The Boys (and Girls) in the Bubble (Updated)

A recent post goes after the Economist, and I quote it at length since the fact-check is itself a very good piece that explains Turkey’s major concern these days—the war the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is waging against Turkey. Here’s the unsigned post:

It’s not just the Economist that’s been getting it wrong. Since the beginning of the White House’s anti-ISIS campaign, it’s become one of the standard conceits in Western journalism as well as U.S. policymaking circles that NATO-member Turkey is a big problem, and the Kurds are freedom-fighting good guys leading in the war against ISIS. But to talk about “Kurds” in general makes no sense; there are lots of Kurdish political groupings, from the pro-U.S. Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, whose President Barzani is closely aligned with Turkey, to the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization that has been waging war against Turkey for 30 years—the PKK. And this Marxist terrorist group hardly represents all Kurds in Turkey, like Beybin Somuk, originally from Diyarbakir where the PKK is waging a brutal war against Turks and many Kurds.

I’m sitting with her and the rest of “The Kebab and Camel” staff at a dinner organized by friend and colleague Ceren Kenar, a print and broadcast journalist at Haberturk where she has a weekly newsmagazine show on Thursday nights. (Her most recent show featured a long interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose new book was published this week.) Other guests around the table include a number of Turkish journalists and analysts, as well as Aboud Dandachi, a Syrian activist and journalist who writes for the English-language Turkish press.

The consensus around the table is that the AKP government is doing a fairly good job. The often-reported creeping Islamism is nowhere in evidence—we’re dining in a newly gentrifying Istanbul neighborhood that owes its resurgence to the AKP. And the Turkish wine is flowing freely.

The other point, my companions argue, is that the AKP is the only party capable of governing Turkey right now. The largest opposition party is the Republican People’s party (CHP), which over the last decade has shown it is incapable of mounting a serious challenge to the AKP. Instead of changing its political formula to win more votes across Turkey, the CHP is content to sit on the sidelines and criticize the AKP without offering workable alternatives. For instance, the CHP opposes having Syrian refugees in the country or allowing them to work. It opposes taking aid from the EU to help Turkey support the refugees, and would send the refugees back if it could. On the domestic side, it opposes the AKP’s privatization of state companies and properties and opposes Erdogan’s massive infrastructure projects. And most bizarrely, it supports Syria’s Assad regime—which has been allied with the PKK for decades. Turkey’s Kurdish opposition party, the People’s Democratic party (HDP), is by most accounts the political wing of the PKK. In the summer, its charismatic leader Selahattin D appeared on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV to praise the “resistance.”

Maybe, as many foreign and domestic critics charge, Erdogan really is angling to become dictator and tank Turkish democracy. But it seems more likely the reason the AKP keeps winning at the polls is because its political rivals are incompetent and/or vicious. In any case, it’s not clear why AKP can’t get make its case better abroad. Why does it get so much bad notice in the Western press? As if in unison, my companions answer “the Cihangir bubble.” Cihangir is a fashionable neighborhood in Istanbul—”it’s like Soho,” says Ceren. And before I know it, we’re heading there for a party.

Virtually every country throughout the Middle East has its own bubble, where the Western press, NGO workers, diplomats, and other foreigners hang out, drink, eat, flirt, and gather information from like-minded locals, many of them educated in the same Western schools as the foreigners. It’s the international intelligentsia, a vaguely leftwing, deracinated political milieu that since it has no stake in the politics of the place where it’s based, can afford to imagine that hard-left parties or even resistance movements (a.k.a., terrorist organizations) are, if not basically progressive like themselves, then at least fighting the good fight against repressive structures.

I saw it most clearly in Lebanon in the mid-2000s, where foreign correspondents gathered in bars and restaurants in what was then Beirut’s pre-eminent nightlife area, Gemmayze. They’d come to drink and swap tales of their meetings with Hezbollah officials or fighters, who would invariably find their way into the stories they filed for major Western media outlets. Indeed, Hezbollah and its allies were key sources for those stories, so that American media consumers were getting their understanding of Lebanon largely through the lens of a terrorist group that was making war not only against American allies like Israel (or “Dixie,” as the really seasoned correspondents call it), but also against the Lebanese state and society.

Clearly the most consequential Middle East bubble in recent years was Cairo’s, located in the fashionable Zamalek district. The insularity of the Western press corps, NGO workers, and diplomats encouraged the coup against Hosni Mubarak insofar as the foreigners, informed by their local sources, shaped U.S. media coverage of the January 25 revolution. And it was largely the images of the uprising against a longtime American ally that prompted the White House to tell Mubarak to step down. The real tragedy of the Zamalek Bubble wasn’t just that the foreigners misunderstood the country’s political energies, but that many of the ostensibly liberal, young, upper-middle class and well-educated Egyptians who drove the revolution were so far removed from the reality of their 80 million neighbors that they too were fooled. They had no idea that they would be quickly overrun by the country’s real political engines—the Islamists and the military regime.

Israel also has a bubble—two of them. The smaller is in Jerusalem, in particular, the beautiful American Colony Hotel where the Western press and NGO workers concur with Israeli Arab leftists that the Jewish state ought to be dismantled. The larger bubble is in Tel Aviv, where the foreign crew mostly hangs out with Israeli leftists, journalists and intellectuals, as well as political officials. And it’s partly because of the Tel Aviv bubble that Western news outlets do such a bad job of reporting on Israeli politics. It’s the old Pauline Kael problem: If everyone you drink with hates Bibi, then how is it possible the guy keeps winning elections?

It’s the same here in Turkey. “How do you cover Turkish politics if you barely leave one area of Istanbul?” says Ceren. And if you don’t, the fact that the rest of Turkey continues to elect the AKP can only be explained by the notion that Erdogan rigs elections. Or that the majority of Turks don’t know their own best interests, and are helping sack Turkish democracy.

The reality is that the foreign press corps has done a bad job of explaining Turkey. “The international media lost the last four elections,” says Ceren. “They all predicted AKP would lose. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read about the end of Erdogan.” Actually, she is able to list the publications that have run stories the last few years about the end of Erdogan: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, the New Yorker, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, the American Interest, Al Monitor, etc.

Maybe that’s why everyone was having such a good time at the party—no matter what you write, no one will ever hold you accountable. If you’re wrong, it doesn’t matter—your job is safe, your expense account, too. In the bubble, it doesn’t matter if your reports or assessments bear no relation to objective reality, like the kind of reality that is revealed through democratic elections. No one will ever call you out, no matter how many times you get it wrong, not your bosses, not your readers, and certainly not your colleagues, who are just as wrong as you because they, too, speak to all the same people, and rarely leave the bubble.

Still, it was a fun party. The people were nice and smart and attractive. There was food and alcohol and maybe music, but there was so much talk and laughter I couldn’t tell. It was like Soho—in the 80s anyway. That’s what the international upper-middle class does—it replicates itself around the world so it’s comfortable anywhere it goes. They wouldn’t like to hear it, but McDonald’s is the model, just upscaled to upper-middle class tastes, in food, wine, sex, and of course politics. Thus, politics anywhere is like politics in America, with maybe a little rougher edge, and if it’s not just like that, then someone must be setting fire to democracy.

Update: One reader brings to our attention that THE WEEKLY STANDARD has also incorrectly predicted the demise of the AKP.