Turkey Will Pay a High Price After Assad
By throwing its lot completely with Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey will sustain costs whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stays or goes, writes Kadri Gursel.
If we have to explain Turkey’s fundamental mistake in the Syria crisis, there is no better way than “putting all the eggs in one basket.” This is exactly what Turkey did by putting all its eggs in the basket of the Muslim Brotherhood and locked itself into the parameters of a zero-sum game.
But a zero-sum game couldn’t be played in Syria. For Turkey to emerge from the Syrian conflict as a country collecting all the bonuses, the Muslim Brotherhood has to fully and absolutely dominate the entirety of Syria. The likelihood of this is close to zero.
Foreign-policy makers in Ankara, while putting all Turkish eggs into the Muslim Brotherhood basket, acted recklessly with extreme self-confidence, confident that the Baath regime will be toppled in a short time.
One reason why the neo-Islamist elite ruling Turkey today adopted an attitude that was far removed from realities was their underestimation of the institutional resistance capacity of the Baath regime against an uprising. This was a gross misjudgment.
