Turkey is Not Just for Thanksgiving

Turkey, not as in sandwich but the country, has recently undergone a change that will be good for it and good for the West and NATO. In recent years Turkey has been drifting into the Islamist camp with its President, Tayyip Erdogan, having delusions of being the new Sultan of the Middle East. Turkish policy has become increasingly friendly to outfits like ISIS and hostile to Israel and the West. Well hold the phone and ring one up for democracy!

Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, envisioned a modern, secular Islamic state when he overthrew the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Democracy gradually took hold and Turkey became a strong ally of the U.S. and was generally a friend we could count on against the Russians and the craziness of the rest of the Middle East. All that was at risk under Erdogan, but in a stunning and unexpected election result on June 7, Turkish voters threw the bums out and thereby affirmed Ataturk's original vision for the country. Barring an attempted coup by Erdogan, we can again hopefully look forward to a renewed and mutually rewarding relationship with Turkey that will bring some stability to what is a wildly spinning and unstable part of the world.

townhall.com/columnists/austinbay/2015/06/10/turkish-election-a-model-for-secular-arab-spring-revolutionaries-n2010439