Three days after his wistful Washington Post article on the failed Turkish junta, Cook took his disappointment a step further in Foreign Affairs. His article bore the unfortunate title “Where the Turkish Military Fails, Egypt’s Succeeds: Here’s Why.”
It is terrible in itself because it clearly attaches negative value to “fail”ing as against positive value to “succeed”ing in carrying out a military takeover. As you might expect, Cook purports to provide a rather cold-blooded “positive” analysis of both countries’ recent military interventions against democratically-elected governments. Through his choice of vocabulary (“iconography… jubilant… overjoyed Egyptians”), Cook gives expression to his feelings of approval for the Egyptian coup. At the same time he tries to hide behind the explanation that he only wants to express why “Egyptian officers managed to do what that one faction in the Turkish military could not.” Cook then concentrates entirely on the way in which the two coup attempts were carried out, as well as the “worldviews” serving to justify the respective militaries’ actions.
The remainder of the article switches back and forth between the two countries. The Turkish coup plotters were incompetent while the Egyptians were “efficient”; the Turkish military was “divided” while the Egyptian military showed “unity of purpose”; the Turkish General Staff seemed “all-powerful,” but in reality was politically weak; the Egyptian military, which appeared politically “docile,” appeared so because they truly had control over, and support from, Egyptian society.
Though Cook’s narrative of the Egyptian coup and the reaction from the Egyptian people is detestable in itself, my focus is on Turkey. And Cook’s treatment of the Turkish side of this comparison is marked by an interesting omission. In his entire discussion of the 15th July abortive coup, he does not ever mention the primary actor, Fethullah Gülen. Yes, there is not even a single reference to Gülen or the Gülen congregation. This is grotesque. Fethullah Gülen’s adherents in the Turkish military were the very real instigators of the attempted army takeover, and that fundamentally changes the circumstances, and the background factors contributing to those circumstances, that Cook is pretending to explain. More generally, without addressing the phenomenon of Fethullah Gülen and his cult, it is simply impossible to understand Turkish politics over the last decade.
For example, early in his analysis Cook states that the Turkish military “was, unbeknownst to most, deeply divided.” Realistically, this can only refer to the fact that Fethullah Gülen’s network, the result of patient, long-range infiltration efforts planned and carried out since the 1980s, had come to control many command positions and significant portions of military hardware, which they then actually manipulated for their 15-16 July deployment. This is why the Turkish Air Force’s officer corps had been saturated so intensely by Gülen’s cult. The Gülenist zealots knew that they would not be getting any support from the masses of Turkish citizens, so their aim was to impose themselves through control of key military command positions, and then to exercise force through those nerve centers. The low-ranking soldiers involved in the street-level clashes were mostly unwitting pawns used by Gülen’s officers.
Other aspects related to Cook’s discussion of the Turkish coup attempt are similarly vulnerable to factual critiques. Cook’s main assertion related to the Turkish military’s role in domestic politics is that “For as long as anyone can remember, academic observers and journalists have portrayed the Turkish General Staff as close to all-powerful.” As one of those academic observers, I can say that I really don’t know where he got that idea. In fact, for nearly a decade now, all commentators that I am aware of have understood the Turkish General Staff to be “defanged” by the events of 2007-2008 and the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases (2). And over the past three years, the role of Gülen’s followers in the Turkish police and judiciary in initiating the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases has also become clear. After 2008-2009, the Turkish General Staff essentially lost its ability to pronounce on Turkish political developments in any meaningful or threatening manner, and Gülen’s cult had an important role in that development.
Cook, however, wants the reader to believe that he’s explaining something counter-intuitive, so he states that the reason why the Turkish military intervened so often into politics was its weakness: “Over time, increasing numbers of Turks refused to be bound by the politics that Kemalism — and the military — demanded.” Though superficially agreeable, this is a fundamentally faulty interpretation because the military’s Kemalism never had mass political support. The example of the Free Republican Party’s brief lifespan in 1930 illustrates just how deeply unpopular the Kemalist reforms were even at that point. Starting from 1925, Mustafa Kemal and his comrades imposed not just political, but also radical socio-cultural interventions based on Western models in a top-down manner. Such reforms from above did not have any sort of democratic legitimacy, and were imposed in a very coercive way. Over time, the mass of Turkish society became more and more educated, achieved greater material affluence, developed an increasingly oppositional consciousness, and began to assert its new-found political influence in more overt ways.
The state structures developed by the Kemalists, because they were not transparent or democratically accountable, would eventually make it possible for groups other than the secularist military to insinuate themselves into Turkish state institutions and eventually climb into positions of power. This is exactly what Fethullah Gülen and his followers have been accomplishing for at least forty years. So not only did the Turkish military not have mass support for its social projects, but the state institutions which constituted their power base also had an Achilles heel. What Cook should therefore be asking is why Turkish officers never accepted the legitimacy of democratic politics, never recognized that the military cannot interfere in a democratic political system, or never understood that the civilians had the right to choose their political leaders without “guidance” from the military. If Turkish state institutions including the military had been democratic in a transparent and accountable sense, Gülen’s supporters could never have acquired the power that they recently unleashed on the Turkish people.
The brevity of Cook’s last paragraph reflects the bareness of his treatment. The Turkish military’s political weakness and the failure of the 15th July junta is a socio-historical phenomenon which Cook has not really been able to explain to his readers. Last but not least, that political weakness is not the reason for the recent coup attempt’s unsuccessful conclusion. The junta failed because first the Turkish people had come to hate army takeovers in general, and second, they also had an anti-Gülenist awareness. This is why they acted decisively in defending their democracy, immediately took to the streets, and opposed the plot en masse. Quite a few even gave their lives. One might at least show a degree of respect for such resistance and self-sacrifice.
NOTES
(2) This situation was actually given symbolic form by the 2011 rearrangement of the seating in the Turkish National Security Council meetings: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/koskte-de-oturma-duzeni-degisti-18519508.