Normally, Ralph Peters is a man well worth paying close attention to. I tremblingly disagree with him regarding the recently attempted coup d'etat in Turkey. Sort of.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was keen to drag Turkey into the 20th century by converting it into a secular state. And, since the fall of the Ottoman Sultanate, around 1923, the army had been the guarantor of Turkish secularism. Not of democracy, of secularism. With the creeping Islamification of Turkey, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, many people, myself included, looked upon Friday's coup with great hope. Ralph Peters trenchantly explains this hope
No matter what, the coup was never going to be about democracy, Erdogan is a democratically elected president It might have been about secularism. However, I had misgivings from the beginning.
First of all, the Turkish army of today is not the Turkish army of old. Erdogan has been in power since about 2003, and he has had a lot time to purge the army of much of its professional, secular leadership. Peters rather colorfully illustrates the incompetence of the remaining officer corp in describing the poorly worked out strategy of the rebellious leaders.
Second, since the army had been substantially, if not completely, purged, who was behind the coup? Erdogan, himself, seems to think it is one Fethullah Gulen, a rather secretive and sinister Muslim cleric who had strong influence in the army before he sought refuge in the U.S. It seems he still had influence.
The point---and this is where I differ with Ralph Peters---is that if Gullen was the coup mastermind, then there never was any hope for the restoration of secularism. I don't know anything about Gullen, but his motivation may well be that Erdogan is not Muslim enough. At any rate, it is impossible that he is a champion of secularism.
Finally, the purge of the professional officers, years before, may explain a lot about Turkey, and much of the recent commentary may be mostly nonsense if the commentators do not take this into account. For example, there has been a lot of commentary on Turkey's unwillingness to mix it up with ISIS. The implication is that Turkey is sympathetic to ISIS.
I doubt it. First of all, Turks have no great love for Arabs, and Turkey is straining under a staggering refugee crisis within its own borders. There are nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. This cannot be easy for anyone, especially Turkey. Turkey could very quickly solve their refugee problem by killing ISIS.
In principle, an armored division of the Turkish army should be able to roll up ISIS like a carpet. Why don't they do it? I think they don't do it because they can't. The first thing an army loses, when they lose their professional officers, is mobility. I think the Turks are scared to death of sending a division into Syria. At best, it would get bogged down. At worst, it might get defeated, and that would be very bad.
Furthermore, the Turkish army has not fought a battle-hardened foe since WW I. They might very well come off second best in a fire fight with ISIS. Just this happened to China, for example, when they mixed it up with Vietnam in 1979. You can look this up yourself. In brief, massive China was going to teach puny Vietnam a lesson for their invasion of Cambodia. In fact, the Chinese got their noses punched comprehensively. You see, the Chinese army exists mainly on paper. They, too, had not had a real fight since the Korean War, and they were rusty. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, were tough, well organized, and thoroughly hardened by a generation of fighting with first the French and then the Americans.
Finally, we have seen what happens when you replace professional officers with religious zealots and political sycophants. The Iranian army, under the Shah, was once thought to be the most professional and effective force in the greater Middle East. They were armed and trained by the Americans.
However, the Ayatollahs took over in 1979. Not only did they purge much of the officer corp (it's the old trust thing), but they also installed the Muslim equivalent of the old, Soviet-style political commissars. Every professional officer had a religious dopple-ganger second guessing his motives and his operational plans.
The Iraqi army was similarly hobbled, though not out of religious zealotry. Saddam feared competent military officers with "a lean and hungry look". In other words, he feared intelligent men with initiative, and got rid of them aggressively.
The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 would have been hilarious if it were not so grisly. Both sides were completely incapable of tactical movement, or effective logistics, or coordination between land, sea, and air elements of their forces, They were almost immediately reduced to two hulking cavemen taking turns bashing each other's brains out with clubs. You would have to read some of the details to get a real sense of the bathos and the horror of it all. (Boys armed with wooden rifles, or nothing at all, marching through minefields, against Iraqi counter-fire, to clear the way for the Revolutionary Guards. They were all massacred. Iran lost nearly a million young men in that war. That is why Iran was quiescent for a generation.)
It is not clear to me that the Turks would fair any better against ISIS than Iran against Iraq (or vice versa). And now, with a purge that cuts even deeper into the muscle of the Turkish army, I think the Turks have lost all military effectiveness. I think you can forget about the Turks ever mixing it up with ISIS, into the foreseeable future. Whether or not they want to fight ISIS is debatable, but I am sure they cannot do it.
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