Makedonya resmen AB adayı oldu!

2004 yılında üyelik başvurusunda bulunan Makedonya resmen AB adayı oldu. Nedense bu çok önemli gelişme Türkiye'de satır aralarında geçiştirildi. Oysa üyelik sürecine Türkiye'den sonra başlayan ne kadar çok ülke olursa bizim için o kadar iyi, çünkü AB'nin mevcut sınırları dışında da genişlemeye hevesli olduğunu, var olanla yetinmeyeceğini gösteriyor. Makedonya'nın üyelik müzakerelerine başlaması birkaç yılı bulur. Ufak bir ülke olduğu için üç dört senede müzakereleri bitirmesi mümkün. Böylelikle Türkiye'yle eşzamanlı olarak AB üyesi olması mümkün. Tabi Bulgaristan, Makedonya ve inşallah bir gün Bosna Hersek ve Arnavutluk gibi Balkan ülkelerinin AB'ye üyeliği çok güzel gelişmeler. Böylece bu Balkan ülkelerinin hem varlığı ve istikrarı garantiye alınmış oluyor, hem de Türkiye ile aynı ekonomik ve siyasi birliğin içine yerleşiyor bu eski Osmanlı memleketleri. Bulgaristan ve Makedonya'da oldukça ciddi Türk ve Müslüman azınlıklar olduğunu, Bosna ve Arnavutluk'ta ise en yaygın dinin İslam olduğunu söylemeye gerek yok sanırım. Yeni Osmanlıcılık AB içinde hayat bulabilir. Bu sözümü copyright'ı ile beraber bir kenara yazın...

http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/dunya/3667969.asp?gid=6918 Aralık 2005AB’den Makedonya’ya aday ülke statüsüAB devlet ve hükümet başkanlarını Brüksel’de biraraya getiren AB zirvesinde Makedonya’ya aday ülke statüsü verilmesi onaylandı. AB’ye tam üyelik başvurusunu 22 Mart 2004 tarihinde yapan 2 milyon nüfuslu Makedonya’nın talebine ilişkin görüşünü geçen ay resmen açıklayan yürütme organı Komisyon, karar organı olan AB Konseyi’ne, bu ülkeye adaylık statüsü vermesini, tam üyelik müzakerelerinin ise katılım kriterlerine uyumun yeterli bir düzeye erişmesiyle başlatılmasını tavsiye etti. AB Komisyonu’nun genişlemeden sorumlu üyesi Olli Rehn, Makedonya’nın, yaşadığı büyük krizlerin ardından bugün istikrarlı bir demokrasi haline geldiğini, büyük çaba gösterdiğini, AB’ye uyum yolunda da büyük adımlar attığını söyledi.

Evaluating success of the war.

This is yet another article that I wrote in the Chicago Maroon many many years ago. Apparently, Chicago Maroon was very desperate to find authors that "weren't Sener Akturk." At least that's what another columnist, James Liu wrote in his online blog: "Hell, I used to write for Viewpoints, but only because I was in the office, and Tim was desperate for writers that weren't Sener Akturk", he says. http://jamesliu.coffeespoons.org/index.php?p=254 Tim in this quotation was the viewpoints editor when I started writing in the Viewpoints. There was a very strong Republican contingent in the newspaper, I think, or in any case they were way too WASPy conservative and mild liberal that they did not enjoy the fact that I wrote in their newspaper. This is just my conjecture. Nonetheless, they were also open-minded enough to let me write there (or perhaps scared that preventing me from writing there would get them in trouble with the university administration, I don't know). In any case, I liked the Chicago Maroon, despite the fact that I successfully avoided seeing anyone else who works there by not going to their office and not attending any of their events (except an annual gathering which I attended to confirm my choice of staying away...) In any case, I at least hope that my articles at the time did not earn me way too many "enemies" (since the letters to the editor are enough to clearly show that it earned me some very strong critics, but critics are fine and fun, but enemies are not), who dread even hearing my name today.

From www.chicagomaroon.com again.
Evaluating success of the war
By Sener Akturk
April 22, 2003 in Viewpoints
Was Operation Iraqi Freedom successful? The assessment of success or failure rests on the criteria for evaluation. By defining the purpose of an action in a particular way, you can attribute “success” to even the most disastrous mission, and vice versa.
The three-week long Iraqi resistance notwithstanding, the operation was a military success. An established nation-state of modest proportions with a highly centralized structure of decision-making and planning has been overwhelmed and conquered in three weeks.
If the purpose of the war on Iraq was to form an increasingly anti-American French-German-Russian axis, the war has been a success beyond measure. The Bush administration not only managed to force Germany and its two archrivals into an anti-American coalition that the traditional U.S. foreign policy tried to prevent for at least 50 years, but it was also able to alienate key regional allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both of which “were” long-standing client states of the U.S. before. The fact that they may now seek European or Russian patronage, or conduct independent foreign policy, should count as one of the greatest successes of the war on Iraq.
If the purpose of the war was to antagonize global public opinion as a whole, that purpose is also undoubtedly achieved. The Bush administration achieved the long-standing liberal and socialist dream of uniting the peoples of the world around a common cause and spirit—in opposing U.S. foreign policy!
If the purpose of the war was to dispose of the excess stockpiles of U.S. military equipment and to induce and insure further military spending on the part of the government, that purpose is certainly achieved. If the purpose of the war was to increase the defense budget, enlarge the budget deficit, and waste billions of dollars that could otherwise be used for providing social and economic benefits for the American people, that purpose is certainly achieved as well. President Bush immediately asked for some $50 billion more for defense spending, brining the overall budget closer to $400 billion!
If the purpose of the war was to distract attention from the socio-economic problems of the U.S., that purpose is accomplished without much disguise. A prolonged economic recession and the long-standing problems of glaring inequalities of all sorts are now compounded with greater economic problems, more severe transgressions of civil liberties, and increasing discrimination against American Muslims.
If the purpose of the war was to increase anti-American feelings especially in the Islamic world, to stop the migration of Muslims to the U.S., and to keep the U.S. at least religiously homogenous, then that purpose is also achieved.
If the purpose of the war on Iraq was to transform the American republic into an American empire, and to betray the very ideas that justified the American Revolution and the War of Independence against imperial Britain, that goal is being accomplished. The fears and concerns that intellectuals from both the left and the right were expressing with regards to the ominous transition from a republican democracy into an informal empire turned out to be true to a considerable extent. “American empire,” which was an unacceptable phrase for mainstream media to employ until recently, came to be widely used and celebrated. These may be the first signs of legitimating an explicitly imperialist discourse and policy.
However, if the purpose of the war was to make the world free from weapons of mass destruction, then Operation Iraqi Freedom doubly failed. It failed once when U.S. troops could not find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It failed a second time when countries like North Korea and Iran accelerated their efforts at acquiring nuclear weapons that, once acquired, would presumably insure that these countries are not attacked and invaded by the U.S. It may seem for the other rogue states that the failure of Iraq was that it did not acquire WMDs and instead cooperated with the U.N. to dispose of even the suspicious conventional weapons it had.
If the purpose of the war on Iraq was to expose the links between the Iraqi leadership and terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, to trace and even capture Osama bin Laden, the Operation Iraqi Freedom has failed miserably.
There is a final prospect of success that is yet to be tested. If the purpose of the war was to bring democracy to Iraq, as the name of the Operation Iraqi Freedom suggests, then it may be too early to judge its success or failure. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. mandate over Iraq will quickly whither away in favor of an Iraq where everyone has the right to vote and the right to run in the elections. We’ll see.

Baghdad 2025 (Bağdat 2025) three years later.

Here is something I wrote three years ago in the Chicago Maroon (the newspaper of the University of Chicago). It kind of a dystopian political fiction, inspired by a true story:

From www.chicagomaroon.com
Prudence and Foresight
By Sener Akturk
November 22, 2002 in Viewpoints
This is Baghdad: November 19, 2025. Three soldiers enlisted in the American contingent of the Republican Guards are patrolling Ar Rasafah, the section of the city that includes the U.S. embassy on the one side, and the Sheraton and Palestine hotels on the other, and faces the Presidential Palace shining on the other side of the Tigris. Seven fighter planes take off from the Rasheed airport, dancing in the sky, swiftly moving and showing off in a solemn celebration marking the 22nd anniversary of American occupation, or rather, the establishment of the so-called provisional American-Iraqi commonwealth.
Groups of Iraqi students flock out of Baghdad University. Seven students are huddled around one guy, who is reading a letter. They are crying and shouting in what appears to be a very happy moment. Jalal, the guy with the letter and a student in the Paul Wolfowitz-Mesoud Barzani Center for Democracy, has just won a scholarship from the National Endowment for Democracy to study at the Kennedy School of Government for two years. About two thousand Iraqi students attend universities in the U.S. annually. Most of them attend really lame colleges, but a couple dozen actually make it to Ivy League schools—and then there are the American universities in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Karkuk, and As Sulaymaniyah. If attending Harvard is the dream of the upper class youth, marrying one of the two hundred thousand American soldiers stationed in Iraq is the dream of the impoverished Iraqi girls. Two decades of intense indoctrination has created an inferiority complex in this formerly proud Middle Eastern nation. The descendants of Harun Rasheed, the inheritors of the glorious Abbasid legacy, now perceive themselves mostly as the pariahs of American society. But they don’t resent it. After all, the situation before the war was much worse: They were faced with starvation and death on a daily basis, due to both the extended sanctions, which lasted for 12 years, and the arbitrary detentions, purges, and massacres of the late Saddam Hussein. Those gloomy days are over now.
Iraqis, or rather the Iraqis who live in the urban centers, enjoy a standard of living much higher than their Middle Eastern neighbors. On the other hand, various American businesses—mostly engaged in oil extraction and refining, but also in such fields as chemicals and petrochemicals, agriculture and textiles—enjoy significant benefits. Everyone is happy! Or are they?
The current situation is totally unsustainable, both from the American and the Iraqi points of view. One of the worries is the “dark Arabs.” They live in the outskirts of Baghdad, in Shaykh Hamid and Al Kazimiyah, and other places whose names would not even be uttered in central Baghdad. They live in the north, south, west, and east; it is as if the entire civilized zone is surrounded by them. They are the ones who band into guerrillas and launch attacks on U.S. military installations. The first half of the year 2025 alone witnessed as many as 21 attacks by the Iraqi guerrillas that ended in casualties.
“Who and what are we protecting here?” a soldier from Durham, North Carolina, asks. A graduate of Duke University and one of the first round of soldiers recruited under the “universal draft” legislation earlier this year, he questions the wisdom of U.S. presence in the Middle East. With unemployment rates as high as 9% and the income gap wider than ever before in the U.S., almost everyone is questioning the prudence of American presence in the Middle East. Why has the U.S., in spite of amassing domestic problems, channeled its political will and economic resources abroad—especially in an obscure and remote place like the Middle East? Is it religion? Is it the interest of individual politicians? Oil consortiums? Defense industry? Maybe all of them; or maybe something overriding all the above—the American elite’s incommensurability with the material world, with the reality of economic, social, racial, and other problems at home.
The U.S. today, in the year 2002, appears as a man who got angry with what is happening at home with his wife, and, not having the courage to face his domestic problems, unleashed his anger on someone in the street. This someone was completely remote and obscure, someone completely unrelated to the problems he is facing. That someone was Iraq.
But looking back from 2025, did it change anything? “Look at this, man—we are guarding Chinese companies and business interests here. We should be working, giving substance to the American dream,” Jesse from Colbert, Alabama, said to me once. I think it was true when he said that six years ago, and today, even more so. It is mostly accepted by now that the 21st century is clearly “the Asian Century.” When the U.S. government finally declared that it could not subsidize even 5% of prescription drugs, Sumitomo Bank rushed with a relief package to save Washington’s face. Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have long since replaced New York and Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles in international political economy and culture.
Huntington’s demographic nightmares have also come true: despite billions of dollars flowing to missionary activity, and despite mass conversions to Christianity in Iraq, Africa, and elsewhere, Islam has replaced Western Christianity as the most popular religion of the world.
Even Europe, the most sluggish continent, is growing at a higher rate than the U.S., partly because it does not spend $340 billion on national defense annually. But its democracy and open society were not butchered by the second wave of McCarthyism that took over the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st century. This allowed for deliberation and prudence to take precedence in policy decisions, rather than prejudice and bipartisan conformity in launching a series of unprofitable wars.
The U.S. and the world in 2025 look very different indeed from the U.S. and the world in 1925. The land of democracy and freedom—and above all, the land of economic prosperity that everyone was looking up to with adulation—is long gone. Jeffersons and Lincolns are replaced with unknowns. The Congress is parceled by religious fanatics and special interest groups, blind to the welfare of the people they were meant to serve. As Shanghai rises and Berlin rejoices, the Mayflower dwindles by the Tigris.