Cold truth has been obvious for months —Turkey’s absolutist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a steadfast and loyal partner in the raging, undeclared war against radical, Islamist, jihadists that America and nations who cherish modernity must wage and win decisively to forge lasting peace.
All President Obama does now by counting Mr. Erdogan and Turkey as “allies” in his stunningly inept campaigns against ideologically fueled criminal extremism is to compound mistakes that he and senior advisers such as Valerie Jarrett make relying upon duplicitous partners based in and funded by Qatar, while cozying up to proven and rising enemies inside Iran.
Mr. Erdogan, like Egypt’s fleeting President Mohamed Morsi, is not a champion of the truly exceptional ideals that bind diverse peoples together in productive unity as they do inside America, despite omnipresent human errors.
Scant months ago, the leaders of America and Turkey barely spoke to one another — with so many excellent and evident reasons now to distrust Mr. Erdogan’s overriding objectives, why cling to a relationship that offers little remaining realistic potential for good?
If Mr. Obama still stubbornly counts upon Mr. Erdogan to help Kurds eject the Islamic State from Iraq and from Syria, then he makes the kind of mistake that must be resoundingly corrected during election season — and, fortunately, Election Day is in less than two weeks.
With carnage already blowing back inside the United States and Canada, we who ferret out facts understand that Obama foreign policies fail on most fronts.
In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu explained why Mr. Obama (and his predecessors) cannot yet achieve victory:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
The keen insights offered centuries ago in China explain America’s failures to repudiate and decimate venomous thinking that drives horrific acts against those who exercise free will to make choices — choices made in the best interests of themselves, their families, their communities and their nations.
Conceived imperfectly revelling in the promise that liberty holds, America must today arrange to educate our citizens and our allies concerning ancient and continuing threats posed by radical, Islamist, jihadist warriors with whom there never will be any negotiated compromise.
In this process, Mr. Obama must then reboot and retune the apology tour he began in Turkey, learning instead to celebrate what makes this nation great instead of fumbling and repeating our periodic failures.
From the past to our future
On April 6, 2009, Mr. Obama began his first foreign address during a speech to the Turkish Parliament with these sweeping comments: “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together — and work together — to overcome the challenges of our time.”
It was a speech full of promise and made by a man whose theoretical potential is already well past spent.
Five years late, we may forgive the small falsehood uttered in April 2009 that “we recently ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed.” That prison is not closed, it should not be closed, and until we achieve compelling victory against the ideology that animates radical Islamist jihadists and others who kill in the name of God, it will likely remain open.
Thinking more about the raft of barbaric atrocities committed since 2008 against Christians in Syria, Iraq, other Middle Eastern countries, and in Africa and Asia, it is much tougher to accept our president’s failure to call out the horrors perpetrated against Armenian Christians inside Turkey for the genocide that it certainly was: “I know there’s strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915.”
Held up to such promise in two election cycles, Mr. Obama, his chosen allies and his actions in league with Mr. Erdogan, Qatar’s riling al-Thani family and the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East are already abject failures, still dressed as success by ignorant sycophants in the mainstream press.
It is past time for the American people and Congress to change alliance partners and marching orders in pursuit of noble ideals that manifestly fuel progress for free, responsible people who embrace the best that humanity has to offer, and to reject mean, ignoble and base influences.
