Turkey's failed coup and the course of global events

Yesterday, Ralph Peters published a column at the Fox News website entitled "Turkey's Last Hope Dies."  It takes an unequivocal view of Friday's failed coup in that country:

Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society.  Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of Europe.

Our leaders no longer do their basic homework.The media relies on experts-by-Wikipedia. Except for PC platitudes, our schools ignore the world beyond our shores. Deluged with unreliable information, citizens succumb to the new superstitions of the digital age.

So a great country is destroyed by Islamist hardliners before our eyes—and our president praises its “democracy.”

That tragically failed coup was a forlorn hope, not an attempt to take over a country. Turkey is not a banana republic in which the military grasps the reins for its own profit.  For almost a century, the Turkish armed forces have been the guardians of the country’s secular constitution. Most recently, coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 (with “non-coup” pressure in 1997) saw the military intervene to prevent the country’s collapse.

And the Most Equal Comrade, as it was going down, quite publicly took sides - and it wasn't with those trying to restore Turkey's identity as a secular constitutional democracy:

So who is the man our own president rushed to support because he was “democratically elected?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is openly Islamist and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Obama appears to believe represents the best hope for the Middle East. But the difference between ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one of purpose, but merely of manners:  Muslim Brothers wash the blood off their hands before they sit down to dinner with their dupes.
With barely a murmured “Tut-tut!” from Western leaders, Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s secular constitution (which the military is duty-bound to protect).  His “democracy” resembles Putin’s, not ours.  Key opposition figures have been driven into exile or banned.  Opposition parties have been suppressed.  Recent elections have not been held so much as staged.  And Erdogan has torn the fresh scab from the Kurdish wound, fostering civil war in Turkey’s southeast for his own political advantage.
Erdogan has packed Turkey’s courts with Islamists.  He appointed pliant, pro-Islamist generals and admirals, while staging show trials of those of whom he wished to rid the country.  He has de facto, if not yet de jure, curtailed women’s freedoms.  He dissolved the wall between mosque and state (Friday night, he used mosques’ loudspeakers to call his supporters into the streets).  Not least, he had long allowed foreign fighters to transit Turkey to join ISIS and has aggressively backed other extremists whom he believed he could manage.
And his diplomatic extortion racket has degraded our own military efforts against ISIS.
That’s the man President Obama supports.

Lest one is tempted to react along the lines of "Well, he's recently shown signs of wanting to foster international harmony, repairing relations with both Israel and Russia. We all know people who have been to Turkey in recent times, and who vouch for a thriving middle class there. He must not be that bad," consider how things are going so far in the failed coup's aftermath:

 . . .  the soldiers were stripped after being arrested in Sirnak, eastern Turkey. 

They were then made to lie next to each other. It comes after a Turkish soldier was reportedly beheaded on Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge by a pro-government mob yesterday.

Turkey today announced it had arrested more than 6,000 people involved in the attempted coup as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asserted his authority.

This is no mere blip on the timeline of this terrible year. Ramifications will play themselves out in unpleasant ways for some time to come.