Turkey (Not Asia Minor)
I believe in democracy not because of any pie-in-the-sky faith in the wisdom of the people, but because democracy as proven itself to be, in the borrowed words of President Lincoln, "the last, best hope of Mankind." Democracy is the government of last resort, because everything else has been tried and has failed. That includes military dictatorship, in innumerable distinct forms it has taken throughout the centuries, from the Thirty Tyrants to feudalism to Napoleonic France to Chile under Pinochet.

A democracy's elected civilian leaders must have ultimate power over the nation's armed forces. That is why American soldier who refuse to serve in Iraq and Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the West Bank must face the harshest penalties allowed under military justice. There are reasonable arguments to be made against the American mission in Iraq and the Israeli mission in the West Bank, but it is not the position of the military to choose which lawful orders it will and will not obey; to grant the armed forces permission to refuse orders it to abandon civilian control of the military, and that puts us about half a step away for the latter days of the Roman Republic, when armies were loyal to their generals, not the Senate. No democracy can long survive under such conditions, as indeed Rome's Republic gave way to the mad reign of the Emperors.

Yet for all its many virtues, democracy is a extremely fragile form of government, one that requires constant vigilance, or, as President Jefferson said when he wasn't busy schtupping his slaves, "eternal vigilance." Democracies are vulnerable to panic and intimidation. That's what Churchill meant when he called it, "the worst form of governemnt imaginable, except for all the others." Before they rose to power the Nazis used violence to intimidate their critics into silence and once in power they used the Reichstag fire to foment the panic necessary to push through the Enabling Act that undermined the last of the democratic Weimar institutions and began the process of elevating Hitler from Kanzler to Führer. The most dangerous element in a democratic society is one that seeks to gain power through electoral means and then suspend further elections, e.g., the National Socialists in Weimer Germany, the Ayatollah Khomenei's faction in post-Shah Iran, or the Communists in post-World War II Czechoslovakia. Each gained power through (more or less) democratic means and each then put an end to democratic governance.

The United States and Israel have proven themselves to be countries with rock solid democratic credentials; thus, though military obedience to civilian command must be strictly enforced and soldiers who refuse lawful orders must be severely and punitively sanctioned, there is no real threat of a military coup against civilian leadership. In the Republic of Turkey, however, the situation is much less certain. I do not like the idea of the Turkish military seizing control of the government, but I like the idea of an Islamist government even less. Istanbulink (not Constantinoplink). The Turkish military is not a warm and fuzzy group of humanitarians, their cruelty toward even non-rebellious Kurds testifies to that, but over the last eighty-odd years the Turkish military has proven itself fanatically loyal to the preservation of a secular Turkish government. I hope that someday the Turkish democracy will be mature enough to not require a martial chaparone, but until then I feel better knowing that the military will make sure a victorious election for an Islamist party will not be Turkey's last election.