The Turkish parliament has approved a reform abolishing the special courts used in coup conspiracy cases, without touching on existing prosecutions of hundreds of military officers that have drawn wide criticism.
The special courts have helped to sharply reduce the power and influence of the military, in the process helping to insure Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist AK Party against any threat of a secularist putsch by an army that has staged four coups in the past 52 years.
Maybe it is a calm assessment that the military is cowed--if there was actually any plot outside of the imaginations of Erdogan's people.
But maybe the dogs were called off because Erdogan knows he might actually need the military to fight for him:
Turkey scrambled six F-16 fighter jets in three separate incidents responding to Syrian military helicopters approaching the border on Sunday, its armed forces command said on Monday.
It was the second day in a row that Turkish jets were launched in response to Syrian helicopters approaching the border and came after a Turkish reconnaissance plane was shot down by Syria late last month.
Cowed. Needed. Whatever. Pounding Assad may be the price of admission for the Turkish generals to get back in the good graces of the government.
