AMERICA'S MOUTHPIECE:

Mideast's New Superpower: Will Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally convince the Middle East to embrace democracy? (Owen Matthews, 9/20/11, Daily Beast)

As Turkey's relationship with Israel has disintegrated, there's been a lot of talk of Turkey moving away from its old alliance with the U.S. But in reality, what's striking is how much common ground Ankara still has with Washington--and how closely allied the two nations' agendas are. In 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq war, George W. Bush spoke of the U.S.'s "freedom agenda" in the Middle East. The regimes set up in Iraq and Afghanistan after Western interventions didn't--to put it mildly--do much to advertise the benefits of democracy. But now, nearly a decade after the U.S. set out to reset the vicious cycle of despotism and political dysfunction in the Middle East, Bush's agenda is finally coming to pass. And Erdogan is far better placed than Bush to promote real, lasting democracy in his neighborhood.

"During the Bush administration, 'freedom' and 'democracy' even became dirty words in the Middle East, for they sounded as euphemisms for sinister Western designs," says Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol author of a new book, Islam Without Extremes. "Arabs needed to hear a 'freedom agenda' from ... a fellow Muslim in whose faith and politics they would trust."

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