What has a place in no book

However much the perpetrators of the December 17 operation aimed for it to be understood as an anti-corruption effort, they failed. They could not prevent the perception from forming, either among citizens inside Turkey or among international audiences, that this was an operation against the government. As this dimension of the affair becomes clear, it is not found strange that the government produced a political response before a legal one. The fact that the perpetrators use the institutional advantages of the judiciary like a property they may dispose of as they please completely destroys their legitimacy.

Having claimed the affair openly and once and for all, they are obliged to produce more justifications for this unjust and illegitimate operation, in addition to the initial justification, which was exhausted at the very first step. With each new justification they produce, they confess more of their responsibility in the operation and own the affair more fully. Yet every new justification they put forward to rationalize the operation also exposes their connections to the affair further, and in the end what emerges is a strange and thoroughly unedifying web of relationships.

We have written before that the pens of the Zaman and Today's Zaman writers, when enumerating the grounds for the operation, frequently slide toward Turkey's relations with Iran, its EU, US and Israel policies, and of course toward earlier criticisms of the resolution process for the Kurdish question. This gives the message that the operation, for which the community has confessed responsibility, was a punishment for Turkey's foreign policy initiatives and was being carried out on someone else's behalf. God forbid, had the operation succeeded, would the message have been given this openly?

It is evident that the community's writers do not like Turkey's Iran policy, but it is hard to understand from what angle they read that policy. They criticize Turkey for pursuing a pro-Iran policy, and this criticism either fails to see or conceals that Turkey is in fierce competition, even conflict, with Iran in Syria and Iraq.

Why does it fail to see it, or why does it conceal it? To label the foreign policy of a country like Turkey "pro-Iran" is, to put it mildly, ignorance; it is blindness to what is happening right under one's nose. Undoubtedly, with the data at hand, a more plausible possibility has emerged: that they follow Turkey through the Tel Aviv media. There is a Tel Aviv media that follows Turkey-Iran relations with thoroughly Iranophobic ravings. We may call that paranoia and let it go, but we still cannot explain what has happened to our own people.

In fact, never mind Turkey, for any independent state to devote itself to another country as in these fantasies runs flatly against the nature of international relations. Turkey of course cannot be pro-Iran, and just as categorically it cannot be an enemy of Iran. It is under no obligation to arrange its relations with Iran as Tel Aviv or any other country would like. Turkey determines its foreign policy entirely according to its own interests. These interests, of course, include every kind of balance of power or assessment of values.

Fethullah Gülen, in his interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the BBC, has already said openly that the basis of his split with the government lies in the government's domestic and foreign policy choices. He cited Turkey's drift away from democratization as the reason for the split. Setting aside how he could possibly see this period, in which a series of packages was announced one after another on the road to democratization, as a drift away from democratization, nothing could be more natural than that Gülen, like every citizen living in Turkey, has objections and criticisms regarding the government's domestic and foreign policy.

The writers devoted to Gülen likewise disapprove of Turkey's foreign policy and have been tearing this policy to pieces for a few years now. In criticizing, they abandon fairness, distort the facts, and attribute to Turkey the stupidity, naivety and foolishness of blindly following pro-Iran policies. Moreover, they attribute to Turkey such cluelessness that, at the same time, it is claimed to be aiding al-Qaeda, Iran's chief enemy. They criticize the resolution process.

Let them criticize. They regard Turkey's democratization steps as insufficient, even as a drift away from democratization. Let them see it that way.

As long as all these views remain views, remain criticism and even political stances, they are legitimate however harsh, and even if they strain the limits of reason, they are an indisputable right. A person, a community or a civil society formation can collectively make the strongest criticisms of Turkey's domestic and foreign policy and take positions, and indeed they do. Turkey can hardly be called a calm environment at the level of clashes of ideas.

Just as it is a right to put forward these views even when they are wrong, it is also a right to expose the contradictions these views contain and to try to refute them. If the affair remained at this level of political debate, no one could have any objection. Democracy requires precisely this.

But what is not a right is to sabotage the government's policies on one matter or another by pulling cadres within the state out of the state's internal hierarchy and driving them to disobedience. To form, with no legal responsibility or authority whatsoever, a group of one's own among cadres within the state and to attempt to run the state through those groups, to weave intrigues to that end, to spread sedition and strife, and to attempt in this way to chart separate courses for the state on the matters one criticizes: this goes far beyond the limits of democracy.

There can be no place for this in any book.