The whole thing seemed fishy that night. I was watching Erdogan's plane circle southwest of Istanbul for an hour or so on FlightRadar24. Then suddenly it lands where just a couple of hours earlier coup-controlled tanks were patrolling the runways. Huh? The "coup" had control of fighter jets that were buzzing Istanbul and Ankara (live on TV), yet they let his plane circle, for all to see, just minutes away?
It appears that there were multiple F-16 sorties flown.
Apparently, Early on, a "coup" F-16 dropped bombs near the presidential palace.
The Blackhawk (possibly with door gunners) and Cobra attack helicopters were "coup" controlled. One Blackhawk was shot down by a "loyalist" F-16. The sonic booms heard later in the morning were likely loyalist F-16s. An F-16 can't stay in afterburner, or fly supersonic at low altitude for very long even with external tanks. The loyalist F-16s were refueled in the air from a Turkish AF tanker.
If there were coup controlled F-16s anywhere near Erdogan's aircraft, it would be stupid to fly in circles. The F-16s could shoot it down from over 20 miles away. It was more likely they were waiting for ground forces to secure the runways before landing.
Note: This is based on my opinions, and available public news sources.
The timing of events at Erdogan's hotel in Marmaris seem very odd too. I'm having a job getting accurate info from the press but it seems roughly:
21:15 - Statement read on state-owned TRT says military has "completely taken over the administration of the country to reinstate constitutional order". - That's when I started following it on CNN and similar
2126 - President Erdogan facetimes people to take to the streets to protest. Speaking to a CNN Turk reporter via a cellphone video link he says it will meet a "necessary response". He says he is returning to the capital Ankara. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/turkey-timeline-coup-a...
Some time later 3 helicopters turn up to get Erdogan at the same hotel he's been photographed at and then left "after about 1.5 hours after Erdogan's departure from the hotel is by the soldiers in the coup attempt was made here attacks. " http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yerel-haberler/mugla-haberleri/er...
You'd think the normal timing would be try to detain Erdogan, then announce coup then press turn up, not announce coup, allow global live press coverage for a couple of hours, then try to catch Erdogan. I realise there may have been confusion but phones, the internet were working normally. They could have whatsapped 'got him yet?' or phoned or whatever. Or turned on the TV and watched CNN and seen his flight on flight24 before going to his hotel.
But also the soldiers were looking for Erdogan at 3.30am, long after he'd gone. And presumably after the photographers had packed up and gone home. Maybe they don't bother checking the news or AlJazeera's twitter feed? Or just coup theatre perhaps. Mail's account from some hotel guests:
>But they were woken at 3.30am by the popping of guns – which they thought at first were fireworks – and his wife Theresa went to the door to see what was going on.
>She was met by the sight of military rebels running around the hotel armed with machine guns.
>'You want to see what is going on, but she found herself face to face with a soldier with a machine gun in his hands,' continued Mr de Graaf.
>The soldiers were shouting in broken English: 'Where Erdogan stay? Erdogan stay?'
Absolutely, I watched every bit of news as it happened, and the video channels.
The military that were holding areas were told it was a drill. It was by far one of the worst coups from an organizational standpoint I've ever seen.
That leaves you with either
1. A extremely poor, unfocused, and uncoordinated coup that had real intentions, but was rushed and ultimately had no chance of succeeding.
2. Erdogan knew a coup was going to happen, and pushed them to go forward with it while he was safe, with protection from fighter jets, etc.
3. A staged coup, and the fighter jets were always part of Erdogan's attempt, at the beginning flying low as a show of support, and at the end, validating he can land safety with no lucky/unlucky coup member getting to take him down.
And, I don't really know. It's one of those, but there isn't enough evidence in any direction to really make a claim of anything in my view.
I will say, none of it makes any sense. Erdogan telling everyone to take the streets to stop this felt ridiculous during it, but afterwards makes a ton of sense.
Most of the military didn't know they were in a coup. And the only shutdowns were things that could potentially alert the military on what was going on, facebook, cellphones, etc.
But I think you have to take it at face value, and go with option 1 unless other evidence comes.
It was already pretty shaky that they had a list of judges to immediately sack 2 hours after the coup. I mean, that's incredible timing.
Ignore the tone, but it was incredible during the coup,
Robert Baer, a veteran former CIA officer said
“I have been involved in coups before,” he said. “They should have taken CNN Turk and closed it down the first minutes, the radio station, social media, the internet. Even if they didn’t arrest [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they should have taken care of all of that right at the beginning.”
Baer also revealed that he had discussed the possibility of a coup with Turkish military officers in the past few months.
“I’ve been speculating with Turkish officers a couple months ago about a coup and they said, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “And clearly they’re not involved, so there’s limited support for this.”
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At the time when we said it, everyone focused on how inappropriate it was to be giving the coup leaders advice, but if you remove that from the equation, what you have is legitimate criticism as to the plan, and more questions that don't have answers regarding who actually started this in the Turkish military.
It would be pretty unprecedented for the coup members to shoot down the sitting president's plane. They would almost certainly just prevent him from landing, or allow him to land and arrest him immediately.
It seems more and more (to me at least) that the coup d'état attempt could have been allowed, if not blatantly organized by the ruling elite of Turkey.
There's actually a great scene in the end of the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown Istanbul episode where someone close to the ruling class (a business owner), makes the following comment[1]:
> "Fear works. Fear gets votes."
Beyond that, I can't find a clip, but it was the most real-life foreshadowing I have ever seen in my life.
I'm not even super big on the show (my wife is), but twice now I've seen things foreshadowed on it. It was so blatantly clear Turkey was devolving into a pure dictatorship when the episode was filmed like two years ago.
We've seen stuff on Reddit, but the conversation they had at the end of the episode with the business owner was just scary. He was basically just like, "yeah, we're going to take power right from under everyone's noses, and it's going to make me rich"
According to Wikipedia's entry on the Patriot Act, it was introduced on October 23. Over a month to produce 342 pages of double-spaced federal legalese? Probably not incredible. That said, I'm sure the TLA agencies took advantage of the crisis to "suggest" a lot of things they'd been wanting.
> It's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks.
That much is obvious. Erdogan didn't start laying blame for problems on the "parallel structure" only after the coup attempt, he's been doing it for years. The coup attempt provided the political pretext for stronger action against the group (and, potentially, others that the regime can use the pretext of going after the group to deal with at the same time) than the regime thought it could get away with before.
Governments frequently use crises as pretexts for actions which they wanted to do previously but didn't find political support for, both against specific internal or external targets and in terms of general, non-specifically-targeted policy.
It's likely par for the course to have lists of potential adversaries maintained in the event of a national emergency : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
In my book, "quite likely" would be, say, 80-90 %. And that is absurd.
It is imaginable that the coup was staged, but it is not more likely than the other, more realistic explanations. In fact, it is still rather unlikely, even if one cannot rule it out completely.
That being said, as another commentator mentioned: These lists have existed before, since tensions have been going on for years. So now Erdogan just had to pull them out of the drawer.
Yes, "starting" may be too charitable, but the first few thousand were military, so it was at least plausible that they were tagged for actual involvement with the coup.
In his convoluted thinking, he's trying to stop the spread of an anti-establishment political organization that has infiltrated all levels of the Turkish military and civil service.
Or, you know, they're reasonable people who are concerned about the dimming of their country's democracy.
While that is true, look at North Korea. Everyone is taught from birth that their Gloious Leader is, in a sense, God. However, people who've escaped have said that when they got old enough to actually think for themselves, they figured out it was a lie but couldn't do anything.
> Well, it's hard to say. Yes and no. Because if you're talking about nowadays North Koreans, it's a little bit hard for me to say that a majority of North Koreans believe propaganda. But I do think that older generations definitely believe government propaganda, because in the 1970's, economically the North Koreans were better off than South Korea, but after the 1990s famine, things have proven that it is not the best country in the world as the government or state claim, because how can you accept the propaganda when your best friend dies of starvation? So I think nowadays more and more people are critical of government propaganda, but I can't say what all North Koreans do now.
I grew up in Eastern Europe in the 80's. No internet, but it was still impossible to stop the flow of information, even a little bit, that the West wasn't this horrible, terrifying place. People are not stupid, but they know when to shut up.
For a while, they basically put the EU over a barrel via the refugee issue. In return for making some effort to restrain refugee flow, Turkey demanded the prospect of membership (bearing in mind that the talks alone were legitimizing, even without actual membership).
At this point, with EU membership looking less inviting and Turkey looking downright autocratic, it's hard to imagine it will happen. But the talks did their job, helping to shore up Erdogan's standing after Tahrir Square while he consolidated his power.
It's one more consequence of the slow. late reaction to Iraq and Syria: the EU had to sell out to anyone who could offer them some kind of damage control.
For example I saw some posts from turkish people on reddit, where they concluded that the few reaming Kemalists (there was a kemalist purge in 2011, with most of them replaced by Gulenists after some false accusations), would attempt a coup during EU-join talks, because they thought joining EU was a better deal than risking a coup.
When Brexit happened, it became clear the EU was a pointless effort, thus everyone waiting on the EU to put their plans forward, now didn't had to wait anymore, so all the corked schemes will now suddenly go forward.
People I talked with, many told me it wouldn't surprise them if we keep seeing a festival of coups, counter-coups and political manuevers now that EU is not in the way anymore.
> When Brexit happened, it became clear the EU was a pointless effort,
That 'pointless effort' has a population larger than the United States and much of the highest standards of living and productivity on Earth. The daft vote by the least educated and deliberately, cynically manipulated and misled half of one country does not make or demonstrate the EU pointless. If the vote was held today it would not pass.
It's possible that EU expansion is over. We ran out of neighborhood democracies.
If Trump wins in a similar democratic fubar, will the US be pointless?
> The daft vote by the least educated and deliberately, cynically manipulated and misled half of one country
This kind of attitude towards that half is maybe part of the reason they voted that way, education level aside. Not everyone benefited from EU membership.
I agree with Chris2048, in time before the actual vote in UK polish media tried to present both options and their arguments, one of the interviews was really memorable for me, the conclusion was that "no fisherman in UK will vote for stay". Of course I know, that the interviewee did not represent all of their trade and some probably voted stay. But the sentiment of it was very familiar to me, it was just like some polish farmers, mostly living off (very) small farms (<10ha). Before Poland joined EU it was feared that those people will have troubles, and let's be honest: with or without EU being a small farmer really sucks. The way that fisherman spoke about more than a decade of hardship and bureaucracy EU created for them was just what I'm hearing here. About new (higher) norms, about artificial production limits, even the part about how other EU countries are taking advantage of it to kill our industry was easy to relate to... And the emotions, last year in my region woman broke down in cries at paper-filling training, because she just couldn't stand it any more. If this was UK she would vote leave. Sure you may say that in a way she failed to make use of great opportunity EU provides, possibly because of lacking education, and there is some truth in that. But blaming people for being uneducated, stupid and cynically manipulated solves non of the problems, this is just an excuse to deny that EU has any problems at all.
Agreed. There's no way Turkey can get into the EU, first, because it will never meet EU rules; and second, because any other EU member can veto it. In this case, Greece probably would.
Turkey first applied to join what was then the EEC in 1987. It was declared an eligible candidate in 1997. Negotiations were formally opened in 2005.
Now, in 2016, negotiations have closed on just one out of 35 chapters—‘science and research’, which was completed in 2006, the year after it was opened.
Of the remaining 34 chapters, 14 have been opened for negotiation.
In 2006, the EU decided that until Turkey agrees to remove obstacles to free movement of goods (including transport restrictions) between it and Cyprus, no more chapters will be provisionally closed. Eight chapters (including areas fundamental to EU law, such as free movement of goods and right of establishment and freedom to provide services) will not even be opened.
Basically, Erdogan has given up on the EU, and to be fair, the EU has probably missed out on an opportunity to draw Turkey into its sphere while the chance existed, and while Erdogan was willing to compromise.
I question whether Erdogan was ever seriously pursuing membership. He probably would have taken it, on good enough terms, but I don't think it was a goal. Too poorly aligned with his religious, autocratic tendencies.
The narrative that makes more sense to me is that Erdogan used membership talks to maintain a moderate reputation, creating a retort to both domestic and international critics. It weakened the position of moderate Kemalists at home, and effectively silenced EU criticism (what were they going to say, "he's a dictator and we'd like him in our club?"). The EU was reluctant to back off that course because it would have alienated an approximate ally well-placed to deal with Iraq and the refugee crisis.
At this point the game is played out; Erdogan has his state control, EU membership is less appealing, and the refugee crisis is, if not fixed, at least no longer new. Everyone got their short-term gains, and the talks can go nowhere just like they were before.
However, it would require Erdogan to be quite an intelligent, long-term thinking person. Which, in my eyes, has to be questioned considering how he is so emotional and short-tempered that he picks any tiny, meaningless war he can get, even if it means suing teenagers who "offend" him.
That's what, based on my limited understanding, is what distinguishes him from Putin. Putin is in many ways similar to Erdogan, but he actually knows that many minor fights are not worth pursuing. Which is why we the Internet can create cartoons and collages ridiculing Putin without being sued by him :)
Seeing Erdogan lacking essential personality traits of a good leader, I somehow have a hard time seeing that he is capable of that type of long-term planning. But who knows. He nevertheless managed to get quite far.
Erdogan confuses me for the same reasons as Trump - he's a petty, immature strongman who has no sense of proportion, but somehow he makes enough clever moves to advance his position. I'm not sure if they're political savants, depending on good advisers, or just lucky and grabbing hold of domestic anger.
Erdogan seems to be a joke of despot compared to the likes of Putin or even Assad, and "he's not competent" is probably the best counterargument to any claim of a big, long-term plan. I just wish I understood how he managed to get this far without the abilities that dictatorship usually requires.
That they were recently is surprising to many. IIRC the main bargaining chip that kept them in contention was consideration for the current collection of refugee crises where certain actions by Turkey could help a lot and other could further exacerbate the problems (both from an administrative PoV within the EU and a humanitarian PoV).
Turkey's civil service is not going to be in good shape after this purge. It seems hard to run a modern society in a very precarious neighborhood with undermanned services and not risk your own citizens getting angry or outsiders using the opportunity to strike.
Cuba is in the shape it's in because the industrialist, knowledge workers, business owners, all left. I honestly believe the revolution started with good intentions, then began to turn more authoritarian. And finally, stacked the ranks with incompetent loyalists.
What a shame. Erdogan is cementing his position and thus totalitarianism and islamofascism. Driving out the intellectuals and freethinkers is a significant step. Every month he and people like him are in office will take Turkey years to recover from. If this isn't stopped now, and it seems like it isn't, I doubt I will see a free Turkey in my lifetime.
I am mostly a-political, 3000 years later none of this will matter. A few billion years later andromeda "collides" with milky way. So let people play.
That being said, how does a successful military coup increase a country's democracy in any conceivable way? How is this a "last ditch effort for democracy" as so many people here seem to be thinking? And why is the answer always "oh it was a fake"? How does it work in the first place? Do you think people will suddenly stop voting for their favorite party and ideology (opposing the ruling secular elite) after 14 years?
>how does a successful military coup increase a country's democracy in any conceivable way?
A conceivable way is they overthrow a dictator and hold elections.
In practice through research finds "though democracies are occasionally established in the wake of coups, more often new authoritarian regimes emerge, along with higher levels of state-sanctioned violence." http://rap.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053168016630837
I don't think a coup would have been a good idea in this case - Erdogan was elected and fairly popular so the argument for a coup would be weak. One reason to think it may not have been a real coup attempt.
As long as rich is getting richer and poor is getting better services, which has been consistently the case for the past decade, majority doesn't care about who rules what and what their agenda is. People just want the status quo. People do think extraditions and finger pointings are increasing to insane levels, but as long as status quo is kept and lost services are replaced, they will keep on voting for their beloved somewhat-islamic somewhat-secular government.
Perhaps, though people are often too quick to conclude that crises are staged just because governments are prepared to quickly exploit a particular category of crises to push a pre-existing agenda with motivations only tangential to the crises, and ultimately the debate over whether the crisis was staged detracts attention from criticism of the response (especially when the crisis wasn't staged, and the claim that it was staged can be convincingly rebutted and used to discredit those questioning the response.)
> Why was everyone screaming democracy when they never had one in the first place?
Political correctness. Turkey is defacto ruled by a brutal dictatorship now, the failed coup was the last chance of restoring actual democracy in Turkey. The Turkish constitution is actually good and acknowledge the danger of an Islamic theocracy. The role of the Turkish army is/was to prevent it.They failed.
I don't think they failed as much as they were never meant to succeed. There are just so many places where the military could've outright "taken out" Erdogan but didn't (such as when the "coup" had two jets right next to Erdogan's jet... but didn't shoot then completely backed off)
This was completely set-up to round up popular support / not make it look suspicious when Erdogan did exactly this.
I honestly don't believe it was a coup at all, or at least it was known before hand. There's no way the presidents plane was allows to just flying in circles around the city.
Absolutely. From the comfort of the States, I am glad that the coup did not succeed, but only because Turkey falling into chaos would be beyond terrible. That said, the recent fallout has all the markings of opportunism and expansion of power.
The coup was a last chance effort. Now Turkey has become a totalitarian dictatorship, there is no doubt about that. To be more precise, it already lost its status as democracy years ago when Erdogan had hundreds of prosecutors and policemen fired who dared to investigate corruption within his family.
But with the latest purges you've got to wonder where they want to get the replacements from. Any sane person will probably try to leave the country rather than being clubbed to death by AKP fans.
Moral of the story: NEVER trust or vote for a party that has the word "justice" in its name.
The coup was never real to begin with. There have been so many holes in this narrative that it's like swiss cheese. Why did the military not fire on Erdogan when he was in their sights? Why did Erdogan even risk flying into Istanbul when he knew there would've been a significant chance of being shot down? The answer of course is that he knew there was no risk cause it was a fake coup to begin with.
It probably will, but at the same time I also feel that these moves are "too sudden". Too many people are left without a job and hating Erdogan. And now they can organize. Unless Erdogan intends to kill them all, too, before they do that.
Putin did all of this on a much slower timescale, and gave the society time to adapt. Erdogan is not doing that. He's taking all the power all at once, and throwing out all the opposition out all at once, too.
This might backfire badly, although the "failed coup" certainly gives him a break to do all this, while the rest of the "normal" population is left confused and not knowing what to do and who to support next.
By the way, what's happening in Turkey is also an excellent real-world example of this:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
That's why the "failed coup" was so critical in allowing him to do all of this. Even if there would've been some of those "good people" that would've opposed him (although not that much evidence of that in the past few years, it would seem), they are now paralyzed by this event.
Still, I believe that that this purge is way too sudden and way too large to not have an "opposite and equal reaction" coming back at Erdogan. But it may take a while to happen.
I've met a lot of Turkish students in New York over the last 10 years who have absolutely no plans to go back to their country ever.
The friends I had growing up whose parents were Turkish diplomats all have no plans to go back (their parents/family included) and from what I heard most of their colleagues found ways to stay as well.
I think many who would react are finding ways to leave instead.
The military in Turkey has been infiltrated for decades, but I'm sure some of the military are now just biding there time. It wouldn't be hard for even a few lone actors to take out the president. AKA two jet pilots and an informant.
Unfortunate that we're just hearing crickets on the international level though. It's a damn shame that a systematic rebuke of Erdogan's official narrative isn't anywhere in the mainstream media.
This seems a little too conspiracy-ish to me. My feeling (and I am clueless and so probably wrong) is that the coup was real, but compromised from the start. The government knew it was coming, infiltrated it, and ensured it wouldn't pose a danger, but at its core I think it was real.
I guess that line gets blurry, anyway. If you find someone with a legitimate grievance and then encourage them to rebel and give them support, is that real or fake?
One could say that Erdogan would be satisfied with martyring himself (Islamist to the end), but I highly doubt that. He believes he is Turkey and that it cannot stand on its own two feet without him, so I don't think he would risk his life intentionally.
In a dictatorship, it doesn't even matter who you vote for because the results can be falsified. Last Turkish election was stolen by Erdogan's AKP. And no one in western media said anything about it.
Erik Meyersson, prof at Stockholm School of Economics, did the analysis of turkish election data and he found the evidence of falsification:
as i read it, not exactly evidence but rather strong hints. from the article: "evidence that would be consistent with widespread voting manipulation, not proof of it", also he makes two assumptions and adds "If any of these assumptions are violated, then the difference in last digit distributions is not informative of voting manipulation."
Probably the most misused term/epithet in international relations. At its worst Turkey is no more repressive than Russia or China and less repressive than Iran. Once you use "totalitarian" to describe authoritarian regimes, you run out of room to describe those that actually qualify as totalitarian, such as North Korea or Eritrea.
This is totalitarianism we're talking about, so the bar has to be very low. Otherwise you're classifying Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany in the same state-repression category, which is ludicrous.
Democracy and levels of state repression being orthogonal notwithstanding, not being democratic (or a EU/NATO candidate) does not imply that a state is totalitarian.
This happened before in Iran's revolution, School Deans, and even Hospital Directors were replaced by pro-revolution islamists regardless of education or qualifications. We might see Turkey transform itself into what Iran became. After this they need a War (a la Iraq-Iran war) to keep people distracted and then the changes will be permanent.
The problem with that plan is that Turkey has only one equal on its borders (Iran), and cooking up a cassus belli (supporting the Rojava Kurds & the Syrian government...?) there isn't going to be easy. Everyone else is either friendly (Azerbaijan), an overmatch (Russia & NATO), or a pushover but with overmatching alliances (Armenia & Syria).
I suppose they'll have to settle for a Kurdish insurgency...
> NEVER trust or vote for a party that has the word "justice" in its name.
Also see Poland's "Justice" Party. Almost the same story there, too.
Not a scientific experiment by any means, but I've also noticed that leaders who have been lawyers, also tend to presume themselves "above the law", and they usually try to interpret the law to suit them.
This might be because from their point of view the "law" is not something set in stone, and therefore being a "criminal" is all "relative". That law can be changed on a whim. And they've been dealing with legal loopholes their whole careers as well. Knowing that, they can probably excuse various crimes much more easily in their heads.
Well, then why didn't Turkish people join the coup? The coup lost all of its momentum when people started marching on the street. Perhaps next time they should consider assassination over a military take-over when all of the top military officials have been replaced by the President several years ago.
Look at Syria. The civil war is still on-going. This is not Thailand. There is no King / Emperor to bless.
It is thought that the coup was planned for few or several weeks later. They learn that the prosecuter is close to the end. Coup members immediatly come to their work, leaving their holiday or annual leaves. They start to prepare for the coup. At 15:00 or 16:00 central inntelligence learns that something is going on due to a leaker. At 18:00 military meeting and intelligance agree to close the airspace. At 21:00 or 22:00 coup starts beacause they are known. The actual plan was for 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. And you know the rest, FaceTime, insider (pro-government) military members, starting too early due to a leak etc made it uncessfull coup.
The coup members execute the constitional military idioligy/law of the Turkish military, that is to prevent both ousider and insider enemies. Here insiders are islamic nuts. Take control, establish Ataturk's 6 (iirc) main points; united republic, secularism, Turkish state, etc. Then they leave. Thece principle are almost same as modern western priciples in ethnic countries like Spain or France, but not like Switzerland or UK.
Sadly Turkey is not only geographically between Europe and Middle East but also idiologically. Ataturk was from Europe. AKP supporters are from eastern parts of the country.
Do we know that the Kemalist sections of the military participated in the coup? I have not read anything about it. These would be the only ones who would care enough to follow the "protect secularism against islamists" protocol. If the initiators were, as being reported, related to the Gülen movement, then they are religious nuts as well, and what they cared about was simply to bring Gülen in power.
>Perhaps next time they should consider assassination
Perhaps you should consider the possibility that this coup was staged by Erdogan himself in order to purge all critically thinking people in prominent positions.
Obama and Hillary made a huge error in judgment by siding with a fascist. It's amazing how we haven't gotten ourselves in deep sh!t already given how badly our leaders judge situations. But maybe we have, and we just don't know it yet.
What else should they have done? Siding with a military coup against a nominally democratic government would look terrible, and when the coup lost they'd look like complete idiots. Remaining neutral wouldn't have been much better.
The people had little choice in deciding their fate, now they have no choice. Erdogan is here to stay -- he will either eventually pass away of old age (see: Zimbabwe's eternal president, Mugabe) or be assassinated.
Without making this too political, this is exactly why good judgement is so much more important than "experience" alone. Hillary is proving herself once again incapable of making good decisions in such tough situations, and who knows to what future catastrophes her bad decisions will lead, if she becomes president.
At least Obama is threatening to throw Turkey out of NATO, but knowing Obama's ABC policy (Always-Be-Compromising), it's just an empty threat, and Erdogan likely knows it.