by Dmitriy Yevstafiev ; translation by J.Hawk Kemalist Turkey is dead. Even if Erdogan manages to survive (I think his position is deteriorating and the inevitable purge/slaughter will only worsen matters), it will no longer exist. The army, in the sense that it used to be the backbone of the Turkish state, is also dead. Therefore the Turkish military might be able to slap together some sort of a putsch which just might succeed through sheer luck (though the likelihood of something like that is small, it’s more likely future putsches would be spearheaded by foreign PMCs), but what would be the point? We must start getting ready for the new Turkey. We used to think the new Turkey would be neo-Ottoman (the second issue of the Ottoman Empire, as I wrote earlier), but now I think it will be something very different. Something entirely different. The neo-Ottoman Turkey was supposed to be relatively strong, relatively secular, comparatively pro-Western, and with a relatively strong economic

By Moon Of Alabama (Please also read the updated tweets below. There are some very interesting nuggets in there that are not yet reflected in the text.) Yesterday's short coup attempt (real time MoA) by parts of the military against the wannabe-Sultan of Turkey failed. Some 200 people on both sides were killed, some 1,200 wounded. The plotters' major mistakes were: to not capture Erdogan and the leaders of his political and security organizations, to not shut down all means of mass communication, especially the Internet, except those under their strict control, to not put out a trusted public face to represent the coup. Erdogan escaped and could orchestrate the counter to the coup. He could continue to communicate with his security management, foreign politicians and his supporters. Without any well known alternative leader the public had only Erdogan to follow. The amateurish behavior of the coup plotter opens the question of who ran this show. Was this, as some asse

Too late did Erdogan realise the cost of the role he had chosen for his country – when you can no longer trust your army, there are serious issues that need to be addressed By Robert Fisk Recep Tayyip Erdogan had it coming. The Turkish army was never going to remain compliant while the man who would recreate the Ottoman Empire turned his neighbours into enemies and his country into a mockery of itself. But it would be a grave mistake to assume two things: that the putting down of a military coup is a momentary matter after which the Turkish army will remain obedient to its sultan; and to regard at least 161 deaths and more than 2,839 detained in isolation from the collapse of the nation-states of the Middle East. For the weekend’s events in Istanbul and Ankara are intimately related to the breakdown of frontiers and state-belief – the assumption that Middle East nations have permanent institutions and borders – that has inflicted such wounds across Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other countrie