Where did the miscalculation of 17 December come from?

The December 17 coup attempt is an event in which a structure that had until now drawn attention for its strategic mind, calculation and maneuvering was caught red-handed.

At first it made one ask how a structure brought to its present point by more than forty years of meticulous, fine-grained work, with such deep calculation, could take such a great risk.

Could the situation into which the community has fallen as a result of the December 17 process, a community that sometimes carries out a whole series of public diplomacy efforts, taking people to visit schools at home and abroad, merely to influence a person's view of the movement, be something it had in fact been willing to risk?

When one looks at the course of the struggle Fethullah Gülen has conducted since the early sixties, up to the day of December 17, one sees from the beginning a plan, a program and a strategic mind that greatly exceed the capacity of a single individual. It becomes clear that even in its initial activities at that time there was a foresight and planning that far exceeded the mind of a preacher in his twenties who was a primary school graduate in the sixties.

Indeed, it is better understood today that in the excessive discipline, systemic structure and strategic mind that made themselves felt in the planning, organization and conduct of the "service" activities, certain circles that had effectively entered Gülen's life in those very years were decisive. The movement bears the traces of the kitchen in which the experience of the former CHP Secretary General Kasım Gülek and of the Association for the Struggle Against Communism was also cooked.

It is known that Gülen himself, in the early sixties, was the founder and an active member of the second branch, in Erzurum, of this association, which in Turkey existed only in İzmir. In his own "Küçük Dünya(m)," he gives as an example of his effective preaching a sermon he delivered in those same years, in which he incited people into action against a film depicting Hz. Omar; this incident too, indeed, deserves to be dwelt upon separately.

In the end, one finds it hard to understand how this strategic mind staked all of its accumulated resources on such a risky attempt as December 17.

Within the relatively short context of December 17, the movement made plain, in a very short time, how great a chasm lies between its discourse and its real intentions. It was seen that the community, which never let notions such as tolerance, dialogue, humanism, living together and democracy leave its tongue, did not believe in a single one of these concepts in the slightest, and on the contrary was recklessly consuming all these concepts and values merely to accumulate power.

What the community, which shrinks from using no value in order to reach its aim, "actually believes in" is, at this hour, a genuinely intriguing question. Just as it wore out the concepts of "tolerance and dialogue," in the December 17 process the community also wore out concepts such as "corruption," "the rights of the servant," and "public right," and continues to do so.

A structure caught red-handed in an open coup (and surely there is no greater corruption than a coup), even though all the corrupt tactics it resorted to in that coup have come to light, still shamelessly goes on accusing others of corruption. This persistence in the discourse is undoubtedly very closely tied to the strategic behavior of the cemaat.

The community does not act on a day-to-day reflex. It does to this discourse what it did to all the concepts and values it had used to the hilt even though it never believed in them before. With one difference: this time it is trying to wage, through this discourse, a war with a defined target.

But whatever messages this strategic mind may be sending to whomever, the situation into which the community has fallen, both before society in Turkey and everywhere in the Islamic world, is a pitiful one. In society, when corruption is mentioned in many matters concerning "the rights of orphans, sacrificial meats, donations and state allocations," no more concrete example comes to mind than this community. And when it comes to placing one's own cadres corruptly in state positions by blocking others through underhand dealing, everyone's mind goes first to concrete examples involving this community, and in these respects too, the more they thrash about, the deeper they sink.

Despite this, the December 17 coup plotters go on thrashing about, strategically, strategically. It is understood that their calculations and imaginings for the period immediately after December 17 were very different.

First, we also understand that they could never have taken this risk had they not been sure the coup attempt would succeed. But it appears that for them December 17 was a flawless plan. Probably the chance of failure seemed to them like zero. Perhaps they assumed that if it did not succeed on December 17, then on December 25, and if not there, then in the many attacks to be pulled out of the bag in the process running up to March 30, no government could withstand them.

Second, this plan was not, in the dimensions we know, the parallel structure's own plan and operation alone. There was a second wave of a coup consortium that had first moved during the Gezi events, and this wave had been taken on exclusively by the parallel structure. But an international backing for this coup was also expected, and that backing never stopped. Many developments in the world since Gezi are moving in parallel with, or in support of, the December 17 attempt.

But there is one place where all that strategic calculation and international support botched things: they did not adequately take into account the style and mode of influence of a leader who, up to now, has repelled coups of every kind.

Let us leave it for another time, with the prayer that God never grants them that opportunity again.