From the introduction to my masters thesis:

Turkey is a difficult country to handle in the comparative political context. Its modern founders built it to resemble Europe, yet its population is Muslim, and it did not participate in World War II—the event central to shaping modern Europe. It is geographically located in the Middle East, yet it is democratic, resource poor, and lacks a colonial history. It is ethno-linguistically Central Asian, yet it has no experience of communist domination. For these reasons and more, Samuel Huntington labeled Turkey the “prototypical torn country,” unclear of where it belongs in the world order. Ernest Gellner, similarly bewildered, called Turkey’s comparative political development “an exception…profoundly eccentric” in which “the army, the guardian of this new democratic tradition, allows free elections to take place.”

Indeed, Turkey’s Armed Forces are an anomaly both in the historical record and in their geographical region. Its officers have deposed four governments in the past fifty years, yet after every coup the military has returned power to civilians through free elections. In none of these cases was the army forced to concede power because of mismanagement, popular unrest, or military defeat—it returned power because of its commitment to democratic government. Is such a system possible in a democracy?

My paper goes on to suggest a new model of analyzing the Turkish military's role in politics--looking at the Turkish military as an "armored constitution." Basically, the constitution that Atatürk promulgated in 1924--Turkey's first constitution--created a completely unworkable system. At the same time, Turkey never developed new, legitimate, civilian institutions after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The military stepped in to fill the void, acting as both a constitutional court and a head of state in uniform. It has routinely intervened through coups to change the political system and try to make Turkish politics work, while protecting against a slide into anarchy and/or extremism. I'm not trying to justify military interventionism--a real, legitimate constitution would be much better. But without such a military, it is likely that Turkey would be much worse off--the identity of the state remains contested, as does its contract with its citizens. Thus, military interventionism is not the cause of Turkey's traditional political dysfunction, but is rather a symptom. If you're interested in the argument, feel free to download the whole thesis and let me know what you think.

Jon

Apparently, they both like young boys:

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it…

[D]ance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home…

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Anyone who has ever read/watched the Kite Runner had some inkling of this. And it’s not just Afghanistan either-- Iranian prison guards (members of the Revolutionary Guard) regularly rape inmates as a form of punishment. How could fundamentalist Muslims, who are typically raging homophobes, allow this? As one Azeri once explained to Evan, it is only homosexual “if you are the one receiving.” What a bunch of creeps.

There's and old joke that Golda Meir used to like to repeat-- that the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years, only to find the one piece of land in the Middle East that didn't have oil.

Well, Israel might now become an exporter of another fossil fuel-- natural gas. The finds are of around 120 trillion cubic meters, a little less than half of America's proven recoverable reserves. Only problem is that the gas find is in Israel's territorial waters near Lebanon. The maritime border between the two countries, like everything else in the area, is disputed.

Gas installations off the northern Israeli coast would make a perfect target for Hezbollah's rockets-- nobody is hurt if you miss, and if you ignite the gas on fire, it will make for prime-time TV on al-Manar.

Here's to fraternity:

A United States Navy ship rescued eight Iranian fishermen from a burning boat in the Arabian Sea; gave them food, water and fresh clothing; and delivered them to an Iranian naval vessel two days later, the Navy reported Friday.

The U.S. Marine Corp Reserve band plays the hits in Mozambique.

H/T to the USNI Blog

The French expel the Roma: 'They are trying to get rid of us all'

- Joe

From FP:

Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University...published a peer-reviewed study on the cost of keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007. Because carriers patrol the gulf for the explicit mission of securing oil shipments, Stern was on solid ground in attributing that cost to oil. He had found an excellent metric. He combed through the Defense Department's data -- which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission -- and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion.

And that's just a partial accounting of peacetime spending. It's far trickier to figure out the extent to which America's wars are linked to oil and then put a price tag on it.

It's also far trickier to put a price on oil's damage to the environment.

Doesn't look good, according to Anna Matveeva:

The long-term prospects are worrying, as the Uzbek minority realises that it is largely on its own with its problems. A renewal of the summer's clashes is at present is unlikely, as the community is shocked and scared. There are three possible templates for the future: that of Sri Lanka, where a powerful guerrilla organisation emerged after ethnic riots; that of Chechnya, where a nascent nationalist movement fell prey to Islamist networks; and that of Uzbekistan, which reacted to Andijan with overwhelming repression. None of these is very inspiring.

To resolve the situation, the ruling elite have to show a determined commitment to the ideology of multi-ethnic society instead of a "return to democracy" based on the titular group supremacy. Policy on interethnic relations and minority issues needs to be articulated, and a mechanism of reconciliation should be established to support it.

Greg Scoblete thinks not:

...[T]he real threat from Iran [to America] is not nuclear bombs going off in Western cities, the wiping of Israel off the map or anything close to that. It's the possible threat Iran poses to America's "top country" status [i.e. hegemony--top country is Elliot Abrams's odd phrasing] in the Middle East.

Wars have frequently been waged for balance-of-power concerns, but in this case, how significant would the balance of power shift out of America's favor? Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is not the top country on the subcontinent - it can barely curtail its own home grown insurgency and it was threatened/cajoled by the U.S. to allow us to bomb portions of the country almost at will. North Korea has nuclear weapons and you'd be laughed out of a room if you suggested they had anything resembling "hegemony" in Asia.

Iran with a crude nuclear weapon would still be poor, weak and surrounded by unfriendly states. The U.S., by contrast, would not be.

Many political theorists have noticed that the nuclear bomb ain't what it used to be. Of the regimes that have pursued nukes/gone nuclear in the past 30 years, none are respected. Most importantly, nukes are useless against internal unrest, which is Iran's greatest weakness. The big worry of course is that these nukes could get loose, which leads to the actual biggest threat to of America posed by an Iranian nuke: an increasingly meaningless non-proliferation regime. Shoring up this regime, if anyone still remembers, was at one point the main reason why the US invaded Iraq.

Ohh politics. Israeli PM Netanyahu is in Greece today, smiling with Turkey’s historical enemy in an effort “re-balance” Israeli foreign policy.

Greece, which has a lot more anti-Western, leftist sentiment than most European countries, traditionally sympathizes with Arabs when it comes to the Middle East—only even having recognized Israel’s existence fairly recently. But the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and so now Greece is looking to replace Turkey as Israel’s favorite tourist destination. The Israeli airforce has also been increasingly using Greek airspace for military maneuvers, while Greece, the biggest military spender per capita in the EU (although that looks due for a change), doubtlessly eyes Israeli military technology.

In the end, Greece can’t really fill the space left by Turkey in Israel’s foreign policy, and there is little popular sympathy for Israel in Greece. But every bit helps when the world (minus America) doesn't like you, and this definitely needles the Turks.

*Hat tip to Aris

P.S. The historical irony of this is probably lost on most people. Many know that the Ottoman Sultan welcomed thousands of Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, but fewer know that the Sultan encouraged Jewish emigration to Thessaloniki, now Greece's second city, until it became the center of Jewry for the entire Ottoman Empire. Thessaloniki was a key port in the region, and the Sultan hoped that bringing in Jews would help dilute Greek domination of Turkey's commerce. Jews soon became a majority in the city, perhaps the only major city in the world with a Jewish majority before being wiped out in the Holocaust. Thessaloniki is also the birthplace of Atatürk, the blue-eyed, blond-haired Turk who founded modern Turkey. More than a few conspiracy theorists (especially Islamists who despise the great modernizer) have mused that Atatürk, coming from a Jewish-majority city, must have been Jewish--of a "dönme" family that had converted to Islam but secretly retained the Jewish faith.