TomDispatch

TomDispatchRecently Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. In late April, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country's top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting "secularism." When the minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the poll for president, the Constitutional Court, powerfully influenced by the military's threat, invalidated the parliament's vote for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a two-thirds quorum -- something that had never been an issue before.