Wednesday, April 7, 2010

No Longer "Your Father's Turkey"

Turkey : Israel is the main threat to Mideast peace.

Under the radar of the daily news cycle has been the rise of Islamism in Turkey. Turkey has long been one of the few countries in the Islamic world that could have been considered an ally of both Israel and the USA.
In light of the latest rebuffs of Turkish attempts to get into the EU, the country has now turned back to its Islamic roots, and may have dreams of reviving the Caliphate and becoming the dominant power in the middle east once again.
At this time, they have a government headed by an Islamist party led by a radical muslim with a western look named Tayyip Erdogan. Given that through NATO and its alliances with the US and Israel, Turkey has undoubtedly Acquired the best equipped and most skilled armed forces in the region. It is my observation that they seem to think that they no longer need the US (which since Obama and Hilary Rodham Clinton took over, is now a laughingstock) or Israel.
I do not think that the Ottoman Empire breathed its last in 1918, but just went into hibernation. Islam was always bubbling under the surface no matter how much Ataturk tried to secularize the Turkish republic. It's almost like Iran where Shah's attempts to suppress Islam were, as we have seen, a colossal failure.
It would not be too difficult for Erdogan to rally the various TURKIC peoples who inhabit most of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, namely Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghizstan and Tadjikistan to form a confederacy (as we have also seen, even under official Soviet atheism, Islam remained a force beneath the surface in those states). Such a superstate would overwhelm the rest of the Islamic world, especially if they re-established the Caliphate in Istanbul, and laid claim to religious leadership as well.
China also has reason to watch Turkey as the Uighur minority who primarily in Xinjiang (aka Sinkiang) province are Turkic people.

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