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Overcast Beware trusting Turkey
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Here’s the good news: the Obama administration has finally grasped that the onslaught of the Islamic State terror group through Iraq and Syria needs to be defeated and destroyed. Sixty-one percent of Americans, according to a Wall Street Jour-nal/NBC News poll, agree with the president. At a time when much of the world believes, not unreasonably, that America is in retreat, the administration’s willingness to pursue military options and its almost George W. Bushesque rhetoric regarding the “evil” of Islamic State, as Secretary of State John Kerry put it, is most welcome. |
Even so, the issue of which states to involve in the battle against Islamic State should leave us less sanguine about where this battle might lead. Yes, yes, I know: This is the Middle East, and we are therefore compelled to work with distasteful regimes, such as the Saudis, in accomplishing strategic goals like the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. This time, however, we need to avoid an outcome that strengthens Iranian influence in the region, which means that we cannot indefinitely postpone the discussion over what to do about the brutal regime of Bashar alAssad in Damascus.
By the same token, there’s another discussion that we cannot indefinitely postpone. That one concerns the role of Turkey—a country described by a senior Obama ad-ministration official, in an interview with the New York Times that coincided with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s visit to Ankara, as “absolutely indispensable” to the struggle against Islamic State.
There is, of course, a great deal of merit behind that statement. Turkey is historically an ally of the U.S. and a member of NATO. The airbase the Americans maintain at Incirlik has been operationally critical to our military engagements in the region over the last quarter of a century, including the present fight against the terrorists of Islamic State.
