Bush should read this incisive analysis of Turkey by the great Professor Raphael Israeli at Chronwatch (thanks to Andy):
The inexplicable Western policy of appeasement towards Islam has been predicated upon the false assumption that if the ”moderate” and ”pragmatic” model that has ”triumphed” in Kemalist Turkey is upheld and sustained, this might deter and thwart the wave of fundamentalist Islam that has been terrorizing the West.
In submission to that rosy conjecture that had no leg to stand on, Europe and the United States have actively fought against Christian Serbs and Macedonians in order to support Bosnian and Albanian Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, who were aided by Iranians, Chechnians, and other Muslim fundamentalists who set their eyes on re-Islamizing the Balkans and driving a Muslim wedge between Greece and Serbia into the heart of Europe, exactly as Izetbegovic had envisioned.
This policy was encouraged by the fact that the newly liberated Muslim Republics of Central Asia, which were part and parcel of the Soviet Union, also seemed to embrace a pro-Western policy, reinforced by their links with Israel, and centered around a close alliance with Turkey, who also became a close military and economic partner of the Jewish state. Except that all those countries which now evoke their Pan-Turkic or Pan-Turanic identity, are first of all Muslim. True, the Kemalist Revolution, which had cruelly eradicated Islam and forcefully secularized society, seemed to prevail for the past decades, mainly under the bayonets of the military who have taken over government on several occasions, every time they thought that the Attaturk ”heritage” was in jeopardy. Similarly, the newly emerged Central Asian republics can keep their pro-western orientation only because they are ruled autocratically by previously communist regimes who have altered their titles and appellations, but little else.
But then, against all expectations and calculations of the experts, Necmettin Erbakan, the head of the Islamist Party, won a plurality of the vote in 1996, and was swept into the premiership, though his less than 20% strength in Parliament necessitated a coalition with civil political parties. The government veered noticeably to the Islamic world, nonetheless, mainly towards Iran, and apparently also threatened the warming relations with Israel which were dear to the heart of the military, the ”guardians of secularism.” But what was supposed to have confirmed the rule of the secularists only proved a thin veneer under which Muslim sentiment was in ferment.
Please read it all.