No one will confuse me for a regular defender of the Turkish government or the ruling AKP, both of which I have criticized often enough, but I have been finding Soner Cagaptay’s one-man crusade to make Americans distrust Turkey quite annoying. A few months ago, he was complaining in Newsweek that the AKP was stoking anti-Americanism, as if the Turks’ attitudes toward the U.S. had declined so precipitously over the last six years for no other reason beside propaganda by Erdogan’s government. Even if it is true that Erdogan and the AKP are exploiting Turkish anger towards the U.S., this does not explain why Turks have gone from holding generally positive views of the U.S. to being among the most “anti-American” in the world.

Cagaptay’s older article flattered the popular American conceit that if an entire nation suddenly sours on the United States, or more specifically on U.S. policy, it is the fault of the other nation’s government and, no doubt, some deep cultural malady, feeling of inferiority/envy or displaced dissatisfaction with their own quality of life. In other words, anti-Americanism is something that just happens, or it is created by foreign governments for their own purposes; it cannot be a reaction, much less a reasonable reaction, to anything our government does. This is axiomatic. The new article aims to do its best to stoke anti-Turkish feelings by portraying the ruling party and the Turkish government as being too cozy with the “wrong” regimes, and therefore somehow increasingly hostile to the West. The possibility that the political and strategic calculations of an allied government about which regimes are actually worthy of pariah status does not seem to occur to Cagaptay.

Increased tensions in the Israeli-Turkish relationship over Lebanon and Gaza do not indicate to Cagaptay that perhaps it is Israel is endangering a valuable military and political alliance with a Muslim country by engaging in counterproductive, wrongheaded policies toward its Muslim subjects. This cannot be, because Israel, like the U.S., cannot actually be generating the ill feeling toward it by its actions–criticism and opposition to its actions can only be explained by deep cultural reasons, irrational hatred or crass motives (or some combination of the three). Naturally, our boosting of Kurdistan and the shelter the PKK has been finding in northern Iraq go almost entirely unmentioned when understanding why Turkey might find neighbors, such as Iran, that have similar concerns about Kurdish separatism and terrorism to be worth cultivating.

Cagaptay’s list of Turkey’s sins is not very damning. Here was one item:

Last July in Istanbul, for example, I witnessed Turkish joy over the capture of Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the “butcher of Bosnia” who was indicted for genocide at The Hague tribunal. Just days later, however, the AKP welcomed Omar Al-Bashir, the even bigger butcher of Darfur. Ironically, the visit of the Sudanese president to Turkey coincided with The Hague court’s prosecutor request that Mr. Al-Bashir be arrested for committing genocide in Darfur.

Well, I suppose this might be ironic, but I don’t see how. It seems to me that it was just an accident of timing. Of course Turkey welcomed the capture of Karadzic. Turkey was and is a leading sponsor of the Bosnian Muslims, and they have been more than pleased to assist in every Western and NATO-led humiliation of the Serbs over the past fifteen years or so. Cagaptay seems to think that Turkish jubilation at the capture of Karadzic had something to do with high principle; maybe for some Turks this was the case. More likely, much more direct religious and historic ties with Bosnian Muslims made the Turkish government and Turkish public sympathetic with their cause to a degree that they simply do not feel for Darfuris. No doubt it helped that the Bosnian Muslims were fighting against people with whom Turks have no sympathy and against whom they have old resentments. Arab militias pitted against Darfuri tribes involve no such memories or feelings, and if anything there is likely to be more official sympathy for Khartoum’s position as a central government that portrays itself simply as brutally suppressing separatist rebellion. Given Turkey’s troubles with the PKK over the years, Ankara is unlikely to take the side of separatists and rebels against the government of another Muslim country. The different reaction to Bashir might suggest that official views of war crimes and genocide change according to political necessity–imagine that. It’s almost as if different standards were being applied arbitrarily and moralizing rhetoric was being applied selectively and opportunistically, but the Turkish government would never do that, would it?

The AKP government’s other errors of late? Treating Ahmadinejad deferentially when he was on a state visit, and cultivating good relations with what is now its largest trading partner, Russia. Clearly, these are terrible and evil acts! How dare Turkey develop good relations with its neighbors and pursue its economic interests! Don’t they know that they are our frontline marcher lord state, and it is their job to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of our misguided anti-Russian and anti-Iranian policies? Western media outlets love having “experts” on other countries paint the foreign governments as somehow threatening or malevolent, but Cagaptay has to work overtime to make the AKP government seem even minimally objectionable.