That's Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and he's no Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey who truly believed in a secular democracy form of government for his homeland. Erdogan doesn't much like us or Israel (somebody tell our president before he sells Turkey our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter), but he's gotten very close to our greatest enemy, and together they are Two Dangerous Guys.
Erdogan was reelected last Sunday, and that is bad news for us, because there can be no doubt his plans are to eventually replace the country's secular government (the legacy of Ataturk) with a religious one (guess which religion).
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, just wrote about Sunday's election in Turkey and the title of his piece is: Erdogan’s Re-election Marks a New Era, But Not a Good One, which pretty well sums it up.
Finally, here's a much more in-depth piece on the problems of Turkey written by Michael Rubin for the July/August 2010 edition of Commentary.
Turkey, from Ally to Enemy
