The President's nomination of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to head the CIA makes me want to talk -- or at least write -- Turkey. Perhaps that's because I've just returned from Istanbul. But it's also because the issue that is causing problems with the nomination, from both parties, is that a military figure as head of a civilian institution in a healthy democracy like the US is a very bad thing indeed. We can see this by considering Turkey.

Turkey for the West is its military. That's our interface with them, after all: their membership in NATO and the US bases there. But that's also why the Europeans are so horrified at the Turkish application for membership in the EU, something the Turks were allowed to do as part of their NATO inclusion. Again and again the bottom line from Western Europe is this: there's too much military presence in civilian government in Turkey to allow them in.

Modern Turkey, founded in 1922 on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by the military hero Mustafa Kemal, has always had a para-military cast. Kemal gave himself the name under which he is generally known: Atatürk, Father of the Turks -- rather like Mussolini's name of “Il Duce,” or Hitler's “Der Führer.” (Visitors arrive at Atatürk International Airport.) As an officer, Kemal acquired fame by holding off the ANZAC troops in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of World War I (Turkey was allied with Germany). Two years after informing the Sultan he had been deposed (whereupon the Sultan slunk off to Italy) Kemal abolished the Caliphate, the position of successor to the Prophet Mohammed that had existed since Mohammed's death in the 7th century, roughly equivalent to the Muslim Pope -- a position that had been exercised by the Ottoman Sultan in a perfect marriage of religion and government.

More recently, Turkey's political history for the last decades has been an alternation of civilian governments with military coups when the military felt things were getting too chaotic. Even today, with a civilian government, the military is omnipresent. The Istanbul English-language newspaper Turkish Daily News when I was there was full of cases Turkey had lost before the European Court in the Hague because military judges had been involved in civilian trials, rebukes by European delegates to the Strasbourg assembly regarding military presence in chambers during political debates, and continuing worries about how far freedom of the press in Turkey goes. (In Turkey it's a crime to “malign Turkishness.”)

Atatürk wasn't the first Westernizer in Turkey. About the time of the American Civil War the Sultans moved from their medieval palace complex Topkapi into European-style chateaux full of French furniture and English crystal and, at least at court, took on many trappings of their Western counterparts. (They still retained slaves.) Atatürk took things several giant steps further, and did so almost overnight.

What pushes our buttons in the U.S. these days is seeing women in Islamic countries shrouded in burkhas. That seems like repression to us. Yet consider the fact that control can come from the opposite direction as well. Atatürk made it illegal -- illegal -- for women to veil or for men to wear the traditional fez, changed the alphabet of the language to the Latin alphabet (with a few oddities) as well as “purifying” the language of words borrowed from languages like Persian. Most important, he put in place a secular state, separating politics from religion. (This gives the lie to current American right-wingers who insist that all Islam is intrinsically fundamentalist and aggressive.)

Turkey is thus what the West apparently wants to see in the Middle East: a secular state where the people happen to be Muslim. Yet all this was accomplished by someone whose brothers under the skin included Franco, Mussolini, the Shah of Iran, and the recent secular militarist leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussain. To be sure, I was awoken at 5 a.m. by the muezzin giving the neighborhood call to prayer in the mosque nearby informing one and all that “prayer is better than sleep.” But in Turkey, religion is a personal matter. They even tolerate Christians.

Turkey therefore avoids the Scylla that has become the great American nightmare in the Islamic world: a fundamentalist state where religious law, shari'a, is state law. (That's the case, by the way, in our great friend and ally Saudi Arabia.) But the question here is this: to what extent does it avoid the Charybdis of military or para-military rule, which in Islamic countries seems the most easily accessible alternative to a religious state? Because it looks so good to us when contrasted with an Islamic state, we might wonder what's wrong with military rule, given that it has clear advantages over some alternatives? Put in Turkish terms this question becomes: Why has the military again and again engineered coups of civilian governments?

The military, in whatever country it intervenes in politics, invariably finds civilians and their goings-on unpredictable and messy (see my earlier consideration of “Military Hardness” for one way this works out on our domestic front). The military can always make things happen on a schedule, or the trains run on time. But as a result military control blurs into fascism. That's why right-wing dictators are so thickly tarred with military overlay. (There are left-wing military dictators too -- Castro, for instance.)

The predictability the military can offer is good to a point and in its own sphere. On one hand, civilizations need the trains to run on time: predictability in this sense is what keeps us away from chaos. You don't get New York or London in a world where nothing is predictable beyond tomorrow. But too much predictability won't allow democracy to flourish. That's why the military keeps the peace. It doesn't run the government.