Turkish Goons Can’t Be Allowed to Beat Up Americans in the Capital

While Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was visiting the White House last week, members of his country’s diplomatic-security team brutally attacked a group of peaceful protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington. To add insult to injury, Ankara responded by summoning the American ambassador to complain of the “aggressive and unprofessional” intervention by the DC police. Rich Lowry comments:

This incident, which injured eleven, is not the most consequential event in the world. It’s not the Syrian war, or a North Korean missile test. We have large national interests at stake with Turkey, especially in navigating the complex currents in the Syria civil war. But it’s not nothing, either. It deserves more than State Department statements of “concern.” Especially given the context. The guards didn’t lash out on their own. They charged under the watchful eye of President Erdogan, who was sitting in a black Mercedes-Benz and emerged to observe the assault. Some media reports contend, based on close analysis, that Erdogan himself may have given the order for the attack.

This is a second offense for the Turks. A year ago, they beat up protesters and disfavored journalists outside an Erdogan talk at the Brookings Institution in Washington. . . .

Not only did the Turks carry out this attack, they are thumbing their noses at us by summoning our ambassador over it. The Turkish goons who punched and kicked people should be identified and charged with crimes. They are beyond our reach, either because they are back in Turkey or have diplomatic immunity. But we should ask for them to be returned and for their immunity to be waived. When these requests are inevitably refused, the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. (heard saying during the incident, “You cannot touch us”) should be expelled. Erdogan is crushing his opponents with impunity in Turkey. Reacting firmly to this attack at least will send the message, “Not in our house.”

Read more at National Review

More about: Politics & Current Affairs, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey, U.S. Foreign policy

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF