By Edmond Y. Azadian
Any politician claiming to exercise moral principles has to be cast as a hypocrite. World history has never witnessed a war to uphold some moral principles yet almost all wars have been waged under the cover of moral principles, religious and human rights and above all, under the cover of promoting democracy.
Media outlets during the last decade or so have been harping on about how the Arab Spring grew out of popular uprisings in the Middle Eastern countries against dictators. After trumpeting that lie so loudly and for so long, the manufacturers of that lie remained as the only believers while the people at the receiving end of that Spring only witnessed death, destruction and bloodbaths. And mind, only the secular governments were toppled, while the medieval potentates remained under additional protection from those very same powers which concocted the legend of the Spring, which, incidentally created further mayhem for the region.
Only opportunists, manipulators and political jugglers could survive and thrive in that kind of atmosphere. One such political animal has proven to be Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom the West considered the right statesman to facilitate their plans, adorning him with the most gratuitous qualifications, such as “mildly Islamist,” or “moderately religious,” and so on while the latter used and abused the religion and the epithets of democracy to further his own agenda, at the expense of the naiveté of his handlers. Erdogan turned out to be the master of political duplicity and from now on his words and actions need to be measured under that paradigm.
It is true that under Erdogan Turkey became an economic powerhouse and regional military superpower, but Turkey’s growth had to serve the ambitions of its ruler, who dreamt to revive the “glorious” Ottoman Empire and sitting at the top of the pyramid of power to play the caliphate of modern times.
