The war that began by rewarding ISIS

The stance Turkey has taken on joining the new coalition that the US is trying to set in motion against ISIS seems to have started a new "axis shift" debate in some circles.

A report published in the Wall Street Journal was the piece that expressed this approach most clearly. The paper, writing that Turkey is no longer on America's side in the international struggle against ISIS, also argued that despite being a NATO member, Turkey long ago stopped behaving as an ally of the US or a friend of the West.

Frankly, we can say first of all that the Wall Street Journal largely reflects its wishes against Turkey, or concerning the US's relations with Turkey. In many earlier outbursts it has always reflected a similar distance toward Turkey's current policy. Moreover, the paper has always tried to use the axis debate against Turkey to impose its own policies, but every time, like some of our own press, it has gone on being consistently wrong.

For one thing, in the diplomatic contacts that have developed because of ISIS, US-Turkey relations are taking place in a dialogue far better than is assumed. What is different, and what some find hard to understand, perhaps what they will not like to hear at all, is that in this dialogue Turkey's theses are also receiving broad acceptance in these talks. More plainly, Turkey's warnings about the struggle to be waged, or the nature and consequences of the struggle, are being taken into consideration with great seriousness.

Turkey does not take a program of struggle diagnosed and decided across the ocean as it is, without questioning and criticizing it. Above all, it sees and points out the errors and shortcomings of both the diagnosis and the measures, and influences the content of the struggle to be waged. There are circumstances that strengthen its hand on this. The first is that the US is still paying the cost of the threat assessment made in the Bush era on the basis of unilateral determinations, which was declared in a stubbornness of "either you are with us or with them," without ever being discussed with allies.

On the other hand, all the recent developments, ISIS included, are developments about which Turkey issued warnings long in advance and which it called for measures against.

Across a broad spectrum, Turkey saw, and tried to show, the Assad administration in Syria, the Maliki administration in Iraq, the Sisi administration in Egypt, and Israel's arbitrary practices, massacres and settlement practices against Palestine as the principal causes of instability in the Middle East and of every kind of wave of anger and violence.

Perhaps on Israel and Egypt, the American allies are not yet in a position to listen to Turkey, but what is taking place especially in Iraq and Syria completely demonstrates the rightness of Turkey's policy and theses, and in the new period this opens up a greater say and space for Turkey regarding the policies to be implemented.

Indeed, though it will be bad news for the WSJ and similar circles, neither the 85-minute one-on-one meeting between President Erdoğan and Obama in Wales nor the talks held during the visits to Turkey of the US Secretaries of Defense and State give the image of a Turkey that has drifted away from the US.

Of course we hope that the theses we conveyed to the US side on the matter during these talks will be taken into consideration. For the US's biggest problem since the occupation of Iraq has been diagnosing what is happening in the Middle East unilaterally and imposing unilaterally all the measures that must be taken. Just as this led to great unrest in the region, it also dragged the US into an economic and political instability from which it still cannot extricate itself.

Because of the perspective that the WSJ and the circles it is tied to draw of the Middle East, and the aggressive policies they suggest in line with this perspective, it set out to bring democracy to Iraq but in the end could bring neither democracy nor stability.

Despite this, analyses are being published that link the emergence of organizations like ISIS to the development of democracy in the Islamic world. Unfortunately, ISIS's pornography of violence serves, in the Western world, at the same time to muddy, dilute, even defile everything about Islam.

Strangely, there are even those who link ISIS to an untimely and excessive liberalization in the Islamic world. Since, chronologically and as told to the American public, these movements emerged after democracy went to Iraq, buyers can easily be found for the neo-Orientalist thesis that Iraq and the Islamic world are not ready for or deserving of democracy.

When the Arab Spring process is placed within the same chronology, the same impression can be reproduced. After all, all these waves of violence and terror began after the Arab Spring, as a development in the direction of democracy.

Yet ISIS and similar waves of violence arise because the waves of democracy coming from the grassroots in the Arab world have been cut off, and the Westerners have also turned a blind eye to their being cut off. Despite this, let us also note that, in a situation where a military coup against an elected government in Egypt killed three thousand people in a single day in a square without blinking an eye, closed all opposition newspapers and jailed their journalists, and held forty thousand people arbitrarily in prison, the Muslim Brothers, who have no demand there other than democracy, freedom and justice, have so far not attempted a single act of violence.

Ignoring this situation and linking structures like ISIS to the development of democracy in the Islamic world carries no meaning other than rewarding structures like ISIS.