election. Over half of Turks did not vote for AKP (which only got 47% of the vote). AKP got control of the govt based on a plurality, because the opposing secular parties could not unite and split the vote.

Many of those Turks have hoped for some condemnation of AKP’s creeping Islamization by the United States, which has yet to come.

In fact, some Turks feel the U.S. doesn’t care at all if Turkey becomes just like the Arab states or Iran - if it does, then why hasn’t the U.S. officially spoken out against AKP they ask.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan once made the statement that “Democracy is like a bus - you ride it to where you want to go, then you get off.”

He and his AKP party have always been essentially the “al Taqiyya” party. They have been gradually implementing a calculated, long-range strategy of deception and misdirection intended to subvert/transform from within and eventually replace Attaturk’s secular Turkey with a fully Islamist one. What they are doing in Turkey is the Islamist equivalent of the Gramscian/Fabian socialist strategy which is destroying the West.

What crap. They stopped us from transiting the country to invade Iraq from the north, probably prolonging the war and costing us casualties.

Their intent was to do even more than that. Remember that maddeningly interminable political kabuki dance with the Turkish parliament with the back and forth votes and the embarrassing and shameful efforts of Colin Powell's State Department to buy themselves an approval vote by continually upping the number of billions we offered in aid and loan guarantees?

All of that was a sham, nothing but carefully political theater where the fix was already in. The Turks really thought that if they could stall and string us along long enough (remember the arguments that the invasion had to happen before the summer heat got too bad?) that we'd be forced to call the whole thing off. THAT would have really boosted Erdogan's "cred" with the Islamists, wouldn't it?

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