Let's be pragmatic!

I keep hearing one line countless times these days. It is perhaps the best single line explaining the true motive behind the government’s Kurdish initiative, which this columnist, like many others, wholeheartedly supports: Yes, let’s be pragmatic, forget the past and the dead and move forward.

Let’s be business-minded. Let’s be realistic. Let’s not worry about a few tears on the faces of those who lost their loved ones during the years that resembled Italy’s bloody Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo). Did Italy sink altogether because the former terrorists of the Red Brigades, the Prima Linea, the Autonomia Operaia or the “New” Red Brigades became respectable politicians or took up other public offices?

That was the semi-veiled message, smartly wrapped in an analogy, in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s historic speech in Parliament last week defending his Kurdish/democratic initiative. Erdoğan carefully reminded us how Atatürk, immediately after the War of Independence, shook hands with Turkey’s Western occupiers and signed peace treaties with them, one after another.

The message? Forget the battles, forget your dead and look forward. Atatürk did it, why shouldn’t we? We forgave the British, French, Italians, Greeks (Greeks… did we?) and Russians, and expected them to forgive our sins in wartime. Can we not do the same with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK? Can we not be pragmatic? That way we’ll no longer have coffins wrapped in the Crescent and Star returning home in sad ceremonies.

Is the reward not worth the emotional effort? I personally think it is.

Having said that, however, we should be fair and extend our realism/pragmatism into a broader political landscape. First, we must admit that it is all too fair and realistic and pragmatic for the opposition to try to sabotage the initiative and hope to abuse the public sentiment for a handful of votes, or maybe more.

Second, we cannot fool 70 million-plus Turks that we are trying to enhance democracy and justice by shyly shaking hands with the PKK and its less- or non-violent supporters when we prosecute every dissident and wiretap half the country in the hope of trapping the government’s opponents. We cannot be convincing when we talk about justice for the Kurds but give a combined 21-year prison term to two lads just because they stole four pairs of shoes.

What do we expect when, for instance, the governor’s office in İzmir files a suit against a gay and lesbian society because it is “illegal, immoral and anti-family?” The wisest thing for the members of the Black and Pink Triangle Association, the “illegal, immoral and anti-family” group, to do at its Feb. 19 court hearing is probably to declare themselves the gay and lesbian flank of the PKK and avoid further proceedings.

If I were Navy Col. Dursun Çiçek, the prime suspect in the coup-plot investigation, I would defend myself with the same strategy: “I am a secret member of the PKK and wrote the coup plan in the hopes of ruining the Justice and Development Party [or AKP] and boosting popular support for the Democratic Society Party [or DTP].”

Sadly, it may be too late for the shoe thieves. They should have declared themselves to the judges as the shoe-robbery flank of the PKK, saying that they would sell the shoes at the flea market in the hope of raising some ammunition money for their comrades.

On the international front, Erdoğan’s “let’s-be-pragmatic-and-forget-our-dead-and-make-peace” rhetoric can be applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hopefully, Erdoğan will advise the leaderships of Hamas and Hezbollah to do the same with the Israelis. The dead are the dead. Let’s be pragmatic and look forward.

The Americans too can derive lessons from what they preach to the Turks. Forgive al-Qaeda altogether, help find safe havens for its leadership and have jubilant receptions for their fighters who go back to safe havens in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. One idea could be to task Erdoğan with acting as an honest broker between the West and al-Qaeda. The problem remains, however, that he is too Muslim for the West and too non-Muslim for al-Qaeda.

There will certainly be others to get their lessons from the Turkish experience. The message is too simple not to comprehend: If you have a cause, kill for it and keep killing more. Only in that way you can force your enemy to accept your political demands. If you are militarily too weak, you have no chance to win. The only path to victory is through a bloodshed that is ideally big enough to force the enemy into compromise.

The let’s-be-pragmatic approach is in fact at the heart of Iran’s nuclear program too. Iran may or may not be a rogue state sponsoring terrorism, but its principal strategy is perfectly justified with the same thinking: Only with nuclear weapons could Iran force its enemies into compromise.

Supposing Iran is a terrorist state and applying the Turkish-Kurdish game plan based on pragmatism, we should expect the Americans and the Israelis to engage in a “Persian initiative,” forget the past, look forward, be business-minded and shake hands with the mullahs, meeting their long-repeated demands for peace.

Too bad it would be a hell of a task to move the entire state of Israel from where it stands today into a faraway land like Alaska.