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A strategic blowback
The strongest evidence of this shift is that the United Statess early military victory in Iraq proved a mirage and the ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan is strategically lost (as Paul Rogers consistently and rightly has argued in his openDemocracy column [9]). In effect, these two wars have ended the unipolar moment. Instead, the wars have engendered a regional order which is both far from the USs strategic preferences and presents a challenge to policy-makers and analysts alike. The US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - as well as Israels against Lebanon [10] (July-August 2006) and Gaza [11] (December 2008-January 2009) - have had damaging strategic consequences for their architects in four broad ways. First, the large-scale destruction and deaths involved in these campaigns (especially of civilians) have been a gift to Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah [12] (whose actions are nonetheless tempered by their national political ambitions in Palestine and Lebanon respectively) but also to al-Qaida-type groups divorced from any regulatory context. The growing incidence of suicide-bombing and other terrorist incidents - especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also (it seems probable) in cases such as the Kampala explosions [13] on 11 July 2010 - is the most tangible example of how these wars have knock-on effects [14] and of how violence has effectively been globalised. Second, the extension of Afghanistans war into Pakistan - reflected in the escalation of US drone-attacks [15] on Pakistani territory - has contributed to the hollowing out of Pakistans state sovereignty, thus compromising Islamabads ability to subdue domestic fundamentalist (and pro-Taliban) movements. The fact that the United States overtly demands Pakistans support in the
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A Turkish lesson
Turkeys repositioning within the greater west Asian area is the most prominent example of this emerging regional order. True, the reorientation [22] of Turkish foreign policies towards the Arab and Muslim worlds has a lot to do with domestic changes within Turkey, primarily the emergence of a new middle class that is sensitive to issues affecting the umma [23] (Islamic nation). This is the constituency that in 2002 brought to power Recep Tayyip Erdogans Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice & Development Party / AKP). But three broad regional trends have also dragged the modern Turkish state away from its historic orientation towards US strategic interests: * the transnational threats of Kurdish separatist movements, which have provoked the Turkish armed forces [24] to repeated incursions into northern Iraq by in pursuit of PKK militants * the human suffering of the Palestinian population in Gaza, which has become a rallying-point of Turkeys Islamist media. The Israeli commando-raid [25] on the aid-flotilla bound for Gaza on 31 May 2010, in which Turkish activists were killed, is only the most high-profile incident [26] reinforcing Turkeys engagement with the Palestinian cause. It is notable that prime minister Erdogan has repeatedly designated Hamas both the democratically elected government of Palestine and (as in a speech [27] in the traditionalist city of Konya) a resistance movement (see Kerem Oktem, Turkey and Israel: ends and beginnings [28], 10 December 2009). * the unresolved crisis over Irans contested nuclear [29] plans, which both frustrates Turkish efforts to forge even closer business links with Tehran (especially in the hydrocarbon sector) and encourages Ankara to pursue closer and more sympathetic [30] dialogue with its eastern neighbour. Erdogan joined the presidents of Iran and Brazil, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to pre-empt a further round of United Nations sanctions; their Tehran declaration, announced [31] on 17 May 2010, is clearly a rebuff to the United States (see Mariano Aguirre, Brazil-Turkey and Iran: a new global balance [32], 2 June 2010). Today, it is Erdogan even more than Ahmadinejad who challenges Israel on the issue of Palestine. The Turkish case is but one example of how the greater west Asian area has its own regional dynamics that go beyond [33] the unipolar logic. This has both strategic and analytical consequences (see A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them beyond Orientalism [34]
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