President Tayyip Erdogan sits inside a car with family members at Istanbul airport on Saturday. ReutersRule number two in planning a military coup is that any mobile forces that are not in the plot – and that certainly includes any fighter squadrons – must be immobilized or too remote to intervene in any case (that is why Saudi army units, for example, are based far from the capital).
The Turkish coup plotters failed to ensure that, so that instead of being reinforced as events unfolded, they were increasingly opposed. But perhaps that scarcely mattered because they had already violated rule number one, which is to seize the head of the government before doing anything else, or at least to kill him. That the Turkish plotters also failed to, so that the country's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was left free to call out his followers to resist the attempted military coup, first by iPhone and then in something resembling a televised press conference at Istanbul's airport.
It was richly ironical that he was speaking under the official portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of Turkey's modern secular state, because Erdoğan's overriding aim since entering politics has been to replace it with an Islamic republic by measures across the board, from the closure of secular high schools to drive pupils into Islamic schools and creeping alcohol prohibitions, to the conversion of major ex-church museums into mosques, adding to frenetic mosque building everywhere, even university campuses where till recently headscarves were prohibited.
Televised scenes of the crowds that came out to oppose the coup were extremely revealing: there were only men with mustaches -- secular Turks rigorously avoid them – with not one woman in sight, and their slogans were not patriotic but Islamic – they kept shouting Allah u Ekber (the local pronunciation of Akbar) and breaking out into the Shahada, the declaration of faith.
Richly ironical too was the prompt and total support of US president Barack Obama, German chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union's hapless would-be foreign minister Federica Mogherini in the name of democracy, because Erdoğan has been doing everything possible to dismantle Turkey's fragile democracy, from ordering the arrest of journalists who criticized him and the outright seizure and closure of the country's largest newspaper Zaman, to the very exercise of presidential power, because Turkey is not a presidential republic like the US or France but rather a parliamentary republic like Germany or Italy, with a mostly ceremonial president and real power left to the prime-minister.
Unable to change the constitution because his AK party does not have enough votes in parliament, Erdoğan instead installed the slavishly obedient Binali Yildirim as prime minister – his predecessor Ahmet Davutoğlu had been very loyal, but not a slave – and further subverted the constitutional order by convening cabinet meetings under his own chairmanship in his new 1000-room palace, a multi-billion dollar 3,200,000 sq ft monstrosity (the White House has 55,000 sq.ft), which was built without authorized funding or legal permits in a nature reserve.
That is just normal operating procedure for Erdoğan, who started as a penniless youth in a slum and is now a billionaire – when prosecutors investigating his associates and sons Bilal and Burak for bribery, corruption, fraud, money laundering and gold smuggling found millions in cash, 350 police officers and all the prosecutors involved were simply removed from their jobs.
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Only interested in his relentless Islamization of Turkey, Erdoğan's core party followers evidently attach no value to democratic principles or legality as such, and think it only natural that him and his sons should have enriched themselves on a huge scale. When Erdoğan's blames anything that goes wrong – including his very own decision to re-start the war against the country's Kurds – on foreigners, the United States of course, and you-know-who ( the "Saturday people"), his followers readily believe him, and that is also true of his wild accusations of terrorism against the US-based Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gülen, once his staunch ally.
Having previously blamed Gülen for the aborted corruption investigation, which he had described as a "judicial coup", Erdoğan has now blamed Gülen and his followers for the attempted military coup as well. That could even be true to some extent, but Turkish military officers scarcely needed Gülen to egg them on: they blame Erdoğan and his AKP followers for dismantling the Ataturk's secular republic, for having built up the murderous Sunni extremists of Syria, the Islamic State (Obama's "Isol") as well as Jabhat al Nusra, who are now spilling back into Turkey itself with stealthy recruitment suicide bombings, and for deliberately re-starting the war against the country's Kurds in 2015 for crass political reasons – a war that is costing soldiers' lives every day, and threatens the survival of Turkey itself within its present borders ( Kurds are a net majority in the eastern provinces).
Coup planners need not enroll very many soldiers and airmen to win, so long as uncooperative chiefs are detained, and their initial success induces many more to join in. But Turkey's top military chiefs neither planned the coup nor joined it, only the very top soldier Gen. Ulusi Akar was detained, and the principal force commanders stayed out, so that the coup activists (fewer than 2,000 in all it seems) including some fighter pilots, were hopelessly outnumbered once Erdoğan's followers came out by the tens of thousands in Istanbul.
Opposition parties all very loyally opposed the coup, but they should not count on Erdoğan's gratitude because the drift to authoritarian rule is likely to continue, even accelerate: as in other Islamic countries, elections are well-understood and greatly valued, but not democracy itself with its indispensable individual rights and legality.
(A renowned military historian, cold warrior and strategist, Edward N. Luttwak is the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, published by Harvard University Press.
He is also the author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire and The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union.)
