Turkish president Abdullah Gul made an unfortunate Freudian slip when he said that Israel’s interdiction in the flotilla incident was al-Qaeda-like — given that the architect of the planned confrontation, the Turkish organization IHH, has often been identified by American, European, and Israeli intelligence groups as having terrrorist ties, and on occasion contacts with al-Qaeda. So, yes, President Gul, the entire incident in some sense was al-Qaeda-like, as the Turkish government once realized when it habitually raided the IHH and occasionally banned some of its operations in the 1990s.

It is now conventional wisdom that neocons and Israel supporters are clamoring for new distance from Turkey. In fact, the flotilla incident is nothing new, but part of a decade-long transformation on the part of Turkey to return to a now much-idealized Ottoman past of galvanizing Islamic resistance against the West in a more sophisticated and focused manner. In this narrative, Ottoman-like, a united Islamic world under Turkish auspices sought to divide the West, import its technology and expertise, and unite various branches of Islam across sectarian and ethnic lines. This is a role that is not predicated on whether Clinton, Bush, or Obama happens to be president.

Our military planners and State Department experts can talk grandly of the old Turkish partnership and the strategic relationship that is unaffected, but it would be wise to start making contingency plans and preparations for every imaginable situation, including a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Turkey, Turkish pressure on Kurdistan and Greece, new trouble in Cyprus, naval incidents between Turkey and Israel, reexamination of sophisticated U.S. arms sales, and a reevaluation of NATO membership.

Right now Turkey is weighing the downside of its new posture (American mumbling about its new Ottomanism) against the upside (adulation in the Muslim world), while factoring in the new Obama neutralism, Western financial depression and debt, Iranian and Syrian nuclear ambitions, and our exposure in Afghnanistan and Iraq. So far, it has concluded that it is better to be neutral toward, or an adversary of, America rather than its NATO ally. Again, that is an empirical, not an ideological, assessment, however disturbing its consequences are, and we should start to craft a bipartisan foreign policy in the region accordingly.