Duking it out on Turkey in The Wall Street Journal

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Wouldn’t it be a relief if The Wall Street Journal re-employed Hugh Pope, its former veteran Istanbul bureau chief, and ditched Michael Rubin’s biased, undistinguished, unenlightening, off-the-wall albeit occasional diatribes on Turkey?

On Friday, Rubin called the country’s prime minister Tayyip Erdogan a dictator ala Vladimir Putin and demanded Erdogan’s ouster. This under an inflammatory headline “Turkey’s Putin Deserves to Go.” Now I usually don’t read WSJ Op Eds because they’re too often over-the-top but there’s so little information and even less analysis on Turkey in the American media and the WSJ is far too influential to ignore completely that I did read this one.

In good part Rubin’s June 6 Op Ed was a retort to a previous one The Journal had run by former US Ambassador Mark Parris who criticized the State Department for ignoring Turkey’s impending Constitutional crisis and failing to try to avert it.

But Rubin went beyond the pale and this is not the first time.

As predicted – Rubin, who – if I remember correctly - has close ties to the Israeli military-industrial complex that sells tanks (or at least other weaponry) to the Turkish military (a major protagonist in the current domestic political fight), trashed the Turkish elected civilian leadership and charged it with undemocratic tendencies. As if the Turkish military and the Supreme Court were themselves bastions of democracy. Regardless, talk about taking sides in someone else’s domestic dispute. Moderate Islamist Erdogan is not perfect and he’s made mistakes – but the secularist opposition which wants the world to equate their actions with democratic governance isn’t a paragon of virtue either.

On top of everything else Rubin blames Erdogan for inflaming anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes in Turkey quoting last year’s Pew Global Attitudes Survey which described Turkey as the “world’s most anti-American country." In this case, the survey’s right. But Rubin’s interpretation of it is just plain wrong. Besides, I don't recall it even including attitudes on anti-Semitism in its data.

Sorry, Mr. Rubin, those anti-American attitudes that have persisted in the country over the past five years have their roots in the Bush administration’s public trashing of the Turkish government when it refused to allow US troops to invade Iraq through Turkey’s southern border.

Maybe if W, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and your other neocon cronies had treated the Turks a little better at the time and even heeded their advice about how to deal with that troublesome neighbor to their south then the American image would not be such a disaster now. If I remember correctly, Turkish views of the US plummeted at the time of the invasion. Didn't you conveniently forget the timing? I didn’t. I’ll bet those attitudes won’t change until W has left the White House and a saner head is in command of US policy in the Middle East.

PS: A note to The Wall Street Journal. Please, your readers deserve better: Michael Rubin deserves to go.