Turkey's president acknowledged Saturday that the resignation of the nation's top military commanders was unprecedented, but he said it would not cause a crisis.
The commanders suddenly quit Friday to protest the arrest of dozens of generals as suspects in an alleged plot to overthrow the country's Islamic-rooted government.
Was there even a plot? If so, it seems strange that the plotters would have just quit rather than trigger the plot. The government has imprisoned 250 officers that could just be a purge of secular officers. Those resigning say they did so in protest of the arrests.
Victor Hanson addresses the issue in light of the widening divisions between the hitherto secular armed forces leadership and the consciously Islamic civilian rulers and sees a revived Turkey emerging, after the armed forces are Islamicized, that doesn't really care about its Western ties:
At some point, an ambitious Turkey, its military and government now in sync as in past Ottoman fashion, will reassert its prior influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean without too much worry over what a NATO rendered impotent in Libya, an imploding European Union, or a nearly insolvent U.S. might say.
Could be. Although I doubt that in the long run there is danger of close Turkish-Iranian relations. My Dictionary of Wars lists 9 "Turko-Persian Wars of [insert year]." I was just scanning so there may have been some named wars, too.
For right now, I want to know if there is no crisis, as the Turkish president states, right now. Turkey has been leaning forward in opposition to the Syrian government's crackdown. With violence in Syria spreading to oil producing areas in the east (there have also been stories of pipeline bombings out there), the Syrian government may be faced with an accelerated need to choose between flight or massive killing to subdue the rebellion.
What will Turkey do if the Syrian government decides to wade in and start killing civilians on a large scale? And what does the turmoil in the Turkish armed forces mean for that decision? Does it make intervention by Turkey less likely?
Or does the Turkish government decide it would rather have their wounded and angry military engaged with a foreign mission rather than nurse grievances against their government?
Will Turkey stop a revolt in Istanbul by supporting a revolt in Damascus?
UPDATE: Austin Bay outlines the resignation issue. I honestly don't know enough to worry or not worry about developments. Turkey has been distancing itself from us for nearly a decade now, it is clear (the refusal to let 4th Infantry Division into Turkey to assault northern Iraq in 2003 was stunning to me). That is disturbing enough. But Turkey is in a dangerous part of the world with often hostile Russians, Persians, and Arabs close by. Do the Turks really want to alienate us completely?
Is Prime Minister Erdogan a Turk who is a Moslem or an Islamist who happens to be a Turk? And are his followers strongly one or the other? I don't assume one man can drag an unwilling country too far in the direction they don't want.
