800 Words: 30 Mini Essays (1-3)

1. Evan Tucker’s Handy-Dandy Guide for How to Prematurely Age: The good news is that I’m the only person I know in my early 30’s who looks almost exactly as young as I did when I graduated college. The bad news is that I already looked at least 40. In my life, it was all too easy to age prematurely. When you combine a long dark history of depression and anxiety with far too large an appetite for food, and then add a college predilection for booze and cigarettes and a hatred of exercise, you’re already far older than most people your age. But when you add to this the verifiable fact that no child ever spent as much time in the company of the elderly as I, you have a kid who could easily be mistaken for the father of his college roommate. When I was a child, my father co-owned and ran a nursing home with his father, who was himself older than most of his patients, and I was there at least once a week. Half of every weekend would be spent at my grandparents house, with the other half often spent going to classical concerts with my Bubbie and her friends. Was there any child in my generation who had more occasion to copy the mannerisms, the habits, and the attitudes of my grandparents’ generation? It was with them that I developed my tastes for old music, old movies, old books, old languages, delicatessen, and elastic waists.

2. If Only We’d Have Listened to President Wilson Part 2 - In recent decades, it has been all too common to defecate all over the reputation of Woodrow Wilson. Yes, Wilson’s presidency must be counted a failure relative to what the world needed - but nevertheless, he was nothing less than a truly great president whose policies gave the world ten years of respite until the Great Depression and a Second World War, and the one sane leader in a world gone mad. Woodrow Wilson did the very best he could in an impossible situation. The age of Great Power Monarchy was over, and no one could put it back together without incurring what would then have been a second world war. Marxist Communism and liberal rule of law were clearly incompatible. The only alternatives left were military dictatorship and democratic self-determination. There were few things which Franklin Roosevelt enacted which Wilson had not first moved heaven and earth in an unsuccessful bid to achieve. Had Wilson not contracted fatal illness during the second term of his presidency, had he enough time to convince America to join the League of Nations, had he enough time to dismember the English and French military apparatus as he had the German, had a League of Nations stopped the Red Army, would the Twentieth Century have unfolded in the disastrous manner which it did? We will never know if Wilson was capable of all this, but fate ensured that we would never know. Because he tried endlessly to do the right thing when no status quo worked, many now look upon his presidency as the century's ultimate disaster when it was anything but.

Today, we have a President who could only give us a shell of a health care program we needed, massive (if still too small) stimulus money unpaid for because Republicans refuse to raise taxes upon the wealthy, a coming social security and medicare boom is likely to triple our financial burden, and perhaps the National Debt as well, yet Republicans were so unconcerned with the collapse of the debt ceiling (which used to be a matter so crucial that it was left unpartisan) that they got our nation’s credit lowered because they wanted concessions merely for allowing the ceiling to be raised. Like Wilson, Obama made inroad after inroad to his rivals, because he knew that peace in our time can only be achieved by cooperation. As a reward, his good sense is rebuffed by a party determined to lead this country to ruination unseen since the days of The Civil War. It is thanks to the religion of Republican intransigence, and ONLY to the religion of Republican intransigence, that in 2008 the world once again stood on the brink of a collapse so massive it dwarved even 1929, when many economists from both wings projected potential unemployment rates of 50% (!). The Obama financial team staved off the collapse, but how much longer can it be staved off before the crazies get their way? If only we’d listen to President Obama...

3. The Arab Winter? - Yet again, I got the Middle East wrong. I supported the Arab Spring. I supported it full-throatedly, knowing that it all might go horribly, terribly awry, but not wanting to stand in the way of the only true shot the Arab world might get to enact liberal reforms for generations. And then it went awry, just as pessimists, cynics, and anti-Arab bigots predicted it would. The Kissinger/Brezhnev-era dictatorships of Mubarak and Qaddafi were certainly bad, but in 40 years, even Qaddafi never committed 1/20th of the political murders which Hafez el-Assad committed in only two.  

What happens in Syria can all too easily happen all around the Middle East. It is, almost literally, the problem from Hell. Russia will block any chance to stop the democide from the UN, and counter any aide to the rebel forces with aide to Assad. Putin will not abide the loss of another Russian ally, and views any further toppling of Russia-friendly dictators as a point of Russian honor. Assad has killed approximately a hundred-thousand of his own people, and could easily kill a million before he decides he’s secure again, but nobody can stop him. If the United States were to get too involved in Syria, World War III could be more than a theoretical exercise. As with all things these days (and usually correctly), the temptation is to blame the Bush Administration. But the actions of the Bush Administration in the Middle East neither caused the Arab Spring nor the bleak Arab Winter which may follow it.  Nevertheless, thank God he was not president when all this happened...

Meanwhile, Libya, a Stasi-like informant state under Qaddafi, is now gripped by the chaos of unpatrolled streets and inter-tribal warfare. What remains of Qaddafi’s loyalists have transformed themselves into an underground terrorist organization, planting bombs all over the country. Tunisia is beset by unemployment and hyper-inflation, an Islamist government with many ministers who want to impose Islamic Law, and a left-wing opposition robbed of its most vocal leader, Chokri Belaid, in February by an assassination. Bahrain is still gripped by a low-level civil war, 3,000 people have been and still are detained without trial, and five have died in custody from torture wounds. The Bahrainian police continues to carry out midnight raids, checkpoint beatings, and instructs doctors to deny medical care to 'potential subversives.'

All of this would have been worthwhile if Egypt, the centerpiece of the Arab Spring which houses 2/5ths of the world’s entire Arab population, seemed in better shape than it is. Within four months of his election, President Mohammed Morsi issued a decree announcing that he would rule by fiat without accountability from the constituent assembly - a constitution-writing body which already conceded to Morsi nearly every power he wanted. The liberal leaders who believed they could mollify Islamic parties like Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood had long since walked out of the constituent assembly. Just as conservatives and realists warned, the post-Arab Spring Middle East may stand on the edge of something so disastrous that we haven’t seen its like since the genocides committed during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And we liberals let it happen without so much as a word of caution.

How could we be so blind that we didn’t see this coming? The Arab Spring happened without the economic means to support its citizens, without a proper rule of law in place, and with the military being the only strong element in each country. The chances of a functional democracy springing up were no less slim than democracy flowering in Iraq, and yet we jettisoned longtime allies like Mubarak which preserved order and stability - however corruptly and brutally, Mubarak was an authoritarian dictator, not a totalitarian. Liberals who decried the democratic project in Iraq were completely mum when it came to the equally unlikely prospects of democracy in Egypt and Syria. Obama has, wisely, stayed true to his word and interfered minimally in the events of the Arab world. But the fact that he did nothing to prevent Mubarak’s fall could (yet again, the liberal in me screams not to say this), eventually be revealed as the greatest sin of his presidency.

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800 Words: 10 Years Ago... (Part 1)

On March 9th, 2003, I’d turned 21 years old, and my parents surprised me in my Czech hotel room with a bottle of champagne and a Happy Birthday note. Rather than spend the big 2-1 as Americans are supposed to - getting shikkored at an American bar (there’d be plenty of opportunities for that later...), I spent my birthday jetlagged from a flight to Prague. I went on a Spring Break trip sponsored by the American University Honors Program, a program to which I’d been accepted by the skin of my teeth. Just six months before I'd been in the Learning Disabled program, and the Honors Program had already rejected me once before. 

That week in Prague was one of the most bizarre weeks of my life. It began with the Honors Program director insisting on buying me six Czech beers on my birthday when I was already too jetlagged to walk. It ended with my refusal to go with the rest of the program to the Terezinstadt concentration camp - to this day, I’ve never been to a Nazi camp. Nevertheless,I spent that week in what might be the most beautiful city I’ve ever encountered (Jerusalem, Odessa, Florence, Nice, Sienna, Avignon, Edinburgh, Tel Aviv, Boston, London, and yes... DC, are other candidates). For all that week's bizarreness, I heard performances of Mozart’s Requiem, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte in a single week, I encountered the joys of Becherovka (and the agonies of Slivovitz), I tasted the deliciousness of goulash and dumplings, drank what’s still the best beer I’ve ever had, and had my first awakening that Europe was a living, breathing place and not the entombed monument of my dreams. There were lots of frustrations on that trip, but in my memory, it will always be the first taste of my adult life at feeling successful.  

One day after our return, the US went into Iraq. It was a red-letter day in American history for everybody, but I didn't just experience this at just any place. This was a day to be experienced at AU.

American University. The most political school in America, perhaps in the entire world. Not a school where ultra privileged children went to grandstand before they ran for office, but a university for students who were obsessively passionate about politics. The university, the best of the university anyway, comprised itself of men and women who lived and breathed the subject as others do sports or music.

And on that day ten years ago, a knife could slice the tension into a million, zillion parts. I remember walking on the quad in the early afternoon. Hardly a single person could be seen from its center. Everybody was glued to the television, everybody was uneasy, everybody was anticipating the explosion of demonstrations guaranteed to occur from both sides. The campus was rife with the tension that everybody knew would shortly arrive. But our anxieties were far more global. We also knew that for better or worse, we were entering an entirely new chapter in American History.

Never had the ordeal of change felt so palpably like what it is. Was America about show the world it was truly invincible - able to win a war and a peace with minimal forces and minimal backing from allies? Or did America just let slip the dogs of World War III? 

The answer, of course, was neither. Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster, but it was a minor disaster compared to the apocalypse we’d been warned about from both sides. There were no nuclear weapons and only minimal chemical weapons. Far less chemical weapons were found than were used in either the Iran-Iraq War or against the Kurds. 

But nor was Iraq the violent deluge of progressive imaginings. Billions of lives were not lost, and the United States is still a country. It wasn’t even half as bad a disaster as Vietnam. The Vietnam War created a refugee crisis roughly 3 million strong, and it cost approximately 2 million lives - or nearly 4 million if you count the war’s ramifications in neighboring countries. I can’t find reliable totals for the wounded among the North Vietnamese, but 1.5 million South Vietnamese were wounded. Around 58,000 Americans were killed, 2,000 went missing, 300,000 Americans were wounded, and at least 610 Vietnamese were killed in what can only be termed American massacres. 

The only way the Iraq War compares to Vietnam is in the number of refugees, for which the UN estimates there are 2.2 million. Reliable estimates put the deaths of the Iraq War at the still horrific total of somewhere between 110-160,000, and I can find no record of the total Iraqi wounded. Roughly 4,500 of those deaths were American, and at least 32,000 American soldiers were wounded. Iraq is not as bad as Vietnam, but it was most certainly a disaster; and unlike Vietnam, a disaster which we caused.

There is no way of knowing how many Iraqis would have died had Saddam Hussein maintained power. Had the Arab Spring spread to a Saddam-controlled Iraq, perhaps he’d have gone the way of Bashar al-Assad and begun massacring whole towns indiscriminately - though knowing Saddam, it would be whole provinces. Or perhaps he might have been another Qaddafi, with comparatively few state sponsored massacres (how weird it feels to write that), and a gargantuan intelligence apparatus ready at the first sign to turn on him. By now, it’s even possible that Iraq without American forces might have become a democracy - perhaps even a relatively functional one considering how much less organized political Islam is in Iraq than in a country like Egypt. It’s also possible that Saddam would have killed another 3 million Iraqis. Or maybe Saddam would have died a natural death, and with his death might come a wholesale collapse of his regime. Perhaps the entire Iraqi military would divide up into factions which cause a civil war that killed half the country.

The Iraq War was grounded in such counterfactuals. It was based upon a the fevered musings of a country grown fat with over-privilege and too little experience of the world’s cruelties. War was not a present reality for us, it was (and is) an abstract. For nearly 140 years, no war occurred on American soil. However bloody America is for certain people, America itself has been the safest place to live in the whole world since the end of the Civil War.

And yes, I was a war supporter, most Americans were. And I was a rather fervent supporter. Self-described liberals who supported the war were extremely common among older Americans, but on a college campus - especially this college campus - they were rare as diamonds. I was interviewed on AU Radio along with a friend of mine as the only self-described liberal students who supported the Iraq War. For the interview, I did my usual spiel, which by then I’d narrowed down to a party trick. The Ba’ath Party was founded in 1943 as a Hitler solidarity movement. The Iraqi population was roughly 25,000,000, of whom Saddam had killed more than 1.2 million. That would be the equivalent of Hitler killing 25,000,000 Europeans in World War II before anyone took action to depose him. Yes, other mass-murderering dictators need to be deposed too, but if the world will be free of democide, we have to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place. Saddam’s Ba’ath party is a Sunni minority within a Sunni minority which might have collapsed any day, bringing chaos on a level even this invasion has not yet seen. And had Iraq collapsed without an American presence, Turkey, Iran, and Syria may all invade Iraq and go to war with one another in an effort to claim Iraqi territory as their own.

This was my pennance. My beliefs, such as I had, grew ever more radical through high school. On September 12th, I didn’t rejoice, but I was certainly one of the people who repeated the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” cliche. I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, and the very idea of the American ethos being morally superior to even Osama bin-Laden filled me with rage. But as I immersed myself ever more in the world of Washington, the contradictions of my beliefs contorted my mind. For smarter or dumber, I was creature enough of my upbringing to believe in spite of my other beliefs that Israel was a true democracy which repeatedly showed good faith in peace talks; while the Arafat government never let go of their goal - vanquishing the Jewish State. And somehow, I kept this belief even in the face of many other radicals shouting at me that I was a racist for believing so. There was a time in my life when I heard about the Holocaust with glazed eyes, as though invoking Hitler was a mere smokescreen to excuse ignorance for genocides of the present. But by college, those glazed eyes would infuriate me. Try as I might, and I tried very hard, I could not let go of the Jew in me. And that little Jew inside me would pull me further to the right than I ever needed to go. I was never a neoconservative, but I was very much a liberal hawk. And like all liberal hawks, I believed that liberalism was betrayed by liberals.

And even if I was wrong, I had a damned good point. Woodrow Wilson displayed democracy as a legitimate third way against dictatorship and monarchy. Franklin Roosevelt beat The Great Depression and the Nazis. The policies of Harry Truman won the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty and Civil Rights. In the years between Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act, liberal causes were a vast wasteland of failure. How did liberalism fail so decisively at the very moment when its greatest goals seemed within reach?

Perhaps the backlash was inevitable. Civil Rights legislation delivered generations of Southerners to Republican hands. Meanwhile, Conservative Christians, a mostly dormant force in American politics since William Jennings Bryan, were alarmed by liberal gains on abortion and the triumph of science over religion.

But liberals didn’t make it easy on themselves. The real story of the 1960’s was not the protests, which were very small, or even the race riots, which accelerated the urban decay that would have happened anyway. The true story of The Sixties is how the Republican party exploited these otherwise marginal events in American History to scare voters into changing their loyalties. And while conservatives stole America, liberals fell asleep.

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800 Words: The Parallels and Paradoxes of Daniel Barenboim (part 1 of 2)

1.



A spell of fatigue and dizziness barred me from tonight’s Beethoven’s 9th at the Proms. Nothing else could have, and certainly no suspicions that some nut would use the appearance of an Orchestra uniting native Israelis and Arabs at the Proms as an excuse to stage a political protest (or far worse) on the night of the Opening Olympic Ceremonies.

I wanted to go desperately. Not because I thought the performance would have been so wonderful, or because it’s an Israeli-Arab orchestra. Rather, it’s Beethoven, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Proms, three subjects I’m as fascinated by as anything in my life. If there ever were a concert tailor-made for me to go, tonight was it.

It certainly wasn’t Daniel Barenboim that pulled me there. Daniel Barenboim’s view of Beethoven is as fascinating as it is dogmatic. Whereas most other musicians of our day pay heed to the advice of musicologists to play close heed to Beethoven’s metronome marks and a chamber-orchestra complement of strings, Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven as though it’s still 1932 - huge orchestras, broad and flexible tempos, weighty bass-heavy sound. There is no attempt made to play Beethoven as he saw himself, this is Beethoven as he was played accumulated after a century of accumulated performance tradition - with (nearly) all the moss and ivy unstripped from the varnish. It is neither Beethoven for the age of Beethoven nor Bjork, it is Beethoven for the age of Wagner.

2.



No conductor in the world - not Thielemann, not Runnicles, not Gergiev, and certainly not any of the other major opera house directors - makes Wagner as exciting as Daniel Barenboim. With Barenboim, those inevitable forty minutes at a time of boredom and bombast can be cut down to twenty or fifteen. No conductor has ever made Wagner sound like every note counts, but Barenboim usually comes closer than any living conductor and closer even than most from more fruitful ages of Wagner performance.

There is clearly something in Barenboim’s temperament: a mixture of showman and intellectual, that responds very deeply to Wagner. Many musicians clearly have such affinities with particular composers; Bernstein had it with Mahler, Schnabel with Beethoven, Casals with Bach. In each case, it manifested itself not only in a desire to play the music extremely well, but to explain the composer himself - to put the composer within the context of his time, of music history in its entirety, and his relevance to our contemporary world.

It should then follow that a conductor who has such a deep affinity for a composer should want to perform it in his homeland. As it happens, that homeland is unfortunately Israel. To perform it there is to ask to become an outcast, and that is precisely what Barenboim has become in his homeland.

3.



As so few Jews found themselves throughout history, Barenboim was uniquely situated to privilege. As a child, he lived in Israel full-time for only two years. His father was a great piano teacher in Argentina and close friend to Arthur Rubinstein, and Barenboim’s gift was nurtured as few others are from the cradle. At different points he found himself mentored by Rubinstein, Igor Markevitch, Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, Nadia Boulanger, Otto Klemperer, Isaac Stern, Gregor Piatagorsky, Edwin Fischer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and even that twice-over Nazi party member Herbert von Karajan. Did any other Israeli of his years generation that level of privilege in any other field? Any at all?

Barenboim is widely reviled in the country he still thinks of as home. He brought the opera orchestra he’s lead since 1992, The Berlin State Opera Orchestra, to Israel for the express purpose of breaking the Wagner taboo. He has not only criticized Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the most strident possible terms, but also made statements to the effect that Israeli society has become sick and rotten at its core. As it happens, I agree with most every gesture and statement he’s made. And yet there’s still something about it that sits very wrongly with me.

Barenboim says that Israel has lost the sense of mission and moral purpose which he loved as a child in the 50’s. Does Barenboim have any memory what happened in Israel between 1952 and 1954? Israel had no more (or less) sense of mission nor moral purpose even then - the sole difference was that the country’s survival was far less guaranteed. Israel was in such fiscal danger that they had to take $3 billion in reparations from West Germany. Even then there were nearly a dozen lethal incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some were government-sponsored, some civilian. Right-wing Israeli militants not only threatened violence against the government as they do today, they attempted to carry it out - like the 1953 attempt to bomb the Department of Education by the terrorist organization Brit HaKanaim.

Life in a tough neighborhood is always hard. It’s very easy to sentimentalize the scrappy underdog country which finds itself beset by problems on all sides yet still manages to pull through. But Barenboim himself lived in this underdog country for only two years, and since then has been able to look on Israel from the perspective of a Citizen of the World - welcome in every first-world country in precisely the way nearly all other Jews would not be (still). Israel has been faced with threats to its very existence from before it was even a country. Even if he doesn’t agree with every decision the Israeli government made, why should Barenboim begrudge Israelis for wanting a small portion of the security which he takes for granted?

4.



There is a similar question which besets the biography of Barenboim’s now deceased bff, Edward Said. Said is, still, the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual voice - and like Barenboim combined the role of intellectual with a showman’s flair for activism and agitation. But in Said’s case, as in Barenboim’s, there is a troubling question of how such well-off people can claim to speak for those less fortunate than they. How can a son of wealth who could simply live in his parents’ Cairo house after Israel took away his Jerusalem home have any idea what true exile from a homeland means? It not only discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Israeli violence, it discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Palestinian violence too.

The West-East Divan Orchestra may yet prove to be the cornerstone of both their achievements. I will never forget the tears in my eyes when I first heard their wind soloists in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K. 333. It literally felt to me as though they were describing a dream of a better world, a longing for the balance which still eludes everyone who lives in that region. Anyone who doubts that music cannot express concrete things must hear that recording.

Yet people as well-educated as Said and Barenboim must know that there is absolutely nothing which the West-East Divan Orchestra can do except make a futile, sentimental gesture toward the peace which the Middle-East clearly eludes. If it accomplishes so little for peace, then is there any point to it but self-aggrandizement - a kind of exploitative posturing that makes Barenboim taken more seriously as an intellectual and political, perhaps even musical, figure, but brings the conflict no closer to resolution. And if such an orchestra does not bring our world closer to peace, does it then mean that it brings us farther away?

But maybe, just maybe, on that 1% of 1% of 1% chance that some leaders will be so moved by the sight of Arab and Israeli musicians playing together in perfect harmony that they can imagine a better solution to the Middle East conflicts, it will have been an entirely worthwhile project. And if it is so, then even if the entire point of the orchestra is to massage Daniel Barenboim’s ego, it will have been entirely worth doing.

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800 Words: The Eurasian Faultline - Part I: Istanbul

Barely a hundred miles from either side of the collection of small seas and straights that separate the Mediterranean Sea from the Black Sea lie the world’s two most important cities – the two outposts of different civilizations that forever stare at each other across the faultline and bloodily demarcate the eternal divide between Europe and Asia. On the Western side lies Athens; cradle of European Civilization and an eternal capital upon which Rome, Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin, and Washington all modeled themselves. On the Eastern side lies Istanbul, the heart of Byzantium and the Ottomans, always either the Westernmost capital of Islam or the Easternmost capital of Christendom – the city which all Central Asian empire­­s from the Caliphates to the Mughals built their cities to emulate. If Islamic empires wanted to extend their domination into Europe, they first had to capture Athens. If Christians wanted to conquer Asia, they first had to capture Constantinople (as Istanbul was then called).

Geography is as large a determiner of history as any other force, and it rarely if ever changes. The strategic importance of these two cities is as important today as it has ever been to world history. Where they go, history goes. And as ever before, Athens and Istanbul determine the our fate, our ancestor’s fates, and our descendants’ fates.

Istanbul: Much has been made of the Greece’s economic reservoir drying up, but very few people have heard that slices of Turkey are similarly dry (sorry…). Indeed, Turkey’s current deficits are no smaller than Greece’s, projected at 10% of their current GDP. Whereas emerging market currencies like Brazil and Russia soar, the Turkish lira has seemed in on the cusp of a complete free fall. Unlike Greece, Turkey controls its own currency and devalues it further and further as a means to control its deficit. But how much more can the lira be devalued before the deficit has to be paid off and their currency spirals down into a hyperinflation?

But the main difference between Greece and Turkey is that while Greece serves as a negative model for Europe of an indolent welfare state living off the largesse of harder working neighbors; Turkey is an absolute role model for the Middle East and nearly all of Asia and Africa. By emerging third-world countries, Turkey is seen as a model of a democracy which successfully integrated Islamist religious parties yet maintained its democratic character, a booming economy, and ever rising international power. Per usual, reality and perception are on mutually exclusive terms. As of December 2011, Turkey had imprisoned ninety-seven journalists, thousands of opposition figures, banned roughly a million websites, disqualified the Kurdish separatist party from serving in the Turkish parliament, bombed Iraq with collusion from Iran in flagrant violation of international law, and killed as many as 56,000 Kurds (admittedly, the actual total of the latter is probably less than half that…). Turkey refuses to renounce its claim on Cyprus, and has occupied half of it as a conqueror since 1974. Prime Minister Erdogan continues his attempts to push through a new constitution that would increase his power at the expense of the press and the judiciary. The whole of the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge the Ottoman Empire’s attempt at genocide which resulted in the murder of 1.5 to 2 million Armenians. This refusal has the backing of most Turks and when the great Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk (everyone should read Snow and especially My Name is Red) denounced this refusal, he was placed on trial for “insulting Turkishness” in a case that went all the way to the Turkish Supreme Court – he was found guilty and would have probably been sent to jail had there not been tumultuous pressure from the international community to not imprison him.

Like the rest of the Islamic world, Turkey faces the twin problems of a baby boom and the flight of non-Muslim peoples to more tolerant parts of the world. Much of contemporary Istambul would like to think itself similar to Athens, a modern European city whose country can easily take its place among the sovereign nations of the European Union. But in the event of so many clampdowns on civil liberties and so much intolerance of minorities, it’s not surprising that Turkey's EU membership was forestalled indefinitely.

There are all sorts of theories about where Turkey is headed. Perhaps Turkey will continue on its 2000’s path toward true democracy and economic boom. As late as the first quarter of 2010, the Turkish economy grew 11%. But the last few years make that possibility seem rather more unlikely than it once did. Some pundits believe that Prime Minister Erdogan is aiming for something approaching a revived Ottoman Empire in which Turkey becomes the benefactor if not the outright satellite governor of every Islamic state within a 2,000 mile radius. In some ways, Turkey is perfectly poised for that position. It stands at the precise northern center of the Islamic world, a potential nexus (perhaps the only potential nexus) of stability while the entirety of the Islamic world surrounding it engulfs itself in civil conflict. All these countries are practically crying out for a strongman to rule them like a colonial empire. Through its proximity to European stability, Turkey is almost ideally equipped to supervise Islamic Africa to its southwest and Islamic Asia to its southeast. No one doubts that if Turkey could prevent Islamic civil conflicts from spreading to Europe or East Asia, then the world superpowers would look the other way if Turkey ran the Islamic world like its own fiefdom. If this turns out to be the case, then Turkey would take its place with the United States and China as one of the world’s dominant superpowers.

Other pundits tell us that Turkey as we know it cannot sustain itself and must fall – potentially separating into at least three different countries – one European, one Islamic, one Kurdish, and all with massive potential for civil war. Should contemporary Turkey fall into pieces, then the only predominantly Islamic country of world importance that does not potentially look on the brink of a long civil war is Indonesia. The truth however remains that no one knows what the future holds in store for Turkey. But either of these two scenarios would yet again bequeath the fate of the world to Istanbul’s hands.

Update: Der Koosh correctly points out that I had in a previous draft misspelled the name of the city as 'Istambul'. I suppose that this misspelling begs the question: 'why should you trust someone to opine on a city which he can't even spell correctly?' The answer: you shouldn't. But I'll opine anyway..

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