The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Chapter XIV

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THE FORMER OTTOMAN EMPIRE
If the Iranian plateau is the most pivotal geography in the Greater Middle East,
then the land bridge of Anatolia, or Asia Minor, follows in importance naturally
from it. Just as the Iranian plateau is completely covered by one country, Iran, so
is the Anatolian land bridge, by Turkey. Together, these two countries, defined
by mountains and plateaus overlooking desert Arabia from the north, boast a
combined population of almost 150 million people, slightly larger than that of all
the twelve Arab countries to the south which comprise the Fertile Crescent and
the Arabian Peninsula. One would have to add Egypt and the rest of North
Africa stretching to the Atlantic in order for the Arabs to demographically
overwhelm the weight of Turkey and Iran.
Turkey and Iran—crucial parts of both Mackinder’s wilderness girdle and
Spykman’s Rimland—also contain the Middle East’s richest agricultural
economies, as well as its highest levels of industrialization and technological
know-how. The very existence of Iran’s nuclear program, and the indigenous
ability of Turkey to follow suit if—for the sake of national prestige—it wished,
contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, which lack the
intellectual capacity for their own such programs, and would therefore require a
technology transfer from an existing nuclear power like Pakistan.
Turkey, like Iran, constitutes its own major region, influencing clockwise the
Balkans, the Black Sea, Ukraine and southern Russia, the Caucasus, and the
Arab Middle East. Especially in comparison to the Arab world, Turkey, writes
Stratfor strategist George Friedman, “is a stable platform in the midst of chaos.”
1
However, while Turkey impacts all the places around it, Turkey’s position as a
land bridge bracketed between the Mediterranean to the south and the Black Sea
to the north makes it, in part, an island nation. The lack of dry-land contiguity
means that though Turkey influences the surrounding area, it is not
geographically pivotal in the way that Iran is to its neighbors. Turkey’s influence
in the Balkans to the west and Syria and Mesopotamia to the south is primarily
economic, though in the former Yugoslavia it has lately become involved in
post-conflict mediation. Only in the Caucasus, and particularly in Azerbaijan,
where the language is very close to Turkish, does Turkey enjoy the level of
diplomatic influence that can dramatically affect daily politics.
Turkey, it is true, controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates: a
terrific geographical advantage, giving it the ability to cut off the supply of water
to Syria and Iraq. But were Turkey to actually do this, it would constitute the
equivalent of an act of war. Thus, Turkey must be subtle in pressing this

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advantage. It is the fear that Turkey might reduce the water flow, through upriver
diversions for its own agricultural development purposes, that can give Turkey
considerable influence over Arab politics. A relatively new geopolitical fact that
is often overlooked is the Southeast Anatolia Project, whose centerpiece is the
Ataturk Dam, twenty-five miles north of Sanliurfa near the Syrian border.
Almost two thousand square miles of arable land in the Harran plateau is being
irrigated via gravity-flow water diverted from this dam. The whole Euphrates
River dam system, planned in the 1970s and built in the 1980s and 1990s, which
actually has the capacity to pump water as far as the water-starved West Bank in
Palestine, will make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East in the
twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. The heightened political profile
that Turkey has adopted of late should be seen in the context of this new
geographical reality.
While recent headlines show Turkey turning its attention to the Middle East,
this was not always the case. From the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the
thirteenth century, the Ottomans were mainly focused on their northwest, toward
Europe, where the wealth and lucrative trade routes were. This was a pattern that
had begun in the late Middle Ages, when the ascent of Central Europe and of the
Carolingian Empire acted like a magnet for Turkish tribes, who themselves had
gravitated westward across Anatolia to the Balkans, to the most fertile

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agricultural lands in Asia Minor’s immediate vicinity. Turkey may be
synonymous with the entire Anatolian land bridge, but (as with Russia) the
nation’s demographic and industrial heft has for centuries been clustered in the
west, adjacent to the Balkans, and relatively far from the Middle East. But
though the Ottomans were clustered near Europe, Anatolia’s exceedingly high
and rugged terrain, with each mountain valley separated from the next, hindered
the creation of tribal alliances that might have challenged Ottoman control in the
areas closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Indeed, because geography
made for social “disruption” in eastern Anatolia, organized dynasties like the
Seljuks and Ottomans could rule for hundreds of years at a time from their base
in faraway western Anatolia, i.e., European Turkey, without worrying about
unrest in the east.
2
Just as the dizzying topography of eastern Siberia and the
Russian Far East made it hard to organize a challenge to the European-based
Russians, the same with Anatolia and the Ottoman Turks—except that because
Anatolia had long borders with seas, the rulers in Constantinople were much less
paranoid about incursions on their peripheries than were the Russians. Anatolia
is compact; Russia sprawling.
Thus, Turkish demography has accentuated Turkish geography. Anatolia is
further removed from the Middle Eastern heartland than the Iranian plateau, and
the northwestern spatial arrangement of the Turkish population in recent
centuries has only made it more so. Ottoman military forays into Central Europe,
which had the flavor of nomadic wanderings and culminated in 1683 with the
siege of Vienna, were eased by Europe’s own political fragmentation. France,
Great Britain, and Spain were focused on outmaneuvering one another, and on
their colonies in the New World across the Atlantic. Venice was involved in a
long struggle with Genoa. The Papacy was entangled in other crises. And the
Slavs of the southern Balkans were divided against themselves, another case of a
mountainous geography encouraging social and political division. Finally, as the
early-twentieth-century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes,
“From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion
of Europe could be conquered.”
3
 He meant that in order to truly consolidate the
barren stretches of Anatolia and expand into the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks
first required the wealth that only the conquest of the Balkans could provide.
Facilitating this fluid arrangement between Europe and the Middle East was the
location of the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, a safe harbor granting access
to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, while also the terminus of
caravan routes from Persia, the Caucasus, and beyond.
Arising from this geography came a sprawling, multinational empire that by

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the late nineteenth century was in its death throes, with the Ottoman Sultanate
only giving up the ghost in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk (Father Turk), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who forged
a modern state in Anatolia following the imperial losses in the Balkans and the
Middle East, was an authentic revolutionary: that is, he changed his people’s
value system. He divined that the European powers had defeated the Ottoman
Empire not on account of their greater armies, but on account of their greater
civilization, which had produced the greater armies. Turkey would henceforth be
Western, he said, marching culturally and politically toward Europe. Thus, he
abolished the Muslim religious courts, forbade men to wear the fez, discouraged
women from wearing the veil, and replaced the Arabic script with the Latin one.
But as revolutionary as these acts were, they were also the culmination of a
Turkish obsession with Europe going back centuries. Though Turkey remained
neutral during most of World War II, Kemalism—the pro-Western, secularist
doctrine of Kemal Ataturk—guided Turkey’s culture and particularly its foreign
policy right up through the end of the first decade after the Cold War. Indeed, for
years Turkey entertained hopes of joining the European Union, a fixation that
Turkish officials made clear to me during many visits to the country in the 1980s
and 1990s. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century it became apparent
that Turkey might never gain full membership in the EU. The reason was blunt,
and reeked of geographical and cultural determinism: though Turkey was a
democracy and a member of NATO, it was also Muslim, and thus not wanted.
The rejection was a shock to the Turkish body politic. More important, it merged
with other trends in society that were in the process of issuing a grand correction
to Turkish history and geography.
Actually, the European orientation that Ataturk imposed on Turkey entailed a
contradiction. Ataturk was born and brought up in Salonika, in northern Greece,
among Greeks, Jews, and other minorities. He was a man of Europe, in other
words, as Salonika in the late nineteenth century was a multilingual outpost of
cosmopolitanism. Likewise, Ataturk’s definition of nationality was strikingly
modern. For he oft declared that whoever says he is a Turk, speaks Turkish, and
lives in Turkey is a Turk, even if he be a Jew or Christian. He moved the capital
to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia, from Istanbul (Constantinople) in European
Turkey, because of Istanbul’s association with the ancien régime. And he made
no effort to regain lost Ottoman provinces in the Balkans or the Middle East:
rather, his strategy was to build a uniethnic Turkish state out of the heartland of
Anatolia, which would be firmly anchored toward Europe and the West. The
keeper of the Kemalist flame would be the Turkish military, for authentic
democracy was a thing to which Kemalism never got around during Ataturk’s

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lifetime. The problem, and this would take decades to play out, was that by
focusing on Anatolia, he unwittingly emphasized Islamic civilization, which was
more deeply rooted in Asia Minor than in the European Turkey of
Constantinople and the sultanate. Furthermore, democracy, as it developed in
Turkey in fits and starts between periodic military coups, delivered the electoral
franchise to the mass of working-class and devout Turks in the Anatolian
hinterlands.
For the first few decades of Republican Turkey’s existence, the wealth and
power resided with the military and with the ultra-secular Istanbul elite. During
this period, American officials had the luxury of proclaiming Turkey’s
democratic status even as the Turkish generals were responsible for its pro-
Western foreign policy. That began to change in the early 1980s, when the newly
elected prime minister, Turgut Ozal, a devout Muslim with Sufi tendencies from
central Anatolia, enacted a series of reforms that liberalized the statist economy.
A slew of large firms were privatized and import controls loosened. This led to
the creation of a nouveau riche middle class of devout Muslims with real
political power. Nevertheless, Ozal’s genius in the later years of the Cold War
was to stay politically anchored to the West, even as he softened the arch-
secularist tendency of Kemalism to give religious Muslims a larger stake in the
system. Turkey became at once more Islamist and more pro-American. Ozal’s
Islamism allowed him to reach out to the Kurds, who were united with the Turks
in religion but divided by ethnicity. The Turkish generals, supremely
uncomfortable with Ozal’s religiosity, stayed in control of national security
policy, which Ozal did not challenge, because he and the generals were in broad
agreement about Turkey as a NATO bulwark on Spykman’s Rimland of Eurasia
facing off against the Soviet Union.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993 at age sixty-five, after ten years as prime minister
and president. This had profound repercussions for the future of Turkey, another
instance about how the lives and deaths of individual men and women affect the
destiny of geopolitics as much as geography, which retains its primacy mainly
because it is permanent. Because Ozal in his own person held together apparent
contradictions—pro-Islamism and pro-Americanism—his death shattered a
tenuous national consensus, though this took some years to unfold. For a decade
after Ozal’s death, Turkey had uninspiring secularist leaders, even as economic
power and Islamic devoutness continued to burgeon in the Anatolian heartland.
By late 2002, the whiskey-sipping secular elite was discredited, and an election
delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to the Islamist Justice and
Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul.
Istanbul, while the home of the secular elite, was also the home of millions of

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poor devout Turks who had migrated in from the Anatolian countryside in search
of jobs to pry their way into the lower middle class; it was these millions to
whom Erdogan had given a voice.
When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism,
strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the
radar screen of official Kemalism. In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in
Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of
proportion to the population. According to some studies, almost two-thirds of
urban working-class Turks prayed daily, as well as most rural Turks, percentages
that have only gone up in recent years.
4
A revived Islam has competed extremely
well with the secular ideologies of the right (fascism) and the left (Marxism) “as
a savior of the disillusioned urban youth,” for whom Kemalism was not a “socio-
ethical system” to guide daily life, writes the London-based author and journalist
Dilip Hiro. Once a normal nationalism tied to Islam took root, Kemalism
gradually lost its “raison d’être.”
5
Yet when the Turkish Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing U.S.
troops to stage in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq, it was not really the Islamist
Justice Party that undermined the American position, but the secularists, who, by
this point, had joined Europeans in their anti-Americanism as a reaction to the
unsubtle post-9/11 rhetoric and deportment of the George W. Bush
administration. The disastrous outcome of the Iraq invasion, which led to
sectarian warfare inside Iraq, even as no weapons of mass destruction were
found, roughly coincided with the realization that Turkey would not be admitted
to the EU. The upshot of these dramatic events—coming at a time when Turkey
had a new, popular, and deeply entrenched Islamist government—was to shift
the political and cultural pendulum dramatically in the country toward the
Middle East and away from the West for the first time in literally centuries.
In a sense, as I’ve said, the United States was hoist on its own petard. For
decades American leaders had proclaimed democratic Turkey as a NATO, pro-
Israel bastion in the Middle East, even as they knew that Turkish foreign and
security policy was in the hands of its military. Finally, in the early twenty-first
century, Turkey had emerged as truly politically, economically, and culturally
democratic, reflecting the Islamic nature of the mass of Turks, and the result was
a relatively anti-American, anti-Israeli Turkey.
In the autumn of 1998, in Kayseri in central Anatolia, I interviewed leading
Turkish Islamists, including Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s current president. The
occasion was a meeting and rally of the Virtue Party, which later disbanded and
reorganized itself as the Justice Party. The Virtue Party was itself a reincarnation

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of the Islamic Welfare Party, which had been untainted by corruption and sought
to bring about the social justice that had existed under Ottoman Islam. In my
report on those meetings, published in 2000, I got a big thing right and a big
thing wrong. The big thing I got right was that these people, though a minority