You have screwed up. Get it off your chest.

My words are neither for your “Chief”, who has become a fixture so permanent on the presidential chair at the palace that his replacement cannot even be mooted, nor for Ahmet Davutoğlu’s successor, the one and only Binali Yıldırım, destined to be the predecessor of whoever is next in line.

cumhuriyet.com.tr

My words are addressed to you MPs who entered parliament on the AKP’s list. Those who sit on village, town, sub-province and province committees of the AKP. Or even the village and quarter heads who have attended one of the “Palace meetings” of whose number I have lost count.
Gentlemen, come clean and confess when others are out of earshot: You have screwed up big time in office.
Don’t be taken in by the never-ending mantra churned out in concert by all of the party bigwigs right up to the very top that, “We have caught up with the times ... We have brought Turkey up to date ... The Economy is in fine mettle ... Things are on track ... External plotters and internal rotters ... Aleppo is ours, and so is Mosul ... Our army is conquering Syria ... Assad’s days are numbered ... Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque awaits us.”
These bombastic, piteous pronouncements are no different from the clamour emitted by those who endeavour with loud singing to cloak their fear and panic as they pass a graveyard at midnight.
Be it domestic policy, be it foreign policy, be it politics, be it economics, be it education, be it security ... Wherever you look, if your eyes are wide open, your mind clear and your wits sharp, you will see that you have screwed up.
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Where shall I start?
You set out with: “Zero problems with neighbours” and continued with: “Make more friends and fewer enemies”. You plodded on. Stop and take a hard look. We remain on good terms with no neighbours. You have lost more friends and made more enemies.
You are not convinced?
Well, spit it out. Is Iraq our friend and are we on good terms? Or Syria? Greece? The bastion of Shiism Iran? Or even, if you look not at idle talk, but at facts and deeds, Russia? Do we now see the same European Union as the European Union that supported you in your early years of office? Your relations with Obama were precarious. You have placed high hopes in Trump, but what will you say when you contemplate his Middle East projects?
Let us leave foreign policy to one side.
Shall we move on to the economy?
I will not go into detail. Let us leave the construction sector, hardly a great contributor of added value, to one side. Take a look at industrial manufacturing, above all take a look at the manufacture of exportable industrial goods.
Then, your exhortations one minute for people to cash in their dollars with misty-eyed talk of a national and local currency and your references the next to us being but one “link in the global economy” conjure up the term ‘oxymoron’. (I have written before about oxymorons. “Nothing but a local and national currency in a global economy” makes about as much sense as a virgin mother, an atheist cleric or impartial parties.)
What about education? What do this year’s results of the OECD’s renowned and respected PISA survey tell you? (You are aware that this PISA is not the leaning tower in Italy, I take it?)
There will be those among you who take exception to my saying, You have screwed up, gentlemen.” OK, let us hear it. Did the Turkish armed forces step onto Syrian soil “to end Assad’s reign” or “to fight terrorists?”
Do not dodge the issue by saying that Assad is also a terrorist. Al-Nusra, ISIL and that lot are terrorists but you cannot call the head of state of a sovereign country a terrorist, even if he terrorises his own people. A foreign policy aimed at deposing him is not even to be contemplated. Before you know it, somebody will appear and utter a sentence beginning, “But you, too ...” and you will be crushed.
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Shall I go on? Shall I turn to the law, security, unemployment, universities or science.
I get it.
You are right. Let us call it a day.
You have screwed up, gentlemen. Get it off your chest.