Numerous observers of the failed coup in Turkey – including some of our own readers – suspect that Erdogan staged the event in order to crack down on opponents of his Islamization agenda.

Rick Moran at American Thinker concludes in an article titled Did Erdogan Stage The Coup To Crack Down On His Opponents?, which explores the accusation:

The small number of troops involved, the incompetent prosecution of the coup, and the apparent lack of planning by the plotters suggest an extremely amateur attempt to overthrow Erdogan. But might Erdogan’s agents have goaded the plotters into taking action? It’s a seductive theory that has no evidence to back it up.

Even if there was an Erdogan plot, there must have been many participants in the uprising who knew nothing of it and strove sincerely for success.

What is certain is that Erdogan gained a significant victory, not just for himself but also for our enemy, Islam.  

Ralph Peters writes at Fox News Opinion:

Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society.  Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of Europe.

Our leaders no longer do their basic homework.The media relies on experts-by-Wikipedia. Except for PC platitudes, our schools ignore the world beyond our shores. Deluged with unreliable information, citizens succumb to the new superstitions of the digital age.

So a great country is destroyed by Islamist hardliners before our eyes—and our president praises its “democracy”. 

That tragically failed coup was a forlorn hope, not an attempt to take over a country. Turkey is not a banana republic in which the military grasps the reins for its own profit.  For almost a century, the Turkish armed forces have been the guardians of the country’s secular constitution. Most recently, coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 (with “non-coup” pressure in 1997) saw the military intervene to prevent the country’s collapse.

Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.

Each time, the military returned the government to civilian rule as soon as that proved practical. …

Friday night, mid-grade officers led a desperate effort to rescue their country again. They failed. The West cheered. Soon enough, we’ll mourn.

The coup leaders made disastrous mistakes, the worst of which was to imagine that the absence of President Erdogan from Ankara, the capital, presented the perfect opportunity.  Wrong.  In a coup, the key is to seize the leaders you mean to overthrow (as well as control of the media).  Instead of fleeing into exile, Erdogan was able to return in triumph.

So who is the man our own president rushed to support because he was “democratically elected”? Recep Tayyip Erdogan is openly Islamist and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Obama appears to believe represents the best hope for the Middle East. But the difference between ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one of purpose, but merely of manners: Muslim Brothers wash the blood off their hands before they sit down to dinner with their dupes.

With barely a murmured “Tut-tut!” from Western leaders, Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s secular constitution (which the military is duty-bound to protect).  His “democracy” resembles Putin’s, not ours. Key opposition figures have been driven into exile or banned. Opposition parties have been suppressed. Recent elections have not been held so much as staged.  And Erdogan has torn the fresh scab from the Kurdish wound, fostering civil war in Turkey’s southeast for his own political advantage.

Erdogan has packed Turkey’s courts with Islamists.  He appointed pliant, pro-Islamist generals and admirals, while staging show trials of those of whom he wished to rid the country.  He has de facto, if not yet de jure, curtailed women’s freedoms.  He dissolved the wall between mosque and state (Friday night, he used mosques’ loudspeakers to call his supporters into the streets).  Not least, he had long allowed foreign fighters to transit Turkey to join ISIS and has aggressively backed other extremists whom he believed he could manage.

And his diplomatic extortion racket has degraded our own military efforts against ISIS.

That’s the man President Obama supports.

And the leaders of the ill-fated coup? What did they stand for?  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy and a secular constitution.  One of the great men of the last century, Ataturk (an innovative general by background) pulled Turkey from the wreckage of World War One, abolished the caliphate, suppressed fanatical religious orders, gave women legal rights and social protections, banned the veil, promoted secular education for all citizens of Turkey, strongly advocated Westernization and modernization … and promoted a democratic future.

The officers who led the collapsed coup stood for all those things. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry opposed them.

By Saturday morning, it was clear that the mullahs and mobs behind Erdogan had won. Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.

NATO, which operates by consensus, will find itself embracing a poisonous snake.  New crises will reawaken old fears in southeastern Europe, which western European states will dismiss condescendingly, further crippling the badly limping European Union.  Syria will continue to bleed.  And educated, secular Turks will find themselves in a situation like unto that of German liberals in the 1930s.  We may see new and unexpected wars.

A desperate, ill-planned coup has failed in Turkey. Here comes the darkness. 

Yes – unless the West starts fighting back under new American leadership.

A nationwide curfew was imposed as a section of the armed forces claimed to have taken the country over. The coup leaders seized national television and the phone network. Gunfire was heard in Ankara and military jets flew low over Ankara and Istanbul where the bridges over the Bosphorus were blocked. In Istanbul, Turkish Gendarmerie and soldiers blocked entrances to bridges over the Bosphorus while tanks blocked Ataturk airport. A TV announcer read out a statement saying that a “peace committee” had taken over the country against autocratic rule and will write a new constitution restoring democracy, whose institutions have been eroded by autocratic rule, and restore secular law.

It was a great aim, a brave attempt – but it failed.

Now Turkey is less likely to be secular and democratic. 

DebkaFile, which we quoted above, assesses the event and analyses why the attempted coup failed:

The Turkish armed forces’ attempt to overthrow the authoritarian rule of President Tayyip Erdogan was largely extinguished Saturday morning July 16 after less than 24 hours – due to three major miscalculations:

1. They first seized the country’s power centers and state television when their first priority should have been to immobilize Erdogan who was out of the capital on vacation.

2. Although out of control in Ankara and Istanbul, he used his mobile phone to reassert his authority through a private television station and called on the people to take to the streets in protest against the plotters. Civilians responded by surrounding the tanks and tying them down until loyal troops moved in.

3. They relied too heavily on the air force to cow the regime, the jets zooming low over the two main cities while the two main airports were closed.

It was soon evident that control of Turkey’s skies was no guarantee of control of the ground. Indeed, the coup leaders did not prevent him from landing at Ataturk airport and declaring immediately that he was in charge, demonstrating that he was on top of events.

In the clashes that followed, Gen. Umit Dundar, the newly appointed acting chief of the general staff, said more than 190 people died in clashes: 41 police officers, two soldiers, 47 civilians and 104 people described as ‘‘coup plotters”. Dundar said officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units were mainly involved in the attempt.

At the same, the attempt by part of the Turkish armed forces to topple Erdogan in the name of democracy and the return of “secular law” was impressive and evidence of social and political malaise under his rule. It was led by at least half a dozen generals, as may be judged the arrest of Gen. Memduh Hakbilen, the chief of staff of Turkey’s command for the important Aegean region, among the more than 1,500 alleged plotters and the suspension of another five generals.

That elements of the air force joined the attempted uprising is unprecedented in Turkey, whose army is NATO’s second largest.

Erdogan will no doubt want to know why his MIT intelligence failed to scent the conspiracy afoot.

He will certainly lose no time in executing a massive purge of Turkey’s armed forces, and especially the air force and intelligence arms, after accusing the coup leaders of treason.

Erdogan has been steadily taking steps to re-create an Islamic state. He wants to reverse the modernizing reforms that Kemal Ataturk effected after Turkey, as an ally of Germany, was defeated in the First World War. He dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire, perhaps seeing himself as Sultan (who was also titled Caliph). He has built himself a new palace in Ankara, and announced that it will be the center of government.

Predictably, President Obama is on the side of the would-be dictator against the side that reached for democracy. 

Erdogan’s new presidential palace in Ankara

President Erdogan in his new palace

President Erdogan among guards dressed in the uniforms of Ottoman soldiers