Tags: 9-11 | NATO | Turkey

Do you remember the school-days world political maps, the ones the teacher would pull down from the DaVinci-esque contraption mounted above the chalkboard, which revealed a world seperated by color - the great pinkish mass of the former Soviet Union descending on helpless green and blue Europe like its mascot bear?

Prodded from deep within my subconcious by ubiquitous photos of the twin towers and, more alarmingly by replayed footage of the Tokyo subway attack, those memories returned yet again last night and I am sick from them.

I dozed fitfully on the flight from Prague to Brussels and again on the flight from Brussels to Turkey. Not until we left the septic, soul-less halls of the last airport and my feet kicked pebbles along the dilapidated streets of Istanbul did I feel safe again.

I felt so safe in fact that, bolstered by the bright, cloudless sky, I had to wonder at it all. Underneath the smiling face of the 66 million-strong, secular Turkish nation which is a member of NATO and aspires to join the EU, there is a Muslim nation (98 percent) for whom it is a mortal sin to declare the war on other Muslims in which the NATO pact has essentially implicated them.

There is also a nation hovering on the brink of prosperity, whose delicate economy was seriously damaged as a result of involvement in the war against Iraq. This delicate balance in many ways typifies the mission the NATO alliance faces in coming months.

Iran, one of Turkey's main trading partners, severed many economic ties due to Turkish complicity in the NATO action - creating a void which was not filled by legitimate increases in Western trade, merely bandaged by degrading, dependancy-producing aid packages and shouldering them with a $109 billion foreign debt.

Here is a possible model of diplomacy on a human scale - where nationhood must never become entirely Eastern or entirely Western at the risk of disappearing, where questions of policy must occasionaly be made with an element of brutality in order to safeguard that precious individuality. Just as many of NATO's questions raised by this recent attack will be posed in Central Asia, many of the most sensible answers may well come from Turkey.

The vast majority of Turks take a strong position against fanatacism of any kind, a sensible approach given their long history of dealing with terrorists on their own soil. This stance is shaken by the bond they feel with other Muslim peoples who, for many reasons which they see as legitimate, feel that their very freedom and religion are under attack.

Just three days after the attack the popular daily "Sabah", or "Morning", ran a slew of tasteless, composited photos which have spread over the internet in the past few weeks, including one of the second plane slamming into the twin towers.

The caption above the photo of the burning towers reads, "American Airlines takes you straight to your office!" (This "joke", by the way, originated in America.) Typical of the dichotomy that is modern Turkey, the paper also ran detailed plans and reported locations of the Taliban and bin Laden's fortified bunkers, condemning bin Laden as a trickster, frustrated oligarch and spoiled rich kid. Mehmet, who hails from Eastern Turkey, works in a guesthouse in Istanbul, allowing him a free place to stay while he studies Turkish language at the University.

"There are many groups of people who do not want Turkey to be a strong country again," he explains. "Because of the many ethnic groups here, we have had no choice but to learn to live together. Some people are afraid of this kind of unity spreading in the Muslim world, especially when the result is a prosperous nation."

Asked how he feels about possible Turkish involvement in a war against other Muslim states as part of its NATO agreement, his face clouds for a moment.

"Of course we feel very strongly about terrorists. It has been a problem for Turkey for a very long time. At the same time, especially in the east of our country, there is sympathy for the many poor and innocent people who could be punished for something that isn't their fault. I don't think anyone really wants that to happen."

"These terrorists use the populations of poor and ignorant people as a tool for their own success," says Gokberk, a student of architecture at Istanbul University. "But it isn't a surprise to see some of the people celebrating this as a victory. They have been at war for a long time, and they know who their enemy is."

As interviews with Osama bin Laden and blurbs from President Bush flash across the tiny television mounted outside the bus station in Fethiye, Southern Turkey, with at least fifty pairs of eyes glued to its flickering light, Gurk echoes the sentiments heard at every turn.

"I am very sorry about this," he says, "It is a great tragedy."

One way to avoid an even greater tragedy would be to seriously enlist the aid; diplomatic as well as military, of Turkey - a nation which has had some success in this arena and whose continuing peace and prosperity hangs on the delicate thread of Western self-control.

As NATO expands so does its mandate to grant each new member full partnership in world diplomacy, not just a chance to throw sons to early and violent graves. As American warplanes swiftly mass in Central Asia - deep in the troubled heart of the former Soviet Republics - Turkey's voice is conspicuously absent from the diplomacy making it all happen.

There has been much talk of a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, but no suggestion of averting the conditions which breed fanatical, fascist leaders in the first place. A Western military presence in Central Asia tills the soil in which people like Osama bin Laden plant their seeds.

Vladimir Putin's Russia, which has striven with laughable persistance to legitimize their genocide in Chechnya as a war on terrorism, is already reaping the ill-concieved rewards of playing the game. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was quoted by the Guardian as saying, "As regards Chechnya, there will be and must be a more differentiated evaluation in world opinion," a virtual guaruntee that the torture and killing there will continue, if not increase.

Is not a Turkish secular pseudo-democracy a better model for Chechnya than the alternative: the contagious zone of lawlessness and breeding ground for extreme fundamentalism which Russia is busy engineering?

The enemy we've created for ourselves in fanatical Islamism - and make no mistake, we have created them - is free upon the earth and, like Janis Joplin said, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Rather than serving as a band-aid, NATO could use this tragic call to action to implement a comprehensive cure for many of the ills of that explosive region by effectively erasing the legitimacy of terrorists for the local populations.

An evil vision of the world of the Crusaders looms above my dreams, with crosses and crescents dividing our world yet again in sick parody of our supposed years of progress. One thought on this common God - like the Twin Towers, this earth and all life upon it was concieved as a grand work and, like the Twin Towers, it would be no big deal to build again.

"Masallah", as the Muslims say, or "What wonders God has willed!"