How Washington misreads Turkey. Those who fear Turkey's "Islamism" miss its dynamism.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/110105/turkey-islamist-recep-tayyip-erdogan

Think Islamist, and you probably imagine some un-democratic place with a stagnant, corrupt economy and women encased from head to toe in black cloth. It is joyless and puritanical in the pejorative sense, with innate hostility to America and the West.

Dynamism probably makes you think of New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rio and Mumbai — places where anything-goes-capitalism has revived after a period of recession.

Well, according to a recent Brookings Institution report the world's most dynamic city is Istanbul, whose Islamist former mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is now Turkey's Prime Minister.

Reconcile that.

In any case, Turkey's official entrance into the world's wealthiest economic union — the EU's GDP is larger than America's — has taken on secondary importance because existing trade with Europe is already enormous. Final numbers for 2010 are not in yet but in the middle of last year Turkey's economy was expanding at a phenomenal 11 percent. It won't finish the year at that pace but Turkey will probably have the fastest growing economy at the western end of the Eurasian land mass for 2010.