"All of this helps to explain why a forcible annexation of Greenland would ultimately also harm U.S. interests [as well]."

"All of this helps to explain why a forcible annexation of Greenland would ultimately also harm U.S. interests. To trade in the most stable and powerful military alliance in modern history for control over a frigid and sparsely populated island—plus a place for Trump in the history books—is a bad deal for the American people. But that doesn’t mean that the Trump White House will see things the same way."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'They Really Just Might Invade Greenland'

"Far from being a project of US imperialism, NATO expansion has been a process driven by the small and vulnerable countries, which are also the most fundamentally anti-imperialist ones"

"In order to accept the premise that Russia could have vetoed former Soviet or Eastern bloc states from ever choosing to enter into certain international alliances, it is first necessary to deny those states full sovereignty.... It is not often acknowledged that entertaining this Russian talking point capitulates to the sphere-of-influence politics of the Cold War...
    "The expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War is often discussed solely as a US policy decision. But this ignores the goals and interests of the small countries, whose politicians made the case for NATO membership much more forcefully than anyone in Washington, and often in the teeth of American doubts and objections....
    "It had often been the fate of the small nations of Europe to be dominated by the larger ones.... An important lesson of the 20th century was that, while appeasement encouraged aggressors, strength deterred them. And it had been the strength of the United States which had changed the course of European history.... Still, Europeans have often struggled to convince Americans that it is in their interests to support freedom on the European continent. ...
    "Far from being a project of US imperialism, NATO expansion has been a process driven by the small and vulnerable countries, which are also the most fundamentally anti-imperialist ones, since their continued existence is predicated upon their ability to deter imperialist neighbours. While many of the threatening imperialisms of the European past have happily vanished, the Russian one maintains its claims.... It is for this reason that a Ukrainian victory—in teaching the Russians where their borders lie—could end the Russian imperial story for good, and hasten the day when a civilisation at ease with itself can live in harmony beside Europe."

~ Oscar Clarke, from his post 'When Havel Met Biden'

"The imperialist mindset is historically rooted in Russia...."

"In Russia’s view, success in Ukraine serves as a major stepping stone for reaching further goals. Russia’s long-term strategic aims remain unchanged: to dissolve the rules-based world order.
    "The key steps in turning the current international order around for Russia are re-establishing spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, and re-creating buffer zones.
    "This is the most important reason why Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, and why similar scenarios have unfolded in Russia’s 'near-abroad' many times before....
    "The imperialist mindset is historically rooted in Russia....
    "Lessons:  ... Russia will only refrain from testing NATO [if] it is absolutely certain that the objectives it seeks bear an unacceptable cost for the Kremlin. It is our objective to ensure that a severe defeat at an immense price is the only scenario....
    "NATO must be prepared, and the action plan is simple: ... in order to truly deter Russia, NATO must complete the strategy shift from deterrence by punishment to deterrence by denial...."

~ Estonian Foreign Intelligence Assessment: 'Russia’s War in Ukraine: Myths and Lessons' (as summarised by @BadBalticTakes who says the Estonians' "sober analysis -- dismissed for decades as paranoia -- has proven to be right on target. [It] has never been more widely read.")

The false Cuban Missile Crisis analogy ...

"A false analogy keeps being made between the Cuban Missile Crisis and Russia’s supposed fear of having offensive missiles in NATO countries bordering Russia. Supposedly, Russia has just as much right to object to NATO missiles in its neighbouring countries as the USA had to object to them in Cuba.
    "One of the main problems with this analogy is that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened before there was such a thing as [accurate] inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Thus, there were no Soviet missiles capable of hitting the continental USA, until they sent ICBMs to Cuba... Russia has already been living under the threat of nuclear intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) attack by the USA for decades, [who have] have never launched one, [who have] signed multiple nuclear arms-control treaties with Russia, [who have] kept the terms of those treaties (unlike Russia), etc.

    "Another problem is that Russia already has nuclear-capable missiles stationed on NATO’s borders, in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders both Lithuania and Poland, and is within IRBM range of many other EU and NATO countries. Do those countries have the right to invade Russia because of the IRBMs in Kaliningrad?

    "Going back to the Cuba analogy, Castro was so unstable that he actually urged the Soviets to launch a nuclear first-strike on the US from Cuba. Fortunately, the Soviets never put Cuba in command of their nuclear forces there, didn’t grant his request, and soon thought better of leaving their nukes where he might be able to get his hands on them.
    "Another dis-analogy is that NATO membership is voluntary. No country is forced to join NATO against its will, the agreement of all existing NATO members is required for any new members to join, and any member can leave at any time. Cuba [on the other hand] was taken over by Castro in a violent, Soviet-sponsored revolution, so Cuba had no choice about whether to become a Soviet ally. 

    "[Further, n]o Soviet ally was ever allowed to stop being a Soviet ally without Soviet permission, and none of the other Soviet allies ever had any say in the matter. Cuba was a Soviet puppet, completely dependent upon the Soviets. Cuba was ruled by its secret police, who were under the command of the Soviet secret police. It was subsidised by the Soviets with billions of dollars a year. Cuba remains a one-party state, more than 30 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, having only in desperation permitted a little bit of free enterprise and replacing its former Soviet subsidies with money from Venezuela’s oil exports, drug smuggling, etc. Cuba sponsored terrorism all over the Americas, and engaged in military adventurism in Africa. Nothing comparable to that has ever been the case with any NATO members."

          ~ from a thread by Tim Starr on Twitter (hat tip Samizdata)

"What Putin fears is not just NATO’s defensive armaments but their ideas..."

"What Putin fears is not just NATO’s defensive armaments but their ideas—most fundamentally, America’s arms and ideas, specifically the concept of individual rights....
    "There is [however] no automatic movement of world history toward freedom and rights. You have to fight for them or lose them."

~ Ed Locke, from his op-ed 'Putin’s Return to Stalinism as Russia Invades Ukraine'

More Russian fake news on the way [update 2]

 

 

Soviet-era Russia almost invented modern political propaganda. Whatever the truth today about “fake news” or of claims that Russia “hacked the US election,” it’s clear that Russia's state-owned foreign language news services are still directed by the Kremlin, and are and have been attempting to sway elections around the world, broadcasting on Sputnik and RT for example what can best be described as carefully-crafted spin promoting selected candidates.

Security officials believe there are two basic elements to the Russian strategy: leaking hacked documents, such as the Democratic National Convention emails obtained by Wikileaks during the US presidential election, and creating – or seizing on and exaggerating - false or misleading news events.

It doesn’t take much to get crap passed around.

The most notorious example of the latter came in January 2016, when Russia’s state-owned Channel One reported that “Lisa,” a 13-year old girl from a Russian-immigrant family, had been abducted and raped by “southern looking” asylum seekers in Germany. The news was not exactly fake – Lisa had indeed vanished for a night, and had initially claimed to have been raped.
    But before police established neither crime had occurred (she had stayed overnight at a friend’s house), protesters from Germany’s Russian speaking diaspora appeared outside Mrs Merkel’s office waving banners reading “our children are in danger!” and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the German government of a cover-up.  The Lisa case is widely viewed the most egregious example of Kremlin propaganda to date, and nothing on the same scale has been seen before or since.
    One European official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he believed it was an experiment, a “test” to see how far such tactics could be used to inflame discontent with Angela Merkel’s policy on immigration. 

London’s Telegraph newspaper cites the East StratCom Task Force (set up by the European Union set up to monitor and respond to Russian propaganda) as saying “Angela Merkel, who will seek a historic fourth term as chancellor of Germany at federal elections in September, has been singled out as a priority target in the coming year.”

 And the Telegraph reports that at least two other European security arms expect Russia to meddle in their elections, promoting candidates keen to “drop sanctions imposed on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, and strongly sceptical of NATO – Europe’s remaining bulwark against any further Russian aggression.

The DGSE, France’s equivalent of MI6, said this week it expects Russia to intervene in the presidential election in April and May on the side of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front. The agency’s director general believes Russia will use internet bots to spread fake news favourable to Ms Le Pen on social media and may leak embarrassing emails stolen from her opponents by hackers, Le Canard Enchaîné , a French weekly, reported on Wednesday.
    In just the past two weeks, Denmark has publically identified Russia as a key cyber espionage threat, Norway said its Labour Party and email accounts belonging to several civil servants had been targeted by Russian hacking group, and Italy said it suspected Russia was behind a four-month malware attack against its foreign ministry last year…
    March’s vote in the Netherlands, the French presidential elections in April and May, and polls in Norway, the Czech Republic, and Serbia, may also be targeted…
    “We have to realise this is not a media strategy run by public relations executives,” said Dr Stefan Meister, who studies Russian propaganda in Germany. “This is a security strategy, run by security agencies," he said, "it is part of the security doctrine of the Russian Federation”

This is not a reason to hyperventilate. But it is a reason to remember what Robert Bidinotto reminded us of last week – that “Putin is a killer. He rose to power via the Moscow apartment bombings atrocity… He has had his political rivals murdered by poison and other nasty means. He runs an brutal oligarchy with an iron fist, and permits no opposition” – and to subject the sniff test anything emanating from Russian news services.

As we always should have.

READ: How Vladimir Putin and Russia are using cyber attacks and fake news to try to rig three major
           European elections this year – TELEGRAPH

[Picture by NRO]

UPDATE 1: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, The (UK) Observer reports the American intelligence community is “pushing back” against a White House “it considers leaky, untruthful and penetrated by the Kremlin”:

A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.
    Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.
    What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.
    None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.

UPDATE 2: Note that these stories are both written in Britain.

Yet at this writing [in America itself], the Russia story still hasn’t caught fire.
    Why?
    As [David Corn of Mother Jones] explains [to Politico], the press corps already has its hands full with Trump stories…

And tweets. You have a media obsessed with tweets, with the short-term, with the easy hits, and ignoring anything further.

    “This quietude is good news for Putin—and reason for him to think he could get away with such an operation again,” Corn concludes.

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Radical Islam: “I alone can solve.”

 

Trump has finally found a policy and a speechwriter and a teleprompter with which to try to sell it. It’s been sold as his first major policy speech on one of today’s most serious issues.

How does the very un-serious Orange Man do? Let’s go line by line looking for his answers.

Now, a … threat challenges our world: Radical Islamic Terrorism.

A fair start. How will you end that threat, sir?

We will defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism, just as we have defeated every threat we have faced in every age before.

How?

Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam.

How?

Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country.Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of Radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our President.

Fair enough, and a nice quote too. But for months he’s been attacking Islam per se, and now he’s condemning something he’s calling “Radical Islam.” So what is that specifically? Who exactly would you name as your opponents? (Compare it for example to the clarity of saying: “Our enemy in this war is: Islamic regimes that have in any way sponsored or supported attacks against the West, and jihadist groups that have planned or executed such attacks. The enemy regimes are primarily those in Iran and Saudi Arabia; and the jihadist groups include Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and Islamic State."

And this thing he calls Radical Islam.” How does that differ to Islam itself?

No answer. (Maajid Nawaz suggested a distinction and taxonomy many months ago. Why not use that?)

If I become President, the era of nation-building will be ended. Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam.

Halfway through the speech, and still the concrete question is: ‘How?’

As President, I will call for an international conference focused on this goal.

Wow. A conference.

We will work side-by-side with our friends in the Middle East, including our greatest ally, Israel. We will partner with King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Sisi of Egypt…

How is this different to today?

We will also work closely with NATO on this new mission…

Changed your mind, then?

I also believe that we could find common ground with Russia in the fight against ISIS…

Just on ISIS? (I think we should be told.) And, yes, you have new friends. But what exactly will you and your friends do? (We’re now two-thirds through the speech and still nothing concrete.)

My Administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS …

A plan. Finally. But is that very much different to what’s already failing? And what’s your end-game if you did succeed? And shouldn’t you perhaps recognise that previous aggressive operations, whether failed or successful, is precisely what created the vacuum and delivered to ISIS the military materiel to hold it?

… international cooperation to cutoff their funding…

How?

… expanded intelligence sharing…

Which is already happening. What do you propose that’s different?

… and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.

Which is already happening. What do you propose that’s different?

No answer

So what else is proposed?

Our Administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East…

Who are they? No answer.

This includes speaking out against the horrible practice of honor killings … speak[ing] out forcefully against a hateful ideology

A lot of speaking out.

A new immigration policy is needed as well

Wouldn’t you know it.

    The common thread linking the major Islamic terrorist attacks that have recently occurred on our soil – 9/11, the Ft. Hood shooting, the Boston Bombing, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando attack – is that they have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Not exactly true, but the way of stating it glosses over the real truth. The major attacks on US soil included everybody from natural-born Americans to people on tourist or student visas to the children of immigrants. And that’s it. The former could conceivably be solved with some superior kind of screening, but since the latter have been here for a generation, it’s clear the answer there has to be something very different. Whatever it is (and I’ve suggested responses before), since these people were already there, it’s patently not a problem that can be solved simply by keeping them out. Even a moron could see that.

However …

The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today. I call it extreme vetting. I call it extreme, extreme vetting. Our country has enough problems. We don't need more and these are problems like we've never had before.

“Extreme, extreme vetting.” That’s a lot of vetting. What would that look like? And how would that stop the large number of home-grown attackers?

A Trump Administration will establish a clear principle that will govern all decisions pertaining to immigration: we should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people.

How would you do that? What would your “extreme vetting” look like?

In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test.

Did we? So what would your “extreme vetting” actually look like?

The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.

So what would your “extreme vetting” actually look like?

In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.

Easy to say. But what would your “extreme vetting” actually look like?

Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country.

So this would be a test that you yorself would not pass, sir. And what would your “extreme vetting” actually look like, that it would uncover these attitudes or beliefs?

No answer. This is the hook for the whole speech, really, and of detail there is and is likely to be none.

And the rest is trash-talk, Hillary bashing, and outright lies about suspicious terrorist behaviour not having been passed on for fear of being accused of “racial profiling” – the only actual concrete proposal being to “identify a list of regions where adequate screening cannot take place” and “stop processing visas from those areas until such time as it is deemed safe.” By whom, I wonder. And what would make them safe?

Well, there was this:

Political correctness has replaced common sense in our society.
    That is why one of my first acts as President will be to establish a Commission on Radical Islam – which will include reformist voices in the Muslim community who will hopefully work with us. We want to build bridges and erase divisions.
    The goal of the commission will be to identify and explain to the American public the core convictions and beliefs of Radical Islam, to identify the warning signs of radicalization, and to expose the networks in our society that support radicalization.

So that’s the best of the policy he promotes, and the only actual detail he delivers – perhaps because it’s a policy plucked from David Cameron, so that some details have already been developed.  No shame in that. It’s a good policy as I said at the time – although Cameron’s policy had much more to it.

Now, bear in mind this is Trump’s only detailed policy announcement so far, in what has been a very long campaign. And this is all the detail he has. And the only detailed announcement he’s ever likely to make on this important issue, and amounts tactically to saying “I’ll do what’s already being done, but me and my frends will do it so much better.”

Which has been pretty much along the lines his other less detailed policies have said.

But at least he’s stopped thinking Obama was born in Kenya and was ISIS’s original founder. So maybe his speechwriter should be thanked for something.

And, you know, we’re not seeking perfection, merely the best policy out of a bad bunch of candidates. One whose hand might seem safe near the nuclear football. (Would you trust this one?)

So what do the other candidates say that we may be able to take seriously?

We already see the fruits of Hillary’s policies in the world we have around us. We barely need to know more. And Jill Stein is just largely me-too. So in the absence of any real thought or concrete plans or policy here, I turned to Gary Johnson’s, detailed last year, which has the clarity the buffoon’s lacks.

Isis, he says, is today’s Nazi fascism. Johnson begins, as MacArthur did in post-war Japan*, by distinguishing between the religion and its links with state violence – in this case between Islam and Sharia:

It is time that we face the reality that, while Islam is a faith that must be granted the same freedoms of religion as all others, Sharia is a political ideology that cannot coexist with the constitutional and basic human rights on which the United States is founded…
   We need not and should not be Islamophobic, but all who are free and wish to be free should be Shariaphobic. In its determination to impose a “law” upon us  and to kill, maim and terrorize in the process – as seen most recently in Paris, ISIS must be stopped…
   Libertarians believe freedom and opportunity require limited government. Government costs too much because it does too much – and a government that does too much erodes liberty. But one responsibility of government is clear: To protect us from those who would do us harm and who would take away our fundamental freedoms. We believe liberty is the true American value, and that our government has a solemn obligation to preserve it.
    We cannot dance around the fact that destroying human liberty and doing us harm are what Sharia law dictates. Whether it be mass murder in Paris, downing a Russian airliner in the Sinai, gunning down innocents in a Kenyan shopping mall, beheading Christians, or flying airplanes into the World Trade Center towers, ISIS and other like-minded Shariaists are engaged in a decades-long campaign to eradicate freedom and replace it with a Sharia political system that is antithetical to everything for which America stands.
    In World War II, too many, including the U.S., stood by for too long as Hitler’s Nazi fascism spread across Europe, with horrendous consequences. Sharia and its ISIS fanatics are today’s Nazi fascism.
    Let’s be clear. Stopping ISIS and Sharia have nothing to do with religious freedom or the rights of Muslims – here or abroad. It has everything to do with protecting people who are free or wish to be free from murderous fanatics who will stop at nothing to establish a global caliphate under which no one would be free.
    Dealing with this threat is the most American thing we can do.

So how would you do that, sir?

Putting tens of thousands of American troops on the ground in Iraq or, especially, Syria, won’t work. We have learned that the hard way. Those realities, however, do not mean that we do nothing.
    First, even barbarians and fanatics need money. ISIS is collecting an estimated $1 million per day in profits from oil sales. That buys a lot of terror. Reducing or stopping that flow of money will do more to stop ISIS than bombing a training camp here or there, and the United States – along with our allies – must get serious about turning off the ISIS oil spigot. While ISIS is receiving support from sympathic individuals and organizations in the region, even the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking concrete steps to cut off ISIS’s daily oil windfall. The U.S. must do the same. The finances and transactions of ISIS and their brethren must be disrupted.
    ISIS’s recruitment and attacks are being executed largely via cyberspace. There will be no invasion that can be repelled with missiles or warships. Rather, they will enlist, plan, finance and coordinate with believers who are already here to conduct their murderous campaign. Paris was just the latest example. We must deploy our formidable technological might to join the battle in cyberspace – and win.
    And while invasions and doomed-to-fail attempts at imposing Western democratic values on unwilling peoples will not work, reviving and supporting strategic partnerships with those who are fighting ISIS in Syria and elsewhere just makes sense. The U.S. must assume a stronger, more committed role to galvanize and lead an alliance based on those partnerships that will first contain and ultimately neuter ISIS.
    Fighting and defeating ISIS wherever they are is not “intervention”. It is stopping violent jihadists whose stated objectives are to kill Americans, wipe Israel off the map and destroy the very freedoms – including religious ones – upon which our nation is founded. It is protecting us from those who would and are doing us harm.

In a short statement delivered many months ago, Johnson gives the details Trump doesn’t, and argues against further direct intervention of the type Trump favours.

Who would make the better president?

---

* “The basic principles of a rational policy towards Islamic Totalitarianism—with clear strategic implications—were revealed in a striking telegram sent by the U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes to General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in Japan, in October, 1945. The telegram established the basic U.S. policy goals towards Shintoism, and laid out, for MacArthur and his subordinates, the basic principles by which those goals were to be achieved:

“’Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments.

“The telegram is clear about the need for separation between religion and state—between an individual’s right to follow Shinto and the government’s power to enforce it. This requirement applies to Islam today (and to Christianity and Judaism) as strongly as it did to Shinto. In regard to Japan, the job involved breaking the link between Shinto and state; in regard to Islamic Totalitarianism the task involves breaking the link between Islam and state. This is the central political issue we face: the complete lack of any conceptual or institutional separation between church and state in Islam, both historically and in the totalitarian movement today.

“As for what we should do about this, the 1945 telegram is direct. Here is its opening, rewritten to substitute Islam for Shinto:

“’Islam, as it is a religion of individuals, is not to be interfered with. Islam, however, insofar as it is directed by governments, and as a measure enforced from above by any government, is to be done away with.

“There is no question here about religious freedom. Individual religious belief is to be left alone—as is all freedom to think and to speak by one’s own judgment—but state religion must be eliminated. It is vital that this principle be understood, stated clearly, and enforced—for this is a precondition of the thorough and permanent defeat of America’s current enemy.

“Totalitarian Islam, an ideology that merges state power with religious belief, must go.”

                                     ~ John David Lewis, from ‘“No Substitute for Victory”: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism’

Turkey, where the lines are now drawn [updated]

 

[UPDATE: Let me alert you to an exceptional piece by Chris Trotter on the events of the weekend, and how Erdogan has used them since: Erdogan Lives - And Secular Turkey Dies.]

In Turkey over the weekend there was a military coup against the democratically-elected leader. Naturally, there was a knee-jerk reaction around the west to oppose the coup, and uphold the democratically-elected leader.

But in a country where the majority votes Islamist, this would be a mistake.  In country likes this, democracy can beome almost wholly the lethal description of it: like three wolves and a sheep voting for dinner – with the Islamists ready to tuck in. Just another reason to support the checks and balances of a constitutional republic over the lack of real checks in an unlimited democracy. [See: Why the United States was Designed as a Republic: to prevent the tyranny of the majority]

In Turkey, in Egypt and right across the faith-based Middle-East, the military is often the last vestige of any secular check on rising Islamism. There is some evidence from the weekend that was the major motivation for the military rising against Erdogan.

As far ago as 2007 it was becoming clear Turkish secularism would need support. "Turkish secularism is gravely threatened,” said Robert Spencer, “and millions of Turks are deeply concerned that their country could become an Islamic state."

The only response that has ever gained traction in the Islamic world has been not just a de-facto laying-aside of Islam's political and social character, but a self-conscious elimination of that character – and [Kemal] Ataturk's Turkey has been the site of the greatest success of this approach. Ataturk realized that there would be a recrudescence and reassertion of political Islam whenever there was a revival of religious fervour. Thus Kemalism presented itself not as "moderate Islam," nor as an Islamic construct at all, but as an explicit rejection of political Islam in favor of secularism. That is, it was never presented as an Islamic construct or justified by Islamic teachings, but was an explicit rejection of certain traditional aspects of Islam.

As historian Scott Powell noted just a few years ago, the tension  was already simmering. “The AKP party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, though democratically elected, has a platform that contradicts the secularist tenets of Turkey’s constitution. If it isn’t stopped by the court, another military coup is likely to occur.” A military coup because “the Turkish military have long been defenders of the secular Kemalist tradition.” Which is the reason, in reverse, that

Late on Saturday night, just 24 hours after the attempted coup, hundreds of supporters of President Erdogan swarmed into Taksim Square – the pulsating heart of secular, modern Turkey – to celebrate their victory with shouts of Takbir – ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God is Great.’

How has the country of Ataturk become the country of Erdogan? Because “Turkey reflects a Middle East in cultural regress.”

Turkey once seemed to be moving towards liberal democracy. It enabled a secular culture to flourish. It joined NATO. It was an ally of the West in a Soviet-dominated region.
    But today Turkey is moving towards Islamism and nationalism. Its president suppresses protest and press freedom while increasing his own power. It has been ambivalent over the crisis in Syria unfolding on its borders.
    Turkey's retreat into illiberalism is sad. It's also alarming. Another Islamist power in the Middle East won't just make that region even less safe, but ours too.

So it you found yourself over the weekend on the side of someone who has suppressed free speech, where they still selectively enforce the jizya tax, where they murder people for apostasy and are still beheading people in the name of Islam -- and to protect their "honour" – where “Erdogan has unleashed the Islamist mobs,” then just consider it possible you may be mistaken.

.