Obama did what was expected, making promises and seeming to distribute favours for everyone. What he left behind is the repetitive chatter, a la Hunchback of Notre Dame, "[he] gave me water".

Even though some of the gestures during the visit –such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the time for Muslim prayer– has drawn a lot of interest, there is nothing extraordinary about these gestures. Such cleverly staged acts are not newly invented. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he took on the role of the patron of Islam. In 1857, during the Sepoy Rebellion in India, the British asked the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid to intervene as the Caliph of the Muslims to help to suppress the rebellion. Obama’s ancestors also came to Sultan Abdülhamid II to ask him to use his authority as the Caliph to get the Muslims of the Phillippines support the United States. None of this, however, helped prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  

We may not need to go that far in history. Throughout the Cold War, the whole Western world, under the leadership of the United States, used Islam endlessly. Some of the conspiracy referred in Turkey as Ergenekon is rooted in this dirty alliance . At the end of the Cold War, on the path that led to the founding of Al Qaida, radical Islamic ideology and organizations were nurtured and supported to the end. Now, the new project focuses on pacifying radical Islam which has recently directed its guns towards the United States and the West.

Turks may now say: "The past is past. At this point in time, isn’t this the best for us?" This mission turns us into a world class actor". "Would it be so bad to be part of the solution?" The problem with this line of thinking is that the project being contributed to has nothing to do with peace and the welfare of humanity. Neither is the issue just Islam. The project is one about divisioning of the world. What needs to be done at this point is, first, to ask "why, for what/who are we getting involved"? Secondly, it is to remember that in these kinds of involvement, it is often countries such as ours that pay the highest price.

Look at the present state of Pakistan which was assigned the role of helping get the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The country has attracted radical jihadists from all over the world and been turned into a front for Jihad, threatening delicate internal social and political balances. They have received no other awards for the role they played in the Cold War except for a phone call after 9/11 threatening that they either join the U.S or be "bombed to the stone age".

Turkey has also been one of the countries in the "Green Belt". Our mission was to form a shield of "moderate Islam" against the influences of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in the region, and to accompany/support the U.S. in filling the vacuum left in Central Asia with the departure of the Soviet Union. Those groups and interests in Turkey who cooperated with one another on these projects through the "deep state", then started fighting one another. They still have not resolved their differences.

Leave alone interrogating this cooperation with global plunderers in the name of humanity, even at the level of reel politique, there is a desperate need for a long, serious questioning of these issues. As much as the gains expected by the Turkish government from such cooperation, there is a need to calculate what is to be lost in working with those at the summit of world power. Governments and countries participating in these grand projects often may face deep fragmentation in their internal politics. Thinking about and dealing with the implications of this is hardly ever the job of the world powers which try to order the world around their own interests. It is always the job of countries like Pakistan which has to face the threat of being "bombed to the stone age" as it cannot take a form position against the Taliban given its internal balance of power. By that time, the political environment in the country may have already acquired a medieval quality through internal dispersion and fragmentation of social and political forces and through conflict.

In politics, extreme cynicism can have a pacifying impact leading to immobilization and inaction. The acceleration of international politics is unforgiving for even slowness to respond, leave alone inaction. On the other hand, it also does not help to be too reckless for the sake of adjusting to the speed of world politics.

Have I drawn too pessimistic a picture? The concerns I have tried to express would make better sense if we read some history and look at what is happening around us in the region at this point of historical rupture. Collectively, whatever we do, let us first abandon the Hunchback complex, end the chatter "[he] gave me water".

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Nuray Mert is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University in Turkey. She has regular columns in the Turkish dailies Radikal and Hürriyet. This article has been translated from her article "Bana Su Verdi!" ("[He] Gave Me Water") published in Radikal on April 9, 2009. http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazarYazisi&Date=9.4.2009&ArticleID=930241

Translation by Sedef Arat-Koç, Associate Professor, Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

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