How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

Turkey was supposed to be the poster child for Muslim democracy. But it is rapidly turning into an Islamist tyranny. In 2002, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, formed the country’s first Islamist government in nearly eighty years. Then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz singled Turkey out as an exemplar of moderate Islam in a September 2002 address.3 The Bush administration gave the AKP party leader Tayyip Erdogan star treatment during a 2003 Washington visit, including a presidential press conference and high-profile meetings at the Pentagon, even though Erdogan was still barred from the prime minister’s office for Islamist pronouncements he had made a decade earlier. When Erdogan was re-elected prime minister in 2007, though, Turkey transmogrified from the West’s (and Israel’s) most reliable ally in the region to a spoiler intent on carving out its own regional role.