Bay: Turkey, not al-Qaida, provides model

By AUSTIN BAY

Global media report militant Islamists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s extremist factions and al-Qaida intend to subvert the Egyptian and Libyan Arab Spring revolts.

Concern is legitimate. International diplomatic, intelligence and economic action to support liberalizing revolutionaries is absolutely necessary.

In the context of 9/11, however, news of attempts at covert militant subversion of the Arab Spring 2011 instead of out-front leadership is another indication of al-Qaida’s great ideological failure and decline.

A decade after 9/11, al-Qaida and its affiliates are not leading these revolutions, but tagging along, as destabilizers-come-lately. That was not how it was supposed to be. In 2001, militant Islamists billed their movement, and themselves, as the strong horse, empowered by God’s divine sanction. In 2011 the violent extremists are, at best, a dark horse, if not a near-dead horse surviving on a life support system hooked to Iran’s robed tyrants. That’s ironic. Iran’s Islamic revolution is a miserable, impoverished failure, and its dictators confront their own revolutionaries.

For many reasons, militant extremists now must hide behind a veil. Arab Spring involves issues of cultural and political identity, but pragmatic demands for jobs, education and individual rights are also driving energies. In a world where every teenager wants a cellphone, savvy futurists bet that these are the decisive demands. Al-Qaida has little to say about jobs, education and how to expand and sustain a society’s material well-being.

This is why many democratic revolutionaries look to contemporary Turkey, the political legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (arguably the 20th century’s most successful revolutionary), as a model for development.

American grit and perseverance also deserve credit. In al-Qaida’s millennialist narrative, America was a weak horse, a nation of godless hedonists and gutless libertines unable to sustain the global, long slog of a war Osama bin Laden planned. Blast the World Trade Center, smoke the Pentagon, and Yankee couch potato psyches would shatter.

A decade proved otherwise. America took the war to Afghanistan, al-Qaida’s chosen battlefield. B-52s and Green Berets drove al-Qaida and the Taliban into the hills. Divine sanction became a question mark. In the turmoil of Iraq, al-Qaida made another great strategic mistake, but one which anarchistic sociopaths in any culture are prone to commit. Terror in New York might elicit jigs on a Palestinian Arab Street, but the daily mass murder of fellow Muslims in Baghdad slowly eroded, death by death, al-Qaida’s reputation. Divine sanction? Does God support murder of the faithful?

Loss of divine sanction played a major role in al-Qaida’s decline, but so did the utter failure of The Blame Game. Al-Qaida blamed America for Muslim social, political, and economic ills. Its real target, however, was modernity, with America as its grandest embodiment.

2011, however, is not about blame. Arab populations slipping the psychological bonds of blame and fear, then taking responsibility for their own political situations, is one of 2011’s most promising indicators, a sign that these revolutions can lead to systemic and productive modernization rather than the imposition of another dystopian tyranny.

Which is why the Turkish model attracts Arab Spring modernizers. Turkey, however, is the product of 90 years of trial and error, with the structure Ataturk left evolving into a democracy. The democratic process, of course, is never finished. The moderate Islamist political party now governing Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), is testing Ataturk’s secular model. Its critics argue that under the guise of extending democracy, the AKP is destroying pluralism. Others argue Ataturk’s system is now so strong it has turned Turkish Islamists into committed supporters of democracy.

Still, Turkey provides a compelling – though sobering – example of how to systematically modernize a Muslim society. The complex process requires discipline and flexible leadership backed by soldiers committed to defending pluralism. Ataturk was a pragmatist who believed a broadly based educational system (spreading literacy and promoting scientific inquiry) and a dynamic economy were essential features of a modern state. He separated mosque from state by eliminating the Islamic caliphate, one of several fossilized Ottoman Empire institutions that stifled creativity and thus condemned Turks to economic and political backwardness. The subservience of women denied society half of its intellectual resources, so Ataturk’s reforms included emancipating Turkish women. Remaining modern requires adaptation. Ataturk saw parliamentary democracy as the political system best suited to sustaining social and economic creativity.

Arab Spring revolutionaries do not have nine decades to succeed. Ataturk’s visionary policies, however, do offer guidance. Contemporary Turkey, with its vibrant civil society, expanding middle class, democratic elections, and lively media, is an example of a modernizing vision made concrete. Its dynamism stands in stark contrast to the fossilized answers of Iranian ayatollahs and al-Qaida caliphs whose future is the same old impoverishing tyranny.

Bay’s new book is “ATATURK: Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire.” Bay, a Rice University graduate, will be appearing at Houston’s Brazos Bookstore on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 2 p.m.

via Bay: Turkey, not al-Qaida, provides model – Houston Chronicle.