A perfect example of how contempt for democracy pervades our foreign policy:
Democracy, Neocon Style
by H.D.S. Greenway
NEOCONSERVATIVES, who have risen to great power and influence within the Bush administration, have told us of their sweeping design to transform the Middle East into a model of democracy. Skeptics have demurred, but the neocons have countered that the doubters lack vision. There have been recent events, however, that bring into question the sincerity of these grand visionaries.
Take, for example, the recent remarks of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the most influential of the right-wing conservatives in government. Although the State Department got most of the blame for the diplomatic debacle over Turkey's failure to allow US troops to transit en route to Iraq, it was Wolfowitz who conducted much of the negotiations.
As it was, Turkey's new, democratically elected Parliament said no, much to Washington's chagrin and to the embarrassment of the Turkish government, which had urged a ''yes'' vote. Turkey was not the first government in a democratic state to be rebuffed by legislators. It happens in the United States all the time.
But last week, in an interview with CNN, Wolfowitz lashed out at the Turkish military for the failure to fall into line. ''I think for whatever reason, they did not play the strong leadership role that we would have expected,'' he said.
Consider the ramifications of this statement in the Turkish context. Democracy in Turkey is alive but fragile. Open elections began only in the 1950s. Traditionally the Turkish military has seen itself as the guardian of the secular state that Kemal Ataturk put into place following the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
The Turkish generals have made it a habit to step in from time to time to dismiss governments they do not like, returning rule to civilians only when it suits them. The last time this happened was in the late 1990s, when Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was chucked out of power by the military for being too anti-Western and too Islamic.
Islam is a growing force in Turkey, especially among the rural poor now flooding into cities. Turkey's armed forces and the elites are determined to keep the country secular. Recent Turkish elections swept all the establishment parties away and brought to power a new Parliament with a decided Islamic bent. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was at first banned from becoming prime minister because of a nationalistic poem with Islamic imagery that he had once read aloud.
But Erdogan and his party had gone out of their way to be pro-West and moderate, and the military kept to its barracks. Eventually, Erdogan was allowed to assume the prime ministry, which he deserved, but not before he had been received by President Bush in the White House.
Bush rightly decided that, far from being a threat, Erdogan's clean government ticket could serve as an example of how a Middle Eastern government could be Islamic, democratic, moderate, and pro-Western all at the same time.
Erdogan and his government wanted to allow US troops to use Turkish soil to attack Iraq, and not just because of the huge bribe the United States had offered. But the government couldn't persuade enough legislators. Many Turks felt the Parliament had made a mistake, that Turkish interests had been hurt, but the Parliament didn't agree, and that was that. End of story; or so it should have been.
One might have thought that anyone interested in true democracy would have been impressed and delighted. Here was Parliament defying the government, and the military didn't intervene. An American foreign policy goal is to get the European Union to accept Turkey. One of the EU's legitimate complaints is that the EU is a grouping of democracies and that the banana republic-like actions of the Turkish military over the years indicate that Turkey's democracy is only a sometime thing. But this time around, the Turkish military was not interfering.
Then up steps Paul Wolfowitz, saying that the Turkish military had not played ''the strong leadership role that we would have expected.'' Does that mean that, in Wolfowitz's view, there should have been a military coup? Or that the Turkish generals should have threatened the Parliament? In the Turkish context there is every reason to interpret the deputy secretary of defense's remarks in that way.
The Turks are perfectly aware of the Pentagon's creeping takeover of US foreign policy. There will be some who consider Wolfowitz's remarks as encouragement to boot out Erdogan as they did Erbakan. Americans have a right to ask: Do the neocons really want democracy, or do they simply want to bully the Middle East into a semblance of democracy that will toe the American line and further neoconservative imperial fantasies?
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