Coup attempt underway in Turkey
<i>&quot;Modern Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal, a general in the Turkish Army who was later formally granted the surname “Ataturk,” or father of the Turks. Ataturk set about an aggressive program of modernizing and “Westernizing” the country, pushing religion to the margins, banning certain apparel like headscarves and fezes, and converting Turkish from Arabic to Latin script. But that secularism has always remained tenuous. Many Turks, especially rural ones, are religious, and not all of the reforms have remained popular.<p>The military has long seen its role as safeguarding Ataturk’s secularist agenda, and when it worries the government is shifting too far away, it has tended to take action.<p>Turkey has thus occupied a strange position in world politics: Although it is prone to coups d’etat, Western governments have often cheered the coups on, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, because they are in the service of a secular agenda. Periodic deposition of democratically leaders has, somewhat paradoxically, been treated as a small price to pay for ensuring liberalism.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s actually a very interesting system of government. A democratic arm that rules the country day-to-day, and a &quot;benevolent dictatorship&quot; that will overthrow the democratic arm if it violates the country&#x27;s &quot;fundamental principles&quot;. Such a model would arguably have served Iraq better than the pure democracy that was attempted and failed.