Wisdom and Hubris in Turkey and Iraq

Successful leaders know humility. While still offering their people hope for the future, they match their ambitions to their means. They know when to stand firm and when to give a little, be tolerant and share power with others. Tragedy looms when, after some time in power, such leaders fall prey to hubris. They lose their humility and forget the strategies that propelled them to greatness in the first place.  An example from Turkey and Iraq can show what the sequence of events can look like. 

At the beginning of its time in power, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) struck a very different tone than previous Islamic-themed parties in Turkey. AKP leaders reassured everyone, from the Kemalist elite in the country to allies abroad, that they were moderates. They advocated secularism in the American sense of the term, including individuals’ personal right to be secular or religious. They insisted that they had no interest in turning Turkey away from its Western orientation or suppressing anyone’s rights. Their moderation attracted international investments and presided over an increasingly thriving economy, and voters rewarded them for this. Their “Zero problems with neighbors policy” seemed to be working, and even the domestic conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seemed on the verge of a solution.

The last several years of AKP rule, however – especially after the Turkish military appeared to have retreated out of politics once and for all -- saw the previous era’s moderation cast aside. AKP leaders began to make increasingly forceful pronouncements on everything, from “correct” lifestyles in Turkey to the legitimacy of governments all across the region. Governance from Ankara appeared to grow more unilateral, awarding business contracts only to “friends” and riding rough shod over the interests, preferences and even rights of those not aligned with the ruling elite. Although the Gezi Park protests started over a badly conceived, unilateral plan to replace one of modern Istanbul’s last green spaces with a shopping mall and replica Ottoman barracks (built by the government’s political friends, no doubt), the protests spread to the rest of the country because of an increasingly immoderate style of governance. When a corruption scandal threatened to take down ministers who had become too greedy, the government responded by firing the corruption investigators and passing new legislation to shield itself from scrutiny. Media outlets expressing too critical a response to these developments saw themselves increasingly muzzled.

Now Turkish society finds itself extremely polarized, with outbreaks of violence more and more common again. Turkey appears nearly friendless in the region, and even NATO allies have begun openly wondering about their relationship with Ankara. Economic growth is slowing as investors, already rattled by the AKP’s increasingly conspiracy-obsessed  rhetoric, react to the instability. Today no one apart from the inner circle of the AKP talks about Turkey serving as a model for other countries. As one top advisor to President Erdogan confidently predicts Turkish superpower status on par with the United States and China by 2023, most others worry that the last decade’s progress is in free fall.

The recent Iraqi example of wisdom followed by hubris can be described much more succinctly. A formerly unknown, modest Nuri al-Maliki saw a lot of successes during his first term in office. Initially cautious in his new position, Mr. Maliki responded to cajoling and prodding from the Americans to share power with the Kurds, Sunnis and other Shiites in the country. By 2010, the insurgency in Iraq appeared very much under control.  As soon as the Americans withdrew, however (both militarily and by way of a much less involved new president in the White House), Mr. Maliki lost his earlier wisdom. He stopped any semblance of compromise with the Kurds and set about consolidating all power in his own hands.  He also went after Sunni Arabs, starting with arrest warrants for the country’s highest ranking Sunni politicians and ending with brutal crackdowns on protests across the Sunni governorates. This set the stage for the comeback of al Qaeda in Iraq – now known as the Islamic State.

Contemporary Kurdish leaders, in contrast, have matched their ambitions to their means much more carefully. In Iraq the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan agreed to share power in a reunified government, and then made room for the Kurdish Islamic parties and the Gorran Movement. For years, leaders in Erbil refused Turkish pressure to act militarily against the PKK, despite having their own serious rivalry with the group. Erbil also pursued a moderate, reassuring foreign policy and promised not to cause their neighbors any problems. The Kurds agreed to remain in Iraq and share their oil revenues with the rest of the country, but with the caveat of not compromising on their constitutional rights (such as managing their oil and gas resources themselves). In other parts of Kurdistan, the lead Kurdish movements sought peace talks and Kurdish rights within states rather than the maximalist demands one sees from dissident groups elsewhere in the region.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).

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