The eventual defeat of the bureaucracy, clear by August 2011, following the early retirement of almost all of the top- ranking commanders of the military in late July in protest at the government, would usher in a new and historic break, to be in full swing within months, from early 2012. To the astonishment of most observers, primarily the domestic liberal intellectuals who supported the transformation for close to a decade and international policy- makers in admiration of the bold steps taken by the government for most of the period, the exercise of power in the new era would proceed to look increasingly like the familiar patterns of political rule just left behind. A noted secular intellectual, and one of the few who would remain loyal to the earlier broad alliance of democrats behind the government, would readily concede this uncanny turn of events in the wake of the old regime, arguing nevertheless that the new order, which he would consider as nothing less than the upshot of a ‘popular rebellion’, was not yet fully in place. Accordingly, the shift still in progress was effectively forcing the administration temporarily to sideline the rule of law. The ‘law’ under the new regime still functioned, he would argue, ‘in favour of the [republican] minority that ruled until recently’, thus remaining ‘open to abuses’ by those who continued to resist the change. He would later state, extending almost a carte blanche to the government in disregard of the law and of basic democratic principles locally: ‘An exercise that is democratic by universal standards can produce rather anti- democratic results depending on the unique conditions of a country such as Turkey.’ This frame of mind appeared to be simply another mimetic extension, reproducing the argument put forward by the republican apologists for decades, namely an exceptionalism in outlook, justified by the purportedly extraordinary, if impermanent, circumstances prompted by the change (see Chapter 1). That is, the admittedly fettered democracy at work from the inception of modern Turkey, with the political participation and the basic rights somewhat curbed, was on the whole nothing other than an imperative dictated by the radical transition in the aftermath of the multi- ethnic and semi- Islamic Ottoman polity.