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Левиафан выпуск 3

An ideal Islamic partner country for usa

Although the more recent developments obviously show that there has been clearly no such shift, it might yet be worthwhile to look into the same issue from the viewpoint of USA during the same period. The military failures of the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the attack of Israel against Hisboullah in 2006 had made the following clear to the US Administration: Military superiority is a must and a big advantage in becoming the master of the world, but it does not sufice. One needs to change the image of the US Administration towards the world as well. In fact, image making has always been accompanying US foreign policy. Just remember the US Foreign Ministers within the last ifteen years: Madeleine Allbright female, Colin Powell black, Condoleeza Rice both female and black, and now Barack Obama black, Hillary Clinton female. Image making

is useful, but not suficient either. What USA really lacks is the diplomatic, social and cultural channels that will enable it to directly iniltrate into an Islamic country to create a socio-political basis that can be made to internalize the US plans concerning that country. The way out is then to create a «model Islamic country» that will do all this that USA itself cannot do on behalf of the US. It is precisely this role that the AKP Administration in Turkey is playing.

«Moderate Islam» is an American invention. A moderately Islamic country is by deinition a country that looks socially and culturally as an Islamic country from outside, which, however, also has gone through a reinterpretation of Koran such that Islam is freed of all the elements that may form an obstacle to the integration of that country to the market system of the West. In the context of Turkey, moderate Islam is meant as a substitute for Kemalism. On the one hand, it is used not only to liquidate Kemalism from the state apparatus, but also to erase all the traces of the Kemalist Revolution from every sphere of social life. On the other hand, a «model country of moderate Islam» is a very useful tool for implementing the US plans concerning the Islamic World. However, if this model country looks like a faithful follower of all the US stances in its foreign policy, then it will have no credibility in the eyes of the other Islamic countries and thus cannot gain the position of a «regional leader». So these are the main guidelines of the scenario written for Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Giil - the former of whom is known to have proudly declared to be a Co-Chair of the Greater Middle East Project of the US in several different occasions, and the latter of whom again proudly confessed to have signed a confidential two-page nine-item agreement with Colin Powell, which speciies what falls upon Turkey in implementing the Greater Midle East Project.