The coup against Erdogan – like the attack on Dogan

When you go up against Ahmed Dogan with a combat pistol and that pistol catches you, there are not many options for what you do – either you are a complete idiot or you are a paid actor. No matter which of the two is true, Dogan will go home with all possible positives. The case is similar with Friday's coup against Turkish President Erdogan.

Conditions for success

Former CIA officer Robert Baer, former Director of National Intelligence James Woolsey, and General Wesley Clark have all commented that it is difficult to imagine a more amateurishly executed coup than the one in Turkey (indicating that they have personally participated in organizing several). They have pointed out that in order to overthrow a government, the military must do two things: arrest politicians and shut down the media. According to Clark, the initial plan to achieve both goals is rarely executed perfectly, so a key factor for success is that the coup plotters do not give up. In Turkey, however, we have not seen either of these two success stories.

Although the state television was briefly taken over, the Turkish army made no attempt to even stop the transmission of the other television channels. In fact, in recent years, private television stations have become increasingly sympathetic to the Erdogan regime and it could be expected that they would spread the most effective propaganda in his support. And this indeed happened. It reached the absurd point of members of the Turkish government appearing on the air and in the television studios during the coup – apparently revealing their location only a few kilometers from the soldiers of the coup plotters.

This is the second surprising thing – instead of the ministers and senior civil servants supporting Erdogan digging in and taking cover, they calmly walked around television studios, went on air and defended the regime. The interior minister, who was in charge of the police, seemed calm as if he were on the morning block on a completely ordinary day. In fact, it was on his shoulders at that time that the responsibility fell to coordinate the police and special forces trying to stop the military coup. Erdogan himself was never attacked, although his whereabouts were known the whole time. There are reports that the hotel he was staying in was hit by air strikes, but long after the president had left it in his plane.

And finally, the last strange element in the whole story – the call of the coup plotters for all people to go home. If you are carrying out a coup in a country of 80 million and you do not want it to turn into a bloodbath, starting a civil war, one of the most important things is to ensure demonstrative public support. That is, your supporters should be in the squares as quickly as possible, supporting the coup or at least protesting against the overthrown/declared overthrown government. For example, the successful coup in 2013 in Egypt began with precisely such protests, the organization of which was later revealed to have been carried out by the army forces and General al-Sisi. The counter-protesters of the Egyptian government were repressed by the army, even by force. In Turkey, the exact opposite happened - the coup plotters told their supporters to go home and did not react in any way when Erdogan brought his supporters to the squares, including with the support of religious leaders.

Incompetence or conspiracy

If we look at previous military coups in Turkey, it immediately becomes clear that the army has indeed always acted with these three main goals – arresting or killing members of the government, instantly taking control of the media, and supporting anti-government movements and protests.

In short, if we trust the expertise of Baer, Woolsey, and General Clark, we can conclude that the coup against Erdogan is either one of the most inept in history, or it was partially initiated by the Turkish government itself, to serve as a pretext for the subsequent and already ongoing self-dealing with political opponents and the inconvenient in the judiciary and the army. The former CIA officers themselves refused to indicate which of the two hypotheses they were leaning towards, but confirmed that no matter how conspiratorial the fake coup may sound, the coincidences are too many to completely rule it out.

After all, it's not every day that a coup against a political leader happens that brings him all the possible political positives. Just as it's not every day that an assassination attempt against a political leader happens that your gun detects.

So, for now, we can be sure of one thing - as the assassination attempt against Dogan was, so was the coup against Erdogan.

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