No Delight

Turkey is already a member of NATO, and is on course to join the EU. The ruling Islamists will soon be our legislators, too. We are already bound by treaty to defend them against external aggression, at least, and that within an integrated military command structure which already includes them, although see below on that.

Along with the Kemalist secular ultranationalists of Dönmeh extraction ideologically and otherwise, who founded the Republic on the bloody mass expulsion of the Greeks and of the Armenians.

But then, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud were also of probable Dönmeh descent. What a thing is unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, of which no example could be sharper than that which gave rise to the Dönmeh.

For Turkey is a land, by no means the only one, of two Far Rights, which fight it out between themselves as the nearest approximation to a meaningful political choice.

That did not used to be the case: the Kemalists used to be barely assailable in practice, and of course they retain control of the Deep State, ever-ready to stage an American-backed military coup if the Islamists start to go too far. Or do they? Is it, any longer? Not so definitely as was the case even into the very recent past.

The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, to which Unionists from Northern Ireland seem oddly attached or at least have done in the past, is a thoroughly Kemalist affair. It seeks to be an outpost, or ideally an integral part, of a mainland country which arguably never really existed, and which certainly does not exist now.

The Ulster Unionist fondness does then begin to make sense, although such a forlorn condition might just as easily endear the place to Republicans from the Six Counties. But what if Turkey as she is now sought to conform her little offshore hobby to herself?

After all, in alliance with the successors of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, she is already seeking to take back control of Syria with a view to the enforcement of such conformity.

Turkey is doing that both directly, and through proxies armed by us while cheered on by our Prime Minister and by our Foreign Secretary.

The people whose conduct we rightly castigate on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul are exactly the people whom we support in their daily commission of far, far, far worse acts in Syria.

Mercifully, only within and immediately around this Government is there the slightest enthusiasm for this impending, if impending, British war.

If Labour were to force a Commons vote on this, then it might very well experience no rebellion whatever on its own side, and it might very well garner enough Conservative and Liberal Democrat votes to make the position crystal clear.

That did not make any difference to David Cameron and William Hague over the EU Budget. But important thought that was, it was not a war.