Hush, enough is enough

I cannot believe it. I am astounded. He is still talking… He is still expecting us to believe him. He still assumes people believe him.

He was again swaggering in New York: “Don’t test our patience…”

They have entered our consulate; they have even taken children hostage together with adults, but our Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu challenges them from over there: “Don’t test our patience…”
If they arrive in Ankara, he will still be boasting from across the Bulgarian border…

Look, enough is enough.

Hush… Do not speak for a while…

Keep quiet.

Keep quiet so the strategic fiasco you cannot openly admit, at least, we can whisper it to ourselves using the idiom, “Silence gives consent.”

Hush for a while and take a look at your past three years…

You sent the people in the Mavi Marmara flotilla knowingly to death and tried to squeeze a policy of “challenging Israel” out of it… You have failed and people paid with their lives…

And you came out and what did you say?

“Don’t test our patience…”

Well, they have…

***

What else did you say?

“We will provide freedom of navigation in the east Mediterranean…”

No commander has been left free to be assigned to lead your navy, let alone wave a flag in the Mediterranean. The offshore oil of Cyprus has started to be drilled…

Everyone but you is waving a flag there.

***

Syria downed our F-4.

What did you say?

“Do not test our patience…”

They downed our plane, what else is there left to test?

Whatever; there is the practice of the “lust for rhetoric.”

No harm has been recorded to anyone from that lust, from that passion…

Just boast and move on…

***

What did he say on Kirkuk?

“It is our red line. Whoever touches it will burn…”

Well, the peshmerga and etc. are all there…

Just boast and move on…

***

But, now, do not boast about anything; do not swagger like this anymore…

We do not buy it, yet we cannot openly laugh at your face because of our fear, whereas the world doesn’t buy it and yet laughs out loud, really loudly.  

What’s at stake is Turkey’s deterrence.

Supposedly, we were the regional power. Now we are not even allowed to play in the neighborhood league of powers.

Once upon a time, there was your book “Strategic Depth,” the one which you made the journalists in your entourage and foreign diplomats read as if it were a mandatory textbook.

Well, that book has failed big time.

A piece of advice to you: Go back to your university and write the second volume of that book. And name it this:

“Strategic retreat…”

At least you will provide the opportunity for the next generations to learn the lesson of “better to lose the saddle than the horse during the pursuit of the Ottoman dream, in the Ottoman delusion…”

This period, the epoch in which you have been heading the Turkish Foreign Ministry will be remembered as “the biggest fiasco in the history of Turkish diplomacy.”

At least we will make use of your experiences to not do so again…