Military Might And The Political Mind

BY ALI BAYRAMOGLU
YENI SAFAK- Columnist Ali Bayramoglu comments on the prospect of Turkish troop deployment in Iraq. A summary of his column is as follows:
Since the Sulaimaniya incident we have been caught up in a shallow argument about military might. There are even those who say that in order to be a ‘powerful country’ we must have a powerful, aggressive army. However, no one realizes that our long-standing policies based merely on military strength and sheer threat of use of force have already gone bankrupt. This applies to both Turkey’s domestic issues and its foreign policy.
One should not forget this: The military mind is a tool for times of conflict. In countries where the military mentality dominates, power-centric tendencies, assessments and expectations lord over the political realm. The state itself becomes prior to politics, replacing domestic problems and internal dynamics. Gradually, the idea that politics could be sacrificed for the sake of the state itself becomes more and more plausible for people. Society grows polarized, and the poles get even more homogenized within themselves. And then diversity is lost. This is even truer in countries like Turkey where political rights and freedoms are overwhelmingly restricted, and where a patriarchal mentality – one nurtured by an inferiority complex due to lost ‘glory,’ and by an obsession with Turkish identity due to a deep feeling of having been oppressed -- turns into a reflexive response to everything. This picture grows even darker if you are living on a ‘fault zone of Western-Eastern identities.’ And in this picture, societal problems concerning freedom, democracy, secularism, citizenship, poverty – all these are seen in the mirror of this mere quest for might.
Today we are facing such a heated debate, this time on possible troop deployments in Iraq. And once again we are challenged by the ‘war, weapon, might’ triad based on the perceived interests of ‘the Turkish nation and identity.’ Our country is being forced to embark on an adventure in order to overcome its own crises of politics and political mentality, ones whose roots in fact lie in that selfsame ‘war, weapon, might’ triad. Unfortunately we are once again lost in search of ‘real strength’ which could only come about through general welfare and democracy, lost for the sake of ‘imaginary might,’ which is the product of conflict, authoritarianism and false nationalism.