As Turkish troops mass at the Iraqi border, readying for a major strike on rebel Kurds, and the U.S. Congress moves to censure Turkey for the Armenian genocide in 1915, a critical opportunity – the kind that defines history – hangs in the balance.

      It is an opportunity for Turkey itself to re-enter the front rank of geopolitics, a century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire punctuated its long, painful decline from global superpower to the "Sick Man of Europe."

    But infinitely more important is a fragile, and perhaps irreplaceable, opportunity to defuse what Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington calls "the clash of civilizations."

      It isn't politically correct to say that this is where Islam and the rest of the world – the West, the Russians, China and Southeast Asia, Africa and even parts of Latin America — find ourselves today. Yet the growing reality is that we peer across a chasm at each other in mutual incomprehension and fury.

          There is only one bridge across that chasm: Turkey. A state that ought to be our principal intermediary in the Islamic world, but isn't. A country that should be fast-tracked for the European Union, but may never enter it.

The Bridge

Physically, Turkey is a literal bridge, straddling the barrier between East and West, with eight historically Christian states on one flank, and Muslim Iran, Iraq and Syria on the other. In human terms, significant ethnic Turkish communities are found in virtually every European, Central Asian and Arab country.

    Its strategic role, as guardian of the sealanes through the Bosphorus, major oil pipelines from the Caspian Basin, and the chief sources of water for much of the Middle East, is virtually unequalled.

      Turkey is the sole Muslim-majority nation in the Middle East with a thriving industrial economy, built on the strength of its own investments, vision and hard work. In the broad sweep of Islamic nations from Morocco to the former Soviet Central Asian republics, it boasts the only political system close to a functional democracy, with vocal opposition groups and an uninhibited press.

    Above all, Turkey is the only Middle Eastern nation to have spawned a modern and freely elected political party with roots in Islamic religious values: the Justice and Development (AK) Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and newly elected President Abdullah Gul, which has been in power since 2003.

    Its performance is one of the great, nearly unnoticed stories of our time. 

    The AK's policies to date have been as centrist and pragmatic as their counterparts at religion-inspired Christian Democratic parties in almost every European state, or in the Buddhist Shin Komeito Party that is part of Japan's governing coalition. Justice and Welfare's technocrats – most of them trained in leading U.S. and European universities – have directed a program of solid, remarkably diversified economic growth that gives the lie to assertions that all Islamic societies are to be found on the extremes of corrupt, oil-fueled wealth or miserable poverty.

    More remarkably yet, Erdogan and Gul have maintained close diplomatic relations simultaneously with Iran and Syria, Israel and the United States. The Israelis have publicly called on Ankara to run peace-keeping activities in tormented Lebanon.

    Even in its most overt, highly publicized gesture to faith – a bid to end the ban at Turkish universities on women who (like the wives of Erdogan and Gul) wear the Islamic veil – the AK has made its case on the grounds of equal rights and civil liberties, rather than Mulsim rectitude.

    "Secularism, one of the basic principles of our republic, is a rule of social peace," Gul declared in his acceptance speech as president in August, alluding to the key doctrine of Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey.

    Turkish feminists "concede that some of the most radical improvements in the lot of women since Ataturk were introduced by AK," the unswervingly secular British weekly The Economist recently noted. "And many agree that to deny a woman an education because she is veiled contradicts Ataturk's vision for women."

Moderate Islam

It would be impossible to overstate the importance of these achievements.

    The hopeful phrase "moderate Islam" is on everyone's wishlist these days, the illusive antidote to the violent fanaticism and equally violent responses that have mounted in frequency and intensity since September 11, 2001. But the harsh truth is that there is scant evidence of a progressive, moderate Islamic renaissance in government today – except for contemporary Turkey.

      It is a young, energetic country, average age 28 and average income in purchasing power rising by roughly 12 percent every year, a miracle not very different from China's in its transforming effects, but without China's one-party state and rapidly aging population.

    There are few places on Earth where the expectations of visitors, especially from the West, are so radically different from what they actually see when they look around them with open eyes.

    The expectation, in a word, is backwardness: refuse-heaped streets, urban slums and rural hovels, illiteracy, macho men and their timid, oppressed women. The reality is newness and sophistication at every turn: bright and immaculately clean suburbs, concert halls that feature Bach and Bartok as often as Sufi chants, bookstores full of both books and readers, and a level of daily courtesy that puts most American and European cities to shame.

    Travelling across Turkey in the past few years, often by land and usually en route to the unnerving chaos of Central Asia or the outright horrors of Iraq, I could allow myself some hope for the future.

    The rest of the world needs Turkey's youth and vigor. But even more, it needs its marriage of Islam and progress.

Progress and Denial

Why, then, is Turkey all but ostracized? Why does the West seem intent on burning – or at best ignoring – that bridge, that lonely hope?

    There is, above all, Ankara's refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, or to allow anyone else, such as the U.S. Congress,  to call it that.  There is the heavy baggage of a past that Turkey clings to with a stubbornness that outsiders can't fathom. The Armenian killing fields, after all, were the work of the Ottoman regime, which was overthrown by Ataturk.

    Yet no Turkish government, up to and including that of Erdogan and Gul, has wavered on this point. "There were many deaths in those years, among Turks and Armenians alike," the official mantra has it. "But there was no genocide."

    In 2006, diplomatic and military contacts with Paris went into a nosedive when the French parliament voted to make d
enial of the Armenian genocide a crime. Gul and Erdogan have promised a similar chill on ties to Washington if Congress passes a resolution formally acknowledging the genocide.

    After the Armenian issue comes the long, bloody conflict between the Turkish Army and rebellious Kurds. But are these hostilities any different than Spain's with its Basques, or England's with the the Republicans of Northern Ireland until recently?

    Does any large modern nation have a history without civil violence and moral denial? What of Austria, which unlike Germany has never fully ackowledged its crimes under Nazism? What of the legacy of Washington's 19^th century wars of exterminaton against Native Americans, or the disastrous mess left behind in Britain's retreat from empire?

    The Turks, with some reason, believe that they are consistently held to a different moral standard than other nations. They point out that Japan refuses to confront the brutalities of World War Two, with very little loss of influence or status.

    They point out, too, that progress has been made on the Armenian and Kurdish issues, and indeed, far more progress under the AK's Islamists than anyone who preceded them.  Kurdish language television, newspapers and schools have been legalized. President Gul has declared his support for changing the law against "insulting Turkishness" that has been used to prosecute dissenting intellectuals and journalists who raise questions about what happened in 1915 or what might happen if the Kurdish problem is not addressed with sensitivity.

          An invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, especially if it coincides with a serious breach in U.S.-Turkish relations over the Armenian question, could render these developments moot.

    But there is no guarantee that progress on either issue will have the desired effect where it most counts, on the European flank of Turkey's mixed identity. 

The Menacing Turk

I've lived in Europe for half my adult life, and if I can't quite understand Turkey's stubborn inability to come to terms with its Ottoman past, I find Europeans' visceral hostility to Turkey just as baffling.

      The idea of Turkish membership in the European Union is regarded here with open repugnance. The gut-level opposition is as evident in Nicolas Sarkozy, the unconventional new president of France, as it was in his conventional predecessor Jacques Chirac. It is the official policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose country's 3 million-strong Turkish community is a model of law-abiding civic responsibility.

    Could it be that "The menacing Turk," the bogeyman of the Ottoman Empire's long assault on the West, still haunts European nightmares?  No other explanation seems to fit, even if the assault ended many centuries ago with the decisive Ottoman defeats by sea at Lepanto in 1571 and by land at Vienna in 1683. The Turkish menace is an old, old ghost.

    It is time to put Turkey's ghosts in context, for the sake of all of us, even if an imperfect resolution of history is all that can be achieved just now. In simpler times, we might ask something closer to perfection of Turkey – setting aside the fact that we have never asked it of Japan, Austria, the heirs of the British Empire or ourselves.

    But there is nothing simple about the world in 2007. And the bottom line is this: At no time in recent history has a country like Turkey, a bridge between East and West, been more necessary.

  – Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5