Obama rebuilds bridges with Islam

It is extraordinary to think that an American president should have to make a public speech in a friendly Muslim capital explaining that the US is not at war with Islam. Yet after eight years of the Bush administration and its misguided policies in the broader Middle East, the Pew Global Attitudes Project registered a collapse in support for the US in Nato-allied Turkey to 9 per cent.

There, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, a majority had come to believe that the US, through its policies in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and, above all, Iraq, was indeed at war with Islam. The beneficiaries of this political disaster have been Islamists in general and jihadi extremists in particular.

Barack Obama’s deliberate choice of Turkey for his first state visit to a Muslim country is the start of what will be a very long and arduous attempt to turn back the tide.

Why Turkey? Not just because it is a Nato ally. Not just because it is the geographical bridge between Europe and Asia. Not even just because it is a Muslim democracy. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), is the marriage of an evolved form of political Islam with democracy. The Muslim world’s first, as it were, Christian Democrats are admired in a broader Middle East mired in various forms of extremist-incubating tyranny – not as a model, but as a success.

That is why the AKP’s electoral victory against Turkey’s overmighty generals in 2007, and score-draw against an attempted coup by the judiciary in 2008, are milestones not just for Turkey but the region.

For a US with fewer lines of communication in the region, moreover, Turkey’s open channels – to Syria, Iran and Hamas as well as to Israel or Saudi Arabia – could be valuable.

Turkish support will be important in securing an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, and as a supply platform for and ally in Afghanistan. A US president who opposed the Iraq war is well-placed to dispel the mistrust caused by Turkey’s refusal to allow the Bush administration to use its soil for the invasion – and, indeed, to retrieve a relationship that Washington had frittered away.

Mr Obama sensibly pledged to support Turkey’s promising rapprochement with Armenia. Ankara, especially as it pursues a problematic entry into the European Union, will have to confront Ottoman Turkey’s role in the mass murder of Armenians from 1915 onwards, and establish whether it was centrally directed. But the US Congress’s push to get this declared a genocide is grandstanding that would benefit the nationalist right in Turkey – and blow up a valuable Muslim bridge to the EU and the US.