Turkey's New Role in the World

An excellent article in today's FT raises a question which has been on the minds of many analysts of international affairs: Turkey's evolving role on the global stage.

The basic conundrum is this: is Turkey's growing confidence and departure from the American playbook a good thing or a bad thing? I submit that, by and large, it is a good thing.

I am indebted to George Kennan for pointing out that the US does not need to conquer the world; we simply need to prevent the bad guys from doing so. Thus, he argued that multiple centers of power were perfectly acceptable, so long as no more than one was Soviet. Indeed, encouraging other centers of power could be a good thing, diluting the Soviet share of the total.

Today the Soviets are no longer with us, thankfully, but threats remain from China, Russia and Islamist terrorism. Turkey can serve as a rival to all three. Thus, while I would like to see Turkey maintain good relations with the US, Greece and Israel, I welcome Turkish involvement in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucus region and Central Asia as well. There will be times Turkey departs from stated American policies; there will be times we step on each other's toes. But we should weigh these costs against the benefits that Turkey brings. How else, for example, could we end up with a secretary general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference coming from a NATO member?

Getting the Arabic Right

In reading over Mitt Romney's website in August, I was appalled by his very first issue position: 'Defeating the Jihadists.' The former Massachusetts governor went on to explain that,

the defeat of this radical and violent faction of Islam must be achieved through a combination of American resolve, international effort, and the rejection of violence by moderate, modern, mainstream Muslims.

In spite of this, he had embraced – unknowingly, we shall hope – the radical Wahabist understanding of the term 'jihad,' which simply has the literal meaning of 'struggle.' To many, probably most Muslims, this struggle is an interior one, a personal one, a spiritual one: suicide bombers are not holy warriors – 'mujahideen' – striving to know or serve the Almighty, they are evildoers properly termed 'mufsidun,' who are engaging in a psychopathic war against society, 'hirabah.'

I notified the Romney campaign of their mistake and the website has since changed. While there has been no adoption of the terms 'mufsidun' or 'hirabah,' terms such as 'jihad', and 'Islam' are always preceded by 'violent' or 'extreme' to clarify that this is not the mainstream variety in question. The headline now reads "Confronting Radical Jihad".

Mitt Romney was not the only presidential candidate to make this linguistic mistake. Ron Paul's website refers to "our direct enemies, the jihadists."

By accepting the Wahabist misappropriation of the term 'jihad,' these candidates and countless other Americans give our enemies further ammunition in the war of ideas, implicitly accepting that the moderate Muslims are wrong in their understanding of Islam, that jihad does demand the killing of innocent American families.

Conversely, use of the terms 'mufsidun' and 'hirabah' – and efforts to educate the American people about them – would not only demonstrate a presidential candidate's command of the complexities involved in the War on Terror but would also strike a blow in the ideological conflict that is at the heart of this struggle. These terms convey exactly what Romney and others are trying to say, and they say it in a way that a majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims understand.

The issues pages for John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich are happily free of this misappropriation of Arabic terms. Whether this happened because the candidates know the proper use of the words or are simply listening to thoughtful advisors, I tip my hat to them all. (This is not to say that all have excellent plans for the Middle East or the War on Terror; some make profound mistakes, but they are not this one. Perhaps more blog posts are in order.)

Mike Huckabee's website has gone so far as to explain that,

Fighting smart means learning the neighborhood, achieving a level of political, religious, and cultural sophistication about the Arab and Islamic worlds that will pay huge dividends for us.... I will support moderates, not extremists, with no favoring of Sunnis or Shiites. The long-term solution to terror is to empower moderates in the region.

While 'moderate' is probably not the best term - Christians, would you like to be designated as 'moderate Christians'? Kind of makes you sound wishy-washy, doesn't it? - that's a good start.

(Special thanks go out to J. Michael Waller of the Institute of World Politics, for his excellent text on the matter, Fighting the War of Ideas Like a Real War.)