Turkey's failures in Iraq, Syria linked to Davutoglu

Turkish President Abdullah Gul gave the first, and more importantly, the most sober reaction to dramatic developments in Iraq when he said, “I am sure such de facto developments won’t be allowed in this region.” He was referring primarily to Turkey’s Western allies. And he did have discreet criticism for them: “You may recall that I had drawn attention to this. I always warned our allies. We cannot afford to leave a vacuum. If you leave it, they will fill it as they are doing now.”

Then he added: "At the moment, our relations with Baghdad are not at the desired level, but there are intensive consultations." Gul was speaking after the extremist Islamic organization Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) captured Mosul and the Turkish Consulate there and news came that they had also captured Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, and Samarra and were moving toward Baghdad. From the words Gul carefully selected, it was understood that Turkey was not thinking of a unilateral military operation and was searching for a multilateral response to rollback ISIS battlefield gains.

During these dramatic developments in Mosul, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, accepted as the architect of Turkey’s new Middle East policy, was abroad. His reaction to ISIS was very tough: “Nobody should test Turkey’s resolve.”

But hadn't Turkey's “deterrent” capacity been well tested by the Middle East’s new protagonists since 2010’s flotilla incident in the international waters of the east Mediterranean against Israel? Or, more importantly, against Syria when Turkey’s fighter jet was downed by a Syrian missile in June 2012? Or in May 2013 after the bloody car bombing in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli that took more than 50 lives, when Turkey put the responsibility on Syrian intelligence and declared that it would not go unpunished?