Coup underway in Turkey; president says he’s still in charge

Coup underway in Turkey; president says he’s still in charge IMPORTANT QUESTION: Can this thug invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter?

Kip Hooker:

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  • Hats off To the people of Turkey!!!! Public Support to democracy pushes might tank back in. Great Nation

  • So far the coup has been put down, looks like a lot of people are on their way to the Gulag.

    • Hey, hey...Watch what you say about one of our "allies." ;-)

      On occasion, I'll watch some of these travel shows and several have talked about how different middle eastern countries are so great to visit.

      Fvck that, I wouldn't go within 500 miles of any country in that cesspool.

  • This is the fifth coup in Turkey in the last half century and NATO has never gotten involved before, but my fear is that this asshat we have in the White House, being so pro Musllm, will resent the ouster of an Islamist and demand that NATO respond. Let's hope everybody ignores him. Certainly France is too busy with its own problems, and the UK has BREXIT things to do, and Germany has a special relationship with Turkey, always has, so they hardly want to vote to send cruise missiles into the country, so... let's just hope Obama doesn't try to send the Marines into Turkey. I wouldn't put it past him.

    • This is really, really bad. While I personally hate Erdogan, he remains popular with a huge part of the Turkish electorate. His party, the AKP, has won historically large electoral victories, often governing alone (something difficult in a multi-party parliamentarian system). The military has historically positioned itself as the guardians of secularism in Turkey, and has brought down four other center-right and pro-islamic governments (three coups, one threatened coup). In the 90s Erdogan arrested a bunch of high ranking officers on probably trumped up charges of planning a coup, and that theoretically broke the army's political power. However, in recent years with the conflict in Syria and the renewed Kurdish conflict, the military has grown in power, and there is speculation that Erdogan had to start working directly with them to maintain his power.

      Neither outcome of the coup is a good one. It's clear that the army isn't united on this, which makes it likely that extremists in the army planned and executed this. If they win, we'll have a minority CHP (Republican People's Party) government ruling with the Turkish military in the background. The government will already be unpopular thanks to how it came into power, and how it allowed the army back into politics, and it's likely that extremists within the CHP will come to the forefront if the coup was done by extremists in the army. That doesn't bode well for Turkey's stability, as the AKP and Erdogan are broadly popular among large parts of the electorate. However, if Erdogan wins, say goodbye to whatever is left of Turkey's democracy. Erdogan was already using the thought of a coup as an excuse to restrict liberties, and a failed coup attempt, even by a minority of the army, will just be used further. If it turns out that some CHP members were involved, there could be ramifications for that political party (the CHP was founded by Ataturk and is the oldest party in Turkey, but banning political parties has been very common in Turkish political history).

      • "His party, the AKP, has won historically large electoral victories..."

        For perspective, he got 52 percent in the last election and he's closed newspapers, strong-armed the judicial system, and generally put in place a number of the same sort of despotic "reforms" that allowed Saddam Hussein to get 98% in every election. When his gig as PM was up he ran for president and made that position more powerful than the PM. So don't try to make the case that he's popular. He's an Islamist thug, like all Islamic leaders, angling to make himself permanent dictator. I'm not sure the country wouldn't have been better off under the military.

    • Offhand, I would say that internal unrest does not meet the threshold of NATO intervention.

    • That is what I fear. There is a child in the White House and there is no telling what he might do.