A foreign policy balance sheet in the Syria context

Kofi Annan, after his visits to Syria and Iran, had only just announced, having presented the new roadmap to the UN Security Council by teleconference, that Syria had been given until July 22 to silence the guns, when Assad's military and Shabiha forces carried out a massacre in Tremseh in which nearly 300 people were ultimately killed and hundreds more wounded. In the attacks, the homes of soldiers who defected from the Baath army and joined the Free Syrian Army in particular are being targeted, and in those homes there are only the families of the former soldiers.

Such attacks have become Assad's classic. Every diplomatic door opened to him, he strangely slams violently from behind before the interlocutors have even returned home. He did the same when seeing Annan off at the end of his previous visit. He had done the same after Ahmet Davutoğlu's last meeting before that. After hours-long talks, while the Turkish delegation was on its way home, the tanks that had ostensibly withdrawn from Hama entered Latakia and Deir ez-Zor a few days later.

It is quite clear that Assad regards diplomatic efforts for a solution as an opportunity offered to him to continue violently suppressing his opponents. He is excessively confident that these efforts will not turn into a military intervention against him. Indeed, the fact that the search for solutions to the Syrian crisis began by excluding the war option emboldens him in this. He is confident that by killing his opponents he will have solved the crisis in his own way.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people continue to die every day.

While people are dying before our eyes at the hands of a merciless dictator's massacres, while the massacre capacity of the blood-stained dictator is recklessly displayed in front of us, there are still those who continue to criticize Turkey's Syria policy for having hurried more than necessary. Faced with this disgusting situation, they continue to assess Turkey in terms of profit and loss.

May no profit whatsoever ever come from this barbarity displayed in Syria. What kind of accounting mind is this? It gets the calculation wrong from beginning to end. What they say one moment does not match what they say the next. For one thing, once you have lost out on humanity, where could you possibly gain?

The moment they were forced to withdraw somewhat from defending Assad's lies, which are increasingly indefensible and can no longer be stuffed into a sack, the path they cling to becomes trying to show the failure of Turkey's foreign policy. And the only thing they point to as an indicator of failure in Turkey's foreign policy is nothing other than Syria. Starting from the situation in Syria, they speak of our having become problematic with all our neighbors.

From the pessimistic atmosphere of the problem continuing with Syria, they are trying to make a noise of failure for the whole of Turkey's foreign policy. Amid this noise, they run a chorus of elegant sentences, such as "from zero problems to problems with everyone," that hook a person in a moment of heedlessness. But let us say, calm down a little, and ask:

For God's sake, with which neighbor that has become problematic today were we better off ten years ago?

Were we better off with Iran ten years ago than today? Were we better off yesterday with the Iran for whose sake we set the February 28ths in motion because it was trying to export revolution to us? And with Russia, were we better off ten years ago? With Armenia, Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, with which of them were we in a better situation ten years ago? Those who perceive problems with neighbors evidently forget that they are not even looking from the horizon of the problems that have been reduced with these countries over the last ten years.

Meanwhile, taken as a whole, the foreign policies of the main countries have undergone great fluctuations and collapses during the Arab Spring process. The US is seeking to make up for the shock it is experiencing in Egypt, where it trusted most in the region. Russia has in any case come out of the entire Arab Spring process with a complete rout. Today, because of its support for Syria, it is suffering a total loss of position in the rest of the entire Middle East that cannot easily be made up. It makes China and Iran partners in all of its loss.

Likewise, Iran, because of the support it is giving to Syria, remains far outside the developments in the Arab Spring. The rhetorical support it has given to the revolutionary processes from the start has produced no prestige for it at all. On the contrary, because of its stance in Syria, its support is in any case not found credible.

France remained entirely French toward what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt, and although it tried to make up for its loss by leaping onto the stage in Libya in desperation, its foreign policy has been seriously wounded.

Even at a quick glance at this picture, which we have summarized briefly, one has to strain the limits of reason and conscience too far to attribute failure to Turkey's foreign policy.