When thousands in the streets of the Ukrainian capital Kiev and the Georgian capital Tbilisi overthrew Soviet-style rulers, many felt warm in the embrace of the West.

Western support for the opposition — open and behind the scenes –  helped many people overcome fear of Soviet-style reprisals to stand for days outside Georgia’s parliament in 2003 or to pitch orange tents on Kiev’s main thoroughfare in late 2004, providing a lasting image of “people power” overthrowing a stale leadership.

Washington, or at least organisations with close political ties with the Bush administration, had courted opposition parties in both countries, coaching in the methods of democracy or securing “regime-change” as they sought to end the rules of President Leonid Kuchma and Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze. 

But the new leaders, and their teams, soon found that the attentions of an adoring West didn’t last for long. Ukraine’s team of President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko soon fell apart.                                                                                                                                                                                     The West grew tired of the constant bickering of the Ukrainian leaders, unable to agree on almost any policy, while a resurgent pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich, who lost a rerun of the presidential election, encouraged unity in his own party and rose in popularity.

In Georgia, Saakashvili cracked down on post-election protests last year and now some blame him for taking Tbilisi into a war it could never win.  

The war in South Ossetia has frightened Ukraine. Yushchenko was quick to turn to the United States, saying he considered “U.S. support for Ukraine to be very important”.

But has the West given up? Ukraine and Georgia have been promised membership of NATO one day but the alliance decided at a summit in April not to give them a road map to membership.

Tomas Valasek, director of foreign policy and defence at the Centre for European Reform, said Georgia could be ruled out of NATO membership for the time being. ”There will be allies who will say that this government is not creating stability, if anything it has done the exact opposite … you don’t want an ally in NATO that has a propensity to act the way that Saakashvili did.”

 But it could go either way for Ukraine.

“You could argue that no one will go to war over Ukraine, and then it will be difficult to invite Ukraine into NATO,” Valasek said. “Or the allies might decide this — that it is important that we prevent Russia acting irresponsibly in the neighbourhood, and it is important to send a message to say we will not be discouraged by what happened in Georgia.”

He tried to build relationships with other world leaders but where did it get him?

In 2001 President George W. Bush famously declared that he had looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got a sense of his soul. He invited the Russian leader to his parents’ seaside estate
in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the former Texas oilman and ex-KGB spy went fishing and ate lobster. Bush then visited the Russian leader at his vacation villa in the Black Sea resort in Sochi, all to repair a friendship that had developed cracks.

In another land far, far away Bush was trying to build ties with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf who decided after the Sept. 11 attacks that he was going to be “with,” rather than “against,” the United States in helping fight terrorism. Bush traveled to Islamabad and stood side-by-side with the Pakistani leader, who had taken control of the government through a coup years ago, and pledged U.S. support for the ally who was helping fight al Qaeda.

As Bush prepares to leave office in January, those friendships have taken a turn. Musharraf just resigned rather than face impeachment. Russia, now with Putin as prime minister and his protege as president, has sent forces into Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally in the region.

Asked whether he trusted Putin any more, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates replied: “Any more is an interesting add. I have never believed that one should make national security policy on the basis of trust. I think you make national security policy based on interests and on realities.”

Ever since Russia launched a massive counter-offensive in response to Georgia’s attempt to retake the pro-Russian, breakaway region of South Ossetia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been omnipresent in Western media. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, BBC and pretty much every other English-language TV channel to accuse Russia of penetrating Georgia far beyond Ossetia, planning an assault on the capital and plotting his overthrow. 

On Aug 11 he wrote an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal warning Georgia’s fall would mean the fall of the West.

At the start of the conflict the verdict was unequivocal. Saakashvili was winning the media war hands down. While the Kremlin’s press operation was largely silent, Saakashvili, an urbane, U.S.-educated lawyer, was assured in putting Georgia’s case. The world’s media and many political leaders swung behind him (in words if not deeds).

But is the tide turning? Saakashvili’s wall-to-wall media coverage may be starting to work against him and the Russians have become more nimble in dealing with the media and countering Saakashvili’s accusations.

Even close ally the United States has reined him in, knocking down his assertion that U.S. forces would take control of Georgia’s airports and ports.
Is Saakashvili’s well-oiled public relations machine starting to work against him? Is he losing sympathy internationally?

The Caucasus tinderbox is alight again. How far will the flames spread this time and what can the outside world - the United States, the European Union, NATO - do to extinguish them?

The strategic significance of this mountainous region stretches back through history.

To the west lies the Black Sea, to the east the Caspian, to the south the Mediterranean, Iran and Turkey.

In the past Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and the Russian tsars struggled to control its trade routes. Today Russia and the West are competing for influence over its energy pipelines carrying Caspian oil to world markets.

The Caucasus’ blue mountains and fiercely independent people have caught the imagination of Russian writers, Lermontov and Tolstoy. It has created only headaches for political leaders.

Georgia’s pro-Russian breakaway region South Ossetia is the latest battle ground in a long-running conflict.

Will the fighting, involving Russian and Georgian troops end there, or will another of Georgia’s breakaway regions Abkhazia seize the opportunity to press its claim for autonomy?

And what of Chechnya, a thorn in Russia’s side for nearly two centuries. Moscow sent in the troops to bring Chechnya to heel in 1994 and again in 1999. Will it try again to free itself of Moscow’s influence?

And what can the international community do to end the fighting. Dependent on Russian oil and gas, Europe has little or no room for manouevre. The United States has provided vocal backing of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, but he would be misguided to expect more. So who can put out the flames?

The temperature at the United Nations Security Council hasn’t been this high in years — and it’s not because the U.N. management raised the thermostat slightly to cut electricity costs. It’s due to the heated exchange of insults and accusations between Russia and the United States, which has reached a fever pitch reminiscent of the Cold War years.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Russia on Sunday of using the Georgian incursion into Georgia’s breakaway enclave of South Ossetia as an excuse for a massive military assault against its tiny pro-Western neighbor whose ultimate goal is “regime change” in Tbilisi. He also assailed Moscow for waging a “campaign of terror” against the civilian population of Georgia, a former Soviet republic.

Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin shot back that regime change is an “American invention” and suggested it was hypocritical of Washington to talk about attacks on civilians in light of what it has done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia. Churkin said Russia is only trying to defend its peacekeepers and protect civilians from Georgian “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” in South Ossetia, a small pro-Moscow province that threw off Tbilisi’s rule in the 1990s and has been managed by Russian troops since.

There’s a subtext to this dispute and it isn’t just the U.S. and European support for the declaration of independence of Kosovo, a former breakaway region of Serbia that seceded in February. Serbia and its ally Russia were both enraged by what they saw as an unjustified tearing away of a large chunk of Serbian territory in violation of international law. (Of course, the Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia — another Georgian breakaway region — took notice.)

Tensions between Russia and the United States have been simmering for a while.

When the United States announced it was planning to build a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic several years ago, then President Vladimir Putin was outraged. He dismissed U.S. statements that the shield was to guard against Iran, not Russia. In February 2007 at a security conference in Munich, Germany, Putin accused the United States of trying to create a “unipolar” world with Washington as its “one single master”. He made clear that Russia would not stand idly by while Washington tried to subjugate the planet. U.S. officials were taken aback at the force of Putin’s speech, which some said sounded like a declaration of a new Cold War.

Russia, richer than ever thanks to its massive oil and gas revenues, has made no attempt to hide its irritation at Washington’s staunch support for Georgia’s NATO aspirations. It views the expansion of NATO towards its borders as an encroachment on its sphere of influence.

Is it possible that when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili decided to go into South Ossetia and try to put it back under Tbilisi’s control, he gave Russian leaders a golden opportunity to severely punish Georgia’s pro-Western leadership and show the world that Russia is no longer the weak, economically devastated nation it was in the 1990s?

Perhaps the message is — Russia is back, it’s powerful and it won’t tolerate anyone messing around in its backyard.

Or is there another message here?

First on Zimbabwe, now on Darfur, Western countries have lost out at the U.N. Security Council to African states backed by China and Russia.

A Western attempt to get sanctions imposed on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government flopped on July 11. Three weeks later, when it came to renewing the mandate of peacekeepers in Darfur, Western countries bowed to demands to include wording that made clear the council would be ready to freeze any International Criminal Court indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide. The United States abstained, but that made no difference to the vote.

The question had long come up in Western countries as to how much Africa mattered to them given what often seemed intractable wars, famine, disease and poverty. From an African perspective, Western countries - often former colonial powers - have sometimes been accused of arrogance, meddling and ignorance of the continent’s realities.

But while Africa’s economies were once dependent on aid and finance from the West, it is China and other Asian countries that are now rushing to invest, helping to drive unprecedented growth. How Africa will deal with the new investment was a key topic at this week’s meeting in Mauritania with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. G8 countries, meanwhile, appear to be falling short on their promises of aid.

Investment from China comes without the conditions that Western countries or institutions might insist on. Meanwhile, China has been very ready to back African friends in diplomatic forums such as the United Nations. Russia is less important as an investor, but has taken a similar diplomatic line.

So how relevant does the West remain in Africa? And if its influence is waning then will that give African countries a chance to do a better job of solving problems their own way? Will it give a freer hand to leaders with little concern for democracy, human rights and government accountability?

What do you think?

Obamamania has hit Germany hard, but many here are wary of the big show the Democratic presidential candidate will put on in Berlin on Thursday, when his speech at the “Victory Column“ could attract hundreds of thousands.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Die Zeit magazine that the “young and open” Obama was raising hopes of a renewal in transatlantic relations and for that reason he should be heeded.

But Eckart von Klaeden, a foreign policy expert for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, recalled that Germans had seen big political events like Obama’s speech before. Hundreds of thousands had turned out for Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt during during German unification , but the message was clear: “Euphoria in politics is an invitation to disappointment.”

Obama is at least not like Bush, seen by many Germans as a war-monger, said Manfred Guellner, head of the Forsa opinion polling group. “There is a lot of hope associated with Obama. People hope he’ll be a peace, rather than a war president.” But the charismatic Democratic senator will find that if he asks Germany to get more involved militarily in Afghanistan or even Iraq, “the positive feeling towards him could change very quickly”.

Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, agreed that Iraq and Afghanistan could well lead to “dissonances” with Obama. “Germany’s Obamamania has disappointment written all over it,” he wrote in his Newsweek blog.

In fact, opined one official in Merkel’s office, it would be much better for Obama to give a low-key speech at a university or think tank. That way, the risk of disappointment will be lower.

Wolfgang Rossbach, a pensioner who lives near the Victory Column where Obama will speak, was rather more upbeat, saying: “He’s black and he’s new. And he promises to change things. I think that’s good.”

Thomas Schmania, sweeping the sidewalk near the Victory column,  expected Obama to try to create a “Kennedy moment” on Thursday, harking back to former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech in which he told a cheering Berlin audience: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”. “Obama won’t be able to top that. A line like that, you get that once in history,” he said.

So there you have it.  A new Kennedy moment or a disappointment waiting to happen. What do you think?

 Is the United States going soft on Iran?

 In the past President George W. Bush accused Tehran of belonging to an “axis of evil”, compared negotiations with its president to appeasing Adolf Hitler, and warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to World War Three.

His administration refused to join international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, which it suspects could be used to produce a nuclear bomb, unless Tehran halted enriching uranium. It pointedly declined to rule out military action if a diplomatic solution was not found.

Now, the United States is sending one of its top diplomats – along with representatives from other major powers — to talks in Geneva on Saturday with Iran to hear its response to an offer of financial and diplomatic incentives if Iran gives up its sensitive nuclear work.

And Britain’s Guardian newspaper says Washington will announce in the next month that it plans to establish a diplomatic present in Tehran for the first time in 30 years — a move the newspaper describes as a “remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush”.

U.S. officials say the decision to send senior diplomat William Burns to the Geneva talks sends a strong signal that the United States is committed to diplomacy, adding that Washington will only join full-blown negotiations if uranium enrichment stops.

 One hawkish former U.S. administration official sees it differently. “This is, and the evidence is plain for all to see, the total intellectual collapse of the Bush administration,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Reuters. 

He wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.”

He urges Washington to consider what cooperation it “will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran” but he doesn’t seem to think the U.S. administration is listening.

So is Washington preparing for a deal instead of war?

This might explain a flurry of regional diplomacy.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki heads for Turkey, shortly after meetings in Ankara by President George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley.
Burns will attend the Geneva meeting and then there’s the Guardian report.

Any deal has a logic that could benefit both sides. Analysts often point out overlapping regional interests. The two countries, say analysts, ultimately want a stable Iraq, share a loathing for the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and (despite Iran’s recent buddying up) are equally distrustful of Russia. (It’s no accident that Iran under the shah was Washington’s closest Middle East ally — bar Israel.)

And yet — there always seems to one of those — the wheels of this happy bandwagon could come off, and quickly.

Much hinges on what happens in Geneva when Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili sits down for talks with the European Union’s Javier Solana, the representative of world powers in Saturday’s Geneva talks. Solana will want to see signs that Iran is ready to consider suspending uranium enrichment, a process Tehran has so far refused to halt.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose opinion ultimately holds sway in Iran, spoke on Wednesday of Iran’s “red lines” — not a very promising statement on the face of it.

Overlapping interests, say analysts, may not be enough for Iran to rehabilitate ties with the “Great Satan”. Interests have overlapped for the past 30 years or so but the hostility has continued. (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has, however, said Iran would consider any overture to open an interests section).

And then, say some Western diplomats, there’s Israel. Will it take matters into its own hands after vowing not to let Iran get The Bomb? Diplomats say it might.

So there may be a shift in Washington. Some at least have detected it. Inside Iran, there has been an unusually public debate on how to handle the nuclear file even if there have also been some fairly uncompromising comments.

But are we really close to a breakthrough? And how long is Israel ready to wait? There’s still plenty to debate.

Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if the shield is deployed.

That phrase could have come straight out of the Soviet lexicon and seems more at home in the second half of the last century than now. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer called it psychological pressure to try to encourage opposition to the missile system among Europeans, and described it as “the same sort that was used in the 1980s by the Soviet Union when the United States deployed cruise missiles in Europe.”

We are, of course, a long way from the tensions of the Cold War. But the dispute is reminiscent of the war of words between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s over another missile defence system — the Strategic Defence Initiative proposed by Ronald Reagan. His dream of a partly space-based missile system, otherwise known as Star Wars after George Lucas’ 1977 film, never became a reality but the row over it plagued Soviet-U.S. relations for years.

The disagreement over the missile defence system that George W. Bush now wants to be partly based in Europe risks having a similar impact on U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps fittingly, it has been referred to as Son of Star Wars.

I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s when the dispute over Star Wars was at its height. The disagreements were clear. Reagan wanted to deploy a multi-billion-dollar land- and space-based shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the programme would disrupt the nuclear balance and fuel an arms race in space, and expressed  hope that Europe would not become “a testing-ground for the Pentagon’s doctrines of a limited nuclear war”. 

The disagreement led to the collapse of a 1986 superpower summit in Iceland.

When I was back in Moscow in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were at loggerheads over U.S. plans for a Star Wars-style missile defence umbrella, even though Clinton had pulled the plug on Star Wars in 1993. Moscow said plans to develop the new missile defence system would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement Moscow saw as a cornerstone of global security.

Similar issues hung over Vladimir Putin’s presidency and now threaten to strike a severe blow to hopes of an improvement in U.S.-Russian ties at the very start of Medvedev’s presidency.

Washington says it needs a missile defence system based partly in Europe to provide protection against any attack on  European or U.S. targets by rogue states such as Iran, which tested new long- and medium-range missiles on Wednesday. Russia says the missiles could threaten its own defences and might become a bigger threat over time it if the system expanded.

In the 1980s, Moscow was worried about a project that would have based missiles outside the former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It is now concerned about a system that would be even closer to home. A radar tracker is to be placed on Czech soil and, if a deal is reached with Warsaw, 10 interceptor missiles could be installed in Poland. Both Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia were members of the Warsaw Pact.

If Poland does not reach an agreement with the United States, Lithuania has been suggested an alternative site for the interceptors. That would be an even less welcome prospect for Moscow because the Baltic state was part of the Soviet Union. Little surprise, then, that Medvedev took a firm line on the issue in comments he made at the group of Eight summit in Japan.

But Moscow could risk shooting itself in the foot by reverting to rhetoric that harks back to the Cold War. Michal Kaminski, an aide to Polish President Lech Kaczynski said on Wednesday Russia’s reaction was unacceptable. He said it showed Poland should “strengthen our alliance with the United States because beyond our eastern border there are politicians who use a language we thought had vanished many years ago, the language of might and imperial ambitions.”
 
   

There can be few countries where the art of the coup is so finely honed as in Turkey, adapting as it does constantly to the spirit of the age, spawning over the decades its own enigmatic lexicon – the “Coup By Memorandum”, the “Post-Modern Coup”, the “Judicial Coup”, the ill-starred “e-Coup”.

Now newspapers (largely pro-government newspapers it should be said), gorge on tales of coup plots dubbed ‘Glove’, ‘Blonde Girl’ , ‘Moonlight’ and devote pages to a shadowy militant group code-named “Ergenekon”. Two retired military commanders, supposed members of the group, have been arrested at their homes on military compounds; a bold step by civilian authorities against an army that jealously guards its privileged status. Critics of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan call the arrests, also netting businessmen and journalists, a ‘revenge action’ for moves by the conservative judiciary to shut his AK party on charges of Islamist subversion.  Ertugrul Ozkok, editor of Hurriyet, a newspaper critical of the government ,  suggested authorities were riding roughshod over judicial processes. If  things are as they seem, he said, “none of us can feel comfortable any more. Any one of us can be taken from our homes and held in custody.”

Erdogan, facing a possible court ban from party politics, might also rest uneasily these sultry July nights.

Some coups have shaken Turkey to the core, others brought more subtle change. All have dealt a blow to democracy. A 1960 military putsch sent a prime minister and two other ministers to the gallows (as well as testing the unity of the forces themselves), four in the last 50 years have toppled governments. Turkish political folklore is rich with other conspiracies supposedly involving the “Deep State” – a nebulous fraternity of militant nationalists in the security services, military, judiciary and civil service.

Why such a rich “coup culture” in Turkey?

Perhaps it’s something to do with the way the rails of Turkish democracy snake along so narrow a ledge. To one side the abyss, the fear of division and chaos many Turks seem to carry within. To the other side the forbidding, towering heights of a powerful and distrusting Pashas, or generals. At every tight turn the train will scrape against the granite face of one or teeter precariously towards the edge of the other.

Now is such a turn.

The Pashas, through their Turkish military optics, see a nation seduced by Tayyip. Critics say the judiciary, civil service, universities, even the presidency and security services, are being opened to infiltration by Islamists. AK’s move to allow the Muslim headscarf in universities only underlines the perils.

Erdogan denies any Sharia ambitions. His party, embracing economic liberals, centrists and nationalists as well as religious conservatives, has steered a soundly pro-Western course (arguably far more pro-Western than that of the ‘secularist’ parties AK first swept from office in 2002 polls), winning international profile, building a strong economy and gaining support across the population.

And here, in Erdogan’s success and popularity, lies the Pashas’ dilemma.

In all their interventions and coups, the Pashas, for many the trusted safeguard of the secular order, have never acted flagrantly against popular will. The 1971 “Coup by Memorandum” came as a relief to millions after months of political violence and strikes. The armed forces chief handed what amounted to an ultimatum to the prime minister to restore order or it would “exercise its constitutional duty”. That did the job, memories of the bloody 1960 coup still being fresh. The premier stepped down and a provisional cabinet under military supervision duly restored order.

The 1980 “September 12 Coup” followed a resurgence of streetfighting between leftists and nationalists. The tanks rolled this time, the streets returned to calm, politicians were rounded up and left to cool their heels at detention centres on the Aegean coast.

By the 1990s, rolling tanks along the streets was less acceptable. The Pashas, however, again saw themselves compelled to act to defend the secular state of Ataturk against a government espousing Islamist ideas.

This was the genesis of the 1997 “Post-Modern Coup”.

Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan fell cleanly to a well-orchestrated campaign of pressure from the military in conjunction with business, the judiciary, media and political leaders. If a column of tanks did roll down a mainstreet somewhere, it was only by way of a salutary reminder of pre-post-modern days. Democracy might have emerged that much stronger though, some say, if the Pashas had kept their nerve and allowed Erbakan to fall under the weight of his own folly.
Erdogan’s hold on power is, in any case, surer.

Erbakan enjoyed only about 20 percent support when elected and his popularity had slumped in office. Erdogan garnered 47 percent support at the 2007 election after a tense wrangle with the General Staff that became known as the “e-Coup” affair. Just before midnight on April 27, the armed forces General Staff posted a declaration on its website cautioning Erdogan, in so many words, against putting up his right-hand man, Abdullah Gul, as president. Erdogan did the unthinkable and publicly, if courteously, admonished the military the following day. His gamble then in calling the 2007 election greatly strengthened his position. Gul was duly installed as president. Breathtaking events.

History suggests the greatest fear haunting the military at such times is that of division; division – ethnic and political — in the country and division in the armed forces themselves. The image of the police officers encroaching on military domain to arrest two generals was poignant, even if entirely within the law.

Conspiracy theorists in Turkey – and there are very many — would see the only way out for the “Deep State” in first robbing Erdogan of his supreme weapon, his popularity.

This, then, is where the Ergenekon allegations, regardless of facts yet to be established, have for many the irresistible ring of truth.

Newspapers speak of a plan to unleash a campaign of mass protests, bombings and shootings this month pitching the country into chaos and turning the population against Erdogan. Today brought an armed attack at the United States’ Istanbul mission that killed three policemen and three gunmen.

The military would then be relieved of any internal debate and forced to intervene to rescue the country. Erdogan would be gone, the country saved from an Islamist threat and the military effectively restored to the position of privilege which has been eroded by democratic reforms in the last six years. The risks would be enormous for Turkey, the outcome a tragedy for Turkish democracy and the country’s European mission.

Appropriately, the name “Ergenekon” goes to the heart of Turkishness.

In Turkish mythology, Ergenekon was a deep valley in which the ancient Turks lived, trapped and isolated from the world for four centuries, until a grey wolf led them out through a hidden pass. Free then to thrive, they went on to defeat their enemies and take their rightful place as a noble nation.

Erdogan will know that if he abandons caution and submits too much, too recklessly, to his Islamist wing, the population, those rising middle classes, will almost certainly turn against him. The game will be up. The Pashas’ instinct and their role is to suspect the worst of the politician, but while they seek to ‘guide’ events, they know confrontation could devastate the economy and leave them with a chalice they don’t cherish. Beyond the General Staff, in the darker recesses of the Deep State, there may be those less temperate. Government and military, courts and commentators might do well to stay their hand and keep a cool head these summer months; and remember the long years in Ergenekon.