The "Arab Spring" is now over one year old. In much of the popular analysis over the past year the term "Arab Spring" has become the defining characteristic of the "new" Middle East emerging from decades of authoritarian and repressive rule. However, one should be cautious about inflating the importance of the democratic uprisings in several Arab countries in shaping the future contours of the Middle East. This caution applies especially to exaggerating both the prospects of democracy -- particularly the unhindered linear transition to representative rule -- in the Arab world and the role of major Arab powers in determining political outcomes in the Middle East in the short and medium-term future.

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On the top floor of a towering apartment block in Cairo, half a dozen Syrian activists are hunched over their laptops. Each man organized demonstrations in his home town before escaping the Assad regime's intelligence agents in the last few months. Now, armed with a list of trusted contacts that stretches across the borders from southwest Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, they have become a key link in the supply chain of an opposition movement that is struggling to outmaneuver a brutal crackdown. Donations collected from Syrians and well-wishers in Cairo are used to purchase cell phones, satellite communications equipment, medicine, and money, which is smuggled to friends and family members on the inside. In turn, protesters send out video evidence of attacks, which the men in Cairo catalogue, upload to YouTube, and forward to media outlets.

The men work with close contacts in their own villages and neighborhoods, independently of organizing committees or opposition bodies. Abdel Youssef fled from Ad Dumayr, a city northeast of Damascus. Syrian authorities went door to door there searching for military defectors on Wednesday night and he spent the day following their movements through eyewitness accounts. As he tells the story of how he fled, a Skype window flashes up on his screen. A woman he knows tells him that security forces attempting to arrest a man have captured his daughter instead. "Now I'm looking out the window," the message reads. "She is being beaten up by the security forces because she is saying ‘Allahu Akhbar'." Abdel Youssef passes on information like this to a contact in the Free Syrian Army, who he says use this information to block roads and set up ambushes in an attempt to protect demonstrations.

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In the midst of all the changes the Arab Spring has brought in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, among others, the intelligent lay, media, and policy worlds have remained largely deaf to the Kurdish question. This is an unfortunate situation because much has occurred concerning Kurdish nationalism, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. However, the Kurdish version of the Arab Spring did not just begin in 2011, but has been going on for decades: In Turkey (at least since the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) formally began its insurgency in August 1984), as well as in Iraq since the days of Mulla Mustafa Barzani beginning in the early 1960s, but especially since the end of the two U.S. wars against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and even more in 2003. These two wars led to the creation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, the most successful attempt at Kurdish statehood in modern times.

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Turkey's air strikes in recent weeks in search of Partiye Karkaren Kurdistane (PKK) insurgents along the Iraqi Kurdish border have fueled a growing crisis. They have caused civilian deaths and displacements, raising criticisms by human rights organizations, local populations, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and even the Baghdad Parliament. This predicament has not only undermined possibilities for negotiating Turkey's Kurdish problem, but has also heightened tensions among Kurdish groups in Iraq and the region.

Still, complaints against Turkish incursions will continue to be checked by concomitant demands to control the PKK, assure regional security, and guarantee shared economic interests. The military interventions may therefore have less effect than expected on the alliance between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds, but may further fragment cross-border Kurdish groups and encourage regional unrest.

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Although it is still early to evaluate the ultimate impact that Turkey's June 12 parliamentary elections -- which resulted in a landslide victory for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- will have on the direction of its foreign policy, there are several likely outcomes. The electoral victory of the AKP under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demonstrates again that the Turkish electorate is satisfied with the assertive foreign policy that has been a concomitant feature of the party. In fact, part of the explanation for the victory of the AKP was the rise of Turkey's stature in its region and in world politics over the last nine years. The support for Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's electoral campaign by the candidates of opposition parties in his district -- and the tendency of opposition parties not to bring Turkish foreign policy to the election agenda -- was a further sign of public support for the government's outlook. From Erdogan's victory speech on election night, moreover, it's possible to tease out a number of possible changes (as well as continuities), in the tone, means, and goals of Turkish foreign policy.

In the AKP's next government term, Turkey will continue to extend and deepen its ties with different political actors and the people of the Middle East, which was indicative in Erdogan's salutation in his victory speech to the people of Damascus, Cairo, Beirut, the West Bank, Ramallah, Gaza, and Jerusalem. As such, and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Erdogan government will likely aspire to a more integrated Middle East where Turkey occupies a central role more attuned to the political developments of the region. The prime minister realizes that only having a good posture, being a favorite leader in the region, or maintaining good ties with the people in the upper echelons of governments is no longer sufficient. To solve this problem, it would not be surprising to see a Turkish diplomatic outreach going forward focused on a "civilian surge" that aims to be more active on the civil-society level in the Middle East in order to build the groundwork for deeper ties with the region.

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Leading Western publications, such as the Economist and the New York Times, have been recently editorializing in a sensational vein that the return to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) with an enhanced majority could be the beginning of the end of the Turkish democratic experiment. The Economist has gone to the extent of endorsing the CHP, Turkey's main opposition party and the standard-bearer of Kemalism with its mix of authoritarianism and militant secularism, as if it were endorsing a candidate in the mayoral elections in London. The New York Times has editorialized that it would be better for Turkey if the voters did not give the AKP what it calls a "supermajority" as it would erode the basis of Turkish democracy.

These apprehensions regarding an AKP victory in the June 12 Turkish elections have their roots in two sources. On the one hand, they are the products of overblown concerns about the future of democracy in a country undergoing democratic consolidation, which is hardly ever a unilinear and smooth process. A second cause for such apprehensions, which undergirds the first, is related to the Islamist pedigree of the AKP -- though the party has moved quite a distance away from its roots and repackaged itself as a conservative democratic formation akin in spirit to the Christian Democrats of Europe. Nonetheless, the fact that many of its leaders belonged to the Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party at one time and that it continues to draw support from some of the same elements that supported Refah conjures up images of a staunchly Muslim Turkey under the AKP that will be reflexively anti-Western.

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President Obama's Middle East speech last week laid out a policy of support for the growth of democracy and peace in the area. He challenged all the players in the region to support self-determination, equal opportunity, democracy, political and civil rights and religious tolerance. He stated that democracy requires a free press and right to assembly. He called for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The President has a clear vision of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It is not obvious that the Turkish government could make the same declarations.

Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Turkey is having a tough time adjusting its much heralded foreign policy of "zero problems with neighbors" to the new realities of the Middle East. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu says Turkey wants good relations with the people and regimes of the region. However the people of the Middle East are challenging their own dictators today. Tomorrow they will remember the states that supported the brutality of these regimes. Turkey must therefore realize the soft power they extol in their active diplomacy as a regional leader is not just about trade and diplomacy. It also calls for active support for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

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Political demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt have sparked a century old discussion: Is Turkey a model for the Middle East? Two contemporary examples of the "Turkey-as-a-model" debate show how this issue can play out: Turkey was presented as a moderate Islamic, democratic model for the Middle East as part of George W. Bush's "freedom agenda," and more recently as part of Barack Obama's democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East. It is ironic that in 2010 the debate revolved around concepts such as a "shift of axis," "torn country," and "drifting away," but now Turkey has transformed from a "lost" ally to a "model" country.

Interestingly enough, Islamist actors such as Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt declared their intention to emulate the Turkish experience in order to differentiate themselves from the examples of Iran and Taliban. How is it that Turkey is presented as a model country by political actors as varied as high-level U.S. officials and Islamist groups? To make sense of this irony, one needs to consider the questions: whose model and which Turkey?

In fact, there are three main political groups with competing narratives on what the Turkish model means.

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The center of gravity in the Middle East has shifted dramatically in the past few decades from the Arab heartland comprising Egypt and the Fertile Crescent to what was once considered the non-Arab periphery -- Turkey and Iran. The exciting era of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, especially Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal and the all too brief union of Egypt with Syria, had made the Arab heartland the symbol par excellence of the reassertion of the Third World's dignity and its aspirations for autonomy from the great powers. Since the 1970s, that air of excitement and hope has given way to the moribund nature of Arab politics and the perpetuation of autocratic and kleptocratic rule, which have contributed in large measure to the diminution in the regional role of major Arab states such as Egypt. Regimes that were once considered "liberalizing autocracies", such as Egypt with its controlled elections and Jordan with an increasingly vocal parliamentary opposition, have now reverted to an unalloyed autocratic model.

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ISTANBUL — As the United States considers repealing the ban on gays serving in the military, they might want to consider consulting their allies in NATO with whom they serve in Afghanistan and Iraq. The vast majority of the organization's 28-member states allow gays to serve openly. But Turkey offers an instructive, and extreme, contrast.

Where the U.S. "don't ask, don't tell" policy has been the subject of fierce political debate since it was launched by Bill Clinton's administration two decades ago, Turkey's ban has seen few public challenges. When Turkey's minister for women's and family affairs, Selma Aliye Kavaf, declared this March that homosexuality is a "disease that needs treatment," she wasn't just pandering to popular belief; she was repeating the official stance of the Turkish armed forces. Indeed, Turkey's gay conscripts are routinely forced to endure humiliation and abuse at the hands of their country's military authorities.

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The last month has clearly demonstrated how far Turkish diplomacy has come. The New York Times recently reported that no country was as outspoken as Turkey in terms of projecting a new image during the opening of the 65th U.N. General Assembly. But the Times was not applauding. Contrasting Turkish President Abdullah Gul's meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his unavailability to meet with Israeli President Shimon Peres, the paper portrayed Turkey as indifferent to U.S. efforts to reach peace in the Middle East and tackle the growing nuclear threat posed by Iran. On the other hand, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, with his head-spinning bilateral and multilateral meeting traffic, contributed to Turkey's assertive image as the new power broker in town.

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In recent months, commentators have given warning of creeping Islamization in Turkey's domestic and foreign policy. Descriptions of the new "swagger" in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's approach to the Middle East are paired with allegations of an increasingly authoritarian style of government by the ruling AKP party. Many have seized upon this weekend's constitutional referendum in Turkey as evidence that the country's secular establishment has been displaced and Islamist forces are consolidating power. While the referendum followed a period of intense political polarization, this simplistic account of Islamist forces arrayed against embattled secularists is both wrong and dangerous.

The twenty-six constitutional amendments at issue in the referendum are difficult to criticize on substance. They include provisions that: empower civilian courts while reducing the jurisdiction of military courts; strengthen gender equality and protections for children, the elderly, veterans and the disabled; improve privacy rights and access to government records; expand collective bargaining rights; and remove immunities long afforded to those responsible for the 1980 military coup. The overwhelming effect of these provisions amounts to civilianizing the military coup-era constitution, strengthening individual freedoms and undertaking much-needed judicial reform. Unsurprisingly, then, the European Union gave its strong support to the amendment package and President Obama called to congratulate Prime Minister Erdogan on the outcome of the referendum.

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Turkish politics is currently undergoing a heated political debate on the constitutional reform package (supported by Prime Minister Erdogan's ruling party), which is on its way to a referendum this Sunday. The package includes amendments to 26 articles of the current constitution along. In addition, it would eliminate the controversial Article 15, a ‘temporary' article that has been in the constitution since the 1980's, preventing the prosecution of officials involved in the military coup of 1980. All in all, Sunday's referendum is one of the ruling AK Party's clearest challenges thus far to Turkey's Kemalist establishment.

Since the establishment of the Turkish Republic, four new constitutions have been adopted (1921, 1924, 1961, 1982) - the latest two were drafted after military interventions - and numerous amendments have been made. Since the most recent constitution was adopted in 1982, there have been 15 amendment packages, which have affected almost half of the constitution. As such, the debate on the present constitution is not exactly a new one for Turkey, as the public is quite accustomed to constitutional changes and the public debate they generate. To understand, then, why the current package has touched off such a firestorm in Turkish society and led to an intensified political atmosphere, it is important to consider both the ramifications that the current reform efforts has for the political system in Turkey and the historical context.

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Arab governments have been basking in the glow of all the attention focused on them recently in relation to their concerns about Iran.  It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new article touting Arab government support for a U.S. attack on Iran, the latest by Jeffrey Goldberg in his new Atlantic piece.  For governments which have been literally begging the United States to end Israel's occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory in exchange for full normalization with Israel, having your opinion being considered on something - on anything - by the policy elite in the United States should be cause for celebration.  Unfortunately, the glow is turning to sunburn as all the latest hype on Arab support for a U.S. attack on Iran misses the true nature of Arab government concerns about Iran's regional dominance.  

There are three points to remember concerning Arab - Iranian relations:

• Arab governments seek a "balance of forces" in the region - not regional conflagration.
• Arab governments and the Arab publics tend to be in slightly different places on concern about Iran and entirely in the same place in their concern about Israel's continued occupations of Arab territory.
• A U.S. war with Iran which would have disastrous consequences for Israel and the United States, would only be that much more destabilizing to the current security of pro-U.S. Arab regimes. 

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