Article | Turkey Is and Has Been a Reliable NATO Member

Mavi Boncuk |

Turkish Ambassador Serdar Kilic's letter to Wall Street Journal:

Turkey Is and Has Been a Reliable NATO Member
Turkey has been a proud and indispensable ally for over 60 years.

Aug. 19, 2018 1:01 p.m. ET

Bernard-Henri Levy falsely claims that Turkey has been an unreliable ally (“NATO Should Give Turkey the Boot,” op-ed, Aug. 14)[1], but that argument ignores decades of history. Turkey has been a proud and indispensable ally for over 60 years: as a front-line combatant against ISIS and other religious extremists, guardian of NATO’s southern flank and home to the alliance’s second-largest armed forces.

Mr. Levy accuses Turkey of spreading Islamist extremism and fomenting violence in Syria, but the opposite is true. We provide a safe haven for approximately four million Syrian refugees who, at this very moment, live free from terror and have access to homes, schools and health-care facilities established by our government. Perhaps he forgets the defeat of ISIS at the hands of Turkish troops in Jarabulus and other battles against ISIS waged and won by and with Turkish armed forces.

Like our NATO allies, Turkey is a democracy whose government is freely elected by its people—not a “caliphate” in the making, as Mr. Levy claims. With a huge voter turnout across the country, Turkey’s democracy is vibrant and dynamic. The numbers tell the story: An amazing 86.2% of eligible voters went to the polls to cast their votes in an election that was the most monitored by international observers in recent history. Over 50 million Turks cast ballots for six different candidates.

As NATO’s most strategically located member, Turkey ensures global security at a time of unprecedented challenges facing the alliance. We have committed to spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024, and the share of our military equipment spending to the defense budget is already above the NATO guideline of 20%.

Turkey’s Incirlik air base also hosts a crucial staging ground for the international coalition to defeat ISIS. Located 60 miles from the Syrian border, the base’s proximity to the front lines allows coalition strike missions to stay in the air longer without refueling and to react more quickly. That saves American and coalition lives. Incirlik is playing a vital role in staging operations that have put our enemies on the run.

We stand by our NATO allies during this challenging time and proudly stand on guard at the front lines to face future threats to our collective security, and expect nothing less from our allies.

Serdar Kiliç
Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey
Washington

[1] OPINION  COMMENTARY
NATO Should Give Turkey the Boot

Ankara, helped by China and Russia, is vandalizing Western interests.
By Bernard-Henri Lévy[*]
Aug. 13, 2018 7:07 p.m. ET

U.S.-Turkish relations are mired in the worst crisis of their history. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is demanding that President Trump turn over Mr. Erdogan’s sworn enemy, Fethullah Gülen. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, seeks the release of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, who was imprisoned on the pretext that he had been involved in Turkey’s July 2016 coup attempt. The U.S. government has levied economic sanctions on two senior Turkish officials, akin to those imposed on Russian oligarchs after the seizure of Crimea. Turkey responded by freezing the plainly nonexistent Turkish assets of two Trump cabinet members....

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EXCERPT 

This sad farce has gone on too long. 

Unless the West comes to its senses, 2018 will live in infamy as the year that Turkey dropped an iron curtain over the Kurdish people.  

What coming to our senses means today is breaking off—not freezing—what has become the farce of negotiations on Turkey’s membership in the EU, dissolving the joint parliamentary commission that continues to operate within the European parliament, expelling Turkey from the Council of Europe (which has, incidentally, condemned the country 2,812 times since it joined the council), and reopening, in a serious way, the question of whether Turkey belongs in the Atlantic alliance. 

 Erdogan leaves the West no choice. If we fail to muster this basic degree of resolve, then the horror of the massacre of the Kurds will be added the shame of watching the killer gloat atop the ruins of our honor. 

{*] Bernard-Henri Lévy is a writer and documentary filmmaker. His Peshmerga! (2016), a Special Selection at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, portrayed the struggle along the thousand-mile front line separating the Kurds from Islamic State. His subsequent La Bataille de Mossoul (2017) explored the fight to retake the city.


Lévy's involvement with the Kurdish cause goes back to the early 1990s.[53] On May 16, 2016, Bernard-Henri Lévy's new documentary film, Peshmerga, was chosen by the Cannes film festival as a special screening to its official selection.

The movie itself is, as stated in its official Cannes presentation: "The third part of a trilogy, opus three of a documentary made and lived in real time, the missing piece of the puzzle of a lifetime, the desperate search for enlightened Islam. Where is that other Islam strong enough to defeat the Islam of the fundamentalists? Who embodies it? Who sustains it? Where are the men and women who in word and deed strive for that enlightened Islam, the Islam of law and human rights, an Islam that stands for women and their rights, that is faithful to the lofty thinking of Averroes, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn Tufail, and Rumi?... Here, with this third film, this hymn to Kurdistan and the exception that it embodies, I have the feeling of possibly reaching my goal. Kurdistan is Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Syrians living freely with Muslims, the memory of the Jews of Aqrah, secularism, freedom of conscience and belief. It is where one can run into a Jewish Barzani on the forward line of a front held, 50 kilometers from Erbil, by his distant cousin, a Muslim, Sirwan Barazi… Better than the Arab Spring. The Bosnian dream achieved. My dream. There is no longer really any doubt. Enlightened Islam exists: I found it in Erbil."

A year later, Lévy said that “Jews have a special obligation to support the Kurds,” and that he hopes "they will come say to the Peshmerga: ‘For years now you have spilled your blood to defend the values of our shared civilization. Now it is our turn to defend your right to live freely and independently.'” 

Cohen, Ben (September 25, 2017). "Bernard-Henri Lévy: Jews Have 'Special Obligation' to Support Kurdish Independence". Algemeiner.com. Retrieved April 3, 2018.