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Adieu, Turkey: Should the United States end its alliance with Turkey?

Should America end its alliance with Turkey?


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I know the history of Turkey and our relationship with them. They absolutely have become a Muslim dictatorship under Erdogan. These people are not our friends and shouldn't be treated as such.

In Turkey in 1997 there was the coup that wasn't a coup. It was a "soft" transition of power implemented by the public and private sectors of the society and by its numerous publics, not by the military only.

While not officially a coup, the Turkish military in 1997 issued several recommendations to the Turkish government. The government’s only choice was to accept those recommendations, Al Jazeera reported, and Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was forced to resign.

Labeled a “soft” coup, it was successful in part because the military worked with business, the judiciary, the media and political leaders, Reuters reported.


Turkey has a history of military coups





In 2016 it happened the old fashioned way.

With elements of the Turkish military declaring martial law, President Erdogan, who went into hiding, used an app on his phone to call on Turkish citizens to take to the streets to protest. Erdogan later appeared at the airport in Istanbul, where he defiantly called on the people of Turkey to resist the coup. Loyal troops and air force units fought the rebels, and the coup attempt fell apart the next day. Casualties included 265 dead, and 1,440 wounded. Most of the dead were rebel and loyalist troops. Erdogan blamed an exiled Muslim cleric as the ringleader, but Fethullah Gülen denied any involvement. In the aftermath of the coup, the government arrested nearly 6,000 people suspected of plotting against the government.

HistoryGuy.com: Military Coups in Turkey



Erdogan has now purged the Turkish military of its secular traditions. Each previous coup had been led by secular generals and admirals to remove an identifiable and decidedly Islamist government: 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997. Additionally a slow boil coup was suppressed from 2007-09 and a serious coup attempt failed in 2016.

The lesson for a democracy is that if you're going to have a coup make sure it isn't your standard and violent military coup. Establish your movement across all components of the society, make it broad and diverse, of a low intensity, respectable and acceptable, as Turks did it in 1997 to include the military which has its proper Constitutional role, obligation and civil responsibility.
 
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