12:15 am, Istanbul time

As I discussed in my previous post, on Saturday night the Turkish military carried out a raid against what it described as PKK bases in northern Iraq. According to one source, at least one civilian has been injured.

In this (Turkish-language) column appearing in the Turkish newspaper Radikal, Murat Yetkin reports that the US government green-lighted both last night's raid and future Turkish incursions into northern Iraqi air space, providing that a) no civilians are injured (see above), and b) that there is no engaging the Peshmerga forces of Iraqi Kurd leader Mesut Barzani.

Yetkin says that one of his (anonymous) sources tells him that the US gov's green-lighting of Turkish incursions into Iraq was relayed to Tayyip Erdogan ahead of his meeting with Barack Obama in Toronto on June 27, whereas another source reports that it has been at least three weeks since this permission was issued.

In any case, the timing related by either of these sources would fit in with recent developments in Turkey suggesting a more aggressive Turkish stance against the PKK outside Turkey's borders (in my previous post I mention recent arrests in Syria of suspected PKK supporters), as well as supporting recent rumors (which I referred to in my post four days ago—scroll down to bottom) of imminent Turkish plans to launch a "major offensive" against the PKK in Iraq in the face of a series of recent attacks against Turkish soldiers.

These events and the diplomatic maneuverings, particularly with respect to recently improved relations with Syria, involved in setting them up should cast a new light on recent yammerings about the Turkish government's supposed desire to "look east."

For some reason, whenever we start talking about non-western countries inhabited by people who speak less common languages, people tend to employ grandiose and abstract theories to explain certain policies. This happens particularly frequently when the country in question (such as Turkey, vis-a-vis Israel, Iran, and Syria) is following policies that people in power (in the US, anyway) don't like. 

Lately, one of the most noticeable examples of this is "neo-Ottomanism," the current flavor of the week for describing Turkey, which is being peddled here, and in many, many other places recently. The problem with stuff like this is that, rather than looking closely at why a country's leaders would consider it important to pursue certain policies (i.e., their interpretations of national and political interests, as well as personal ones, in some cases), this type of analysis reduces policymaking to "identity"-oriented gobbledy-gook that lets the rest of us off the hook. People buy this because it's easier to "understand" Turkey (or Russia, or China, or Japan, or the "Islamic world") through abstract concepts than through the hard work of learning details and developing comparative and relational approaches to discussing the issues at hand. This sort of analysis also makes it easier for us (meaning Americans, in particular) to avoid asking tough questions about the actions of our own government.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has taken a hard stand against Israel and has sought to improve relations with Syria for a number of reasons, but especially these three, in no particular order: a) bashing Israel is good domestic politics at a time when the AKP's popularity has been weakening; b) Erdogan, I think, genuinely feels morally outraged at Israeli policies towards Gaza; and c) his government believes that, in the context of an increasingly independent northern Iraqi statelet backed by a superpower, Turkey needs the support of regional powers (especially Iran and Syria, the two other states with huge Kurdish minorities) with respect to the Kurdish issue. One way of dealing with the Kurdish issue was the so-called "Kurdish initiative," which has fallen apart. Now we're seeing a different means.

But rather than get our fingers dirty by looking at things like the US government's policies towards the Kurds and northern Iraq (like this)—policies which might shake up our complacent fantasies about America's supposed lack of imperial interests in the region—it's easier to assign grandiose identity-based motivations to policies, especially when they seem to be at variance with US objectives like supporting Israel no matter what, or turning up the thumb-screws on Iran and Syria, no matter what.

Rather than talk about Turkey's "turn to the east" or "neo-Ottomanism," let's talk about the reasons why Erdogan is pursuing these policies. Are these policies really so impractical and crazy, are they really so far-out that we can only conceive of them in abstract terms? Let's talk about why Erdogan might feel bound to criticize Israel and improve relations with Syria (and Iran) for reasons that don't imply looney-tunes delusions of grandeur. Let's talk about why Erdogan might feel that following these policies are in the interests of both his party and his country, and why Turkey's government might not feel that following the American line on Israel, Syria, and Iran is a great idea.

[And if you're looking for another recent example of how supposedly independent media types and in the US can heap invective upon a foreign leaders who doesn't seem to care about getting a pat on the head from the US, look at the very different ways in which Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin are portrayed...but I digress]

I don't mean to imply that Erdogan and his cohort have no interest in using identity as a political tool—governments do these things. And there is no doubt that AKP supporters enjoy invoking a certain concept of Ottoman "tolerance" in which they see the Ottoman Empire as having been a kind of Islamic utopia where everybody got along.

But this kind of feckless idealizing is not the basis of serious policymaking any more than blind adherence to "pan-Islamism" outweighed practical approaches to policymaking during the time of Abdulhamid II. Even the Unionists (or "Young Turks"), who were rank amateurs compared to Abdulhamid II, used "pan-Turkism" as a (relatively minor) means of helping to accomplish specific goals, rather than as a policy objective worth pursuing in its own right.

I've criticized Erdogan's actions a lot on this blog, but he's a serious person. Instead of reducing his policies to catch-phrases that imply that he's succumbed to a disturbed Sultanic fantasy, I think it would be more productive to ask where "neo-Ottomanism" and concepts like it come from in the first place. 

Any ideas?