The chance for the US to recover is in Syria

Rising in a fury right after 11 September, the US had in fact launched an intensive package of Islamophobic policies under the heading of the struggle against terror. When announcing this package, President Bush Jr. used the phrase "Crusade," which would later be passed off as a slip of the tongue. When he was reminded that among the masses he was trying to draw to his side there were also Muslim countries, he realized at once how mistaken the phrase was, but the campaign he launched for Afghanistan and Iraq was no different from the typical Crusader campaigns of the Middle Ages. In this campaign, whose political-theological promises were expressed as "bringing democracy" and "protecting modern values," all people were to be subjected to a digital coding of "either with us or with them."

In those days we too had a closer experience in our memories to which this Crusader campaign could be likened, and the comparison was not avoided. Ruşen Çakır immediately described this campaign as a "Global 28 February." He was probably not aware that this description in fact placed the 28 February coup attempt and the campaign that accompanied it, too, in the column of a Crusader campaign, but it was like a display of courage that revealed the parallel.

Truth be told, this was not the only parallel between them. That 28 February, too, had been organized with a kind of preventive-war logic was a very important commonality. In this war, which set a nation's own people against it as an enemy, the Imam-Hatip graduates were placed as a bloc on the enemy side (politically, the side of the Welfare Party). Action had been taken on the prediction that these enemy generations, "if no measures were taken," would bring that enemy party to power on its own in the early 2000s. But the ironic aspect of the matter that always repeats itself in history had repeated itself once more: although the middle sections of the Imam-Hatip schools had been closed within the framework of these measures, that is, so that they would not come to power, the AK Parti's coming to power on its own in 2002 could not be prevented. Indeed, the effect of this very preventive war, which produced the opposite results, in bringing about this outcome was seen very clearly.

The 28 February process, too, lost because it displayed the ignorance that the excessive self-confidence of the human mind displays. If the global 28 February is the move the US began after 11 September, then it was inevitable that it too would meet the same fate. Because it launched campaigns in which every kind of Islam was harmed in the name of so-called Islamic terror, it could not escape suffering the fate of 28 February. The measures taken also carried the "aim of eliminating hatred of the US," but the road taken did nothing but increase the hatred.

At the end of 20 years, then, we are at the point where the US needs to make a more sober assessment of what it has gained and lost for itself and for the world. At this point the US seems to have engaged in self-criticism of what it did first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, and to have turned back from some part of the damage. We have to say that this is good for it. From now on the US can establish relations with both Iraq and Afghanistan that are healthier, that look after its own country's interests, but that, within a framework of respect for the peoples of these countries, are also much more profitable and serve its interests in the long term. Once these relations benefit both itself and the countries it is in relations with, no one will be able to object, and it will itself come out far better off. Provided only that it does not resort to global-28-February-style or occupying practices.

True, even in the days when it was weighing the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, the opportunity that could perhaps repair its whole image was in Syria. By standing with its people against a dictator who massacred his own people, it could have eliminated this hatred. But by carrying the Syrian adventure it launched on that pretext into a completely different channel, it missed a historic opportunity. Thus, with the extraordinary support it gave to a terrorist organization against an ally like Turkey, it drifted still further away from both the Syrian and the Turkish people. Yet it is very clear that whatever the program it applied here is, it came out of the same mind, or mindlessness, that dragged it into the quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The adventure the US continues in Syria is of no benefit to it, because, just as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it runs against the sociological realities of this geography. Any order it builds by carrying out demographic operations, and moreover by supporting one terrorist organization against another, is destined to leave the US facing a new fiasco.

Had the US not pursued complicated policies that forcibly prolonged the life of an Assad who was already on the verge of collapse, the waters in Syria would long since have calmed, and the establishment of a political order at peace with its people was by no means a remote possibility. Yet by following a policy that was not transparent even to its own allies, the US burned both itself and the region.

At present, the plans and practices of the US for Syria that are currently in force promise no good or solution whatsoever. If it is to contribute to a solution, and if it wishes in some way to protect or maintain its own prestige, it must depart from the course it is now on. Indeed, by this means it might even be able to restore the image and prestige it ruined in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The new course is a policy that makes possible the establishment of a government in Syria at peace with its people and the return to their own land of the Syrian people scattered across every part of the world.

The route to follow on this matter is also obvious.