TURKEY: Why it matters...

People may ask why I am so interested in the country of Turkey and what goes on there. Well, when I had my medical manufacturing company, I established some good contacts in Turkey and sold quite a bit of my products there. As I have done with other countries I did business with, I thoroughly studied the history and culture of the country before visiting it. This approach has served me well as I impressed my hosts with my knowledge of their country and culture and gained for me their friendship that exists to this day even though I am now retired.

On my visits there, I encountered a modern country with a great history striving to do well in the new world economy. It had trouble with inflation which in some years was rampant (200%) and with government which seemed a little volatile at times. Turkey was a nominally Muslim country but the people that I dealt with were mostly secular.

After WWI when the Ottoman Empire collapsed (1914), a man named ATATURK took control and fathered the modern secular democratic Turkey of today. There have been occasions where the army had to step in and depose leaders that were moving Turkey back into theocratic ways which meant they were trying to use religion (Islam) to rule the country. The army, after bringing order to the political process, would then relinquish their rule once a secular government was formed.

I need to also mention that the Turks have had problems with a KURDISH minority in their country and at times the relationship has become violent. The Kurds are a people without a country that have existed for thousands of years and populate Turkey, Iran and Iraq as well as other countries.

I also have to mention that Turkey exists in Europe as well as in Asia Minor. Turkey has wanted to join the European Union for some time now but the Europeans (Germany) do not trust in Muslim Turkey’s stability…for good reasons.

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN is a gentleman that seems to have been plotting, for quite some time now, a way to take over Turkey, declare himself a dictator, and turn Turkey into an Islamic state. He has taken slow but definitive steps to move the country in that direction and the biggest step he took was to basically dismantle and in some cases, imprison the army’s top command so they can never be able to step in and take control when they feel the country’s secularism was in danger.

A recent tactic he used to gain power was to create the impression that the Kurds are about to take over the country and must be stopped at all costs and he is the only person to save Turkey from the Kurds. This is obviously not true but the spin he was able to use to create this scenario united the Turks behind him as a savior. This is similar to what Hitler did with the Jews in Germany when he made them scapegoats for all of Germany’s woes and branded them as enemies of the republic…the rest is history. Erdogan also used Hitler in a recent speech he gave where he compared the Hitler Republic as a system of government he admired and wished to emulate…get the picture?

The picture with Turkey gets a little more complicated when you consider that they are part of NATO and our ally. The Kurds are also our allies in the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq but Turkey considers them enemies and is actively bombing them; our allies are bombing our allies.

Turkey has also shot down a Russian jet making Putin vowing revenge knowing full well that the U.S. has to defend Turkey against all foreign aggression because they are a NATO member.

We use an airfield in Turkey to attack ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

You can see how the situation with Turkey is very fluid and full of uncertainty all because of ERDOGAN and his political party and his political ambitions.

This is why I follow this story closely because it can be a deciding factor in the history of the region in 2016.