Politics & Power Quote by Roger Wicker

Wicker frames a strategic inconvenience as a morality play about loyalty, and the sleight of hand is the point. By opening with "Talk about national interests", he signals a reset: stop pretending alliances run on shared values; they run on access, permissions, and leverage. The anecdote about Turkey denying passage during the Iraq invasion becomes less a historical recollection than a rhetorical weapon - a reminder that even "allies" can act like sovereign states with their own domestic politics, red lines, and regional calculations.

The subtext is transactional and disciplinary. Turkey is offered up as Exhibit A in a broader argument that partnership should be measured by compliance when Washington calls. The question "How much trouble did that cause us" is doing double duty: it asserts that the U.S. was entitled to that corridor, and it nudges the listener to feel aggrieved, as if the obstacle was betrayal rather than a democratic parliament voting against facilitating a war many Turks opposed.

Context matters because Operation Iraqi Freedom is one of the most contested U.S. choices of the modern era. Invoking it without relitigating its legitimacy is a deliberate bracketing move: assume the mission, debate only the logistics. That’s how the line works politically. It converts a complex debate about the war into a narrower lesson about alliance management, implying that the real mistake wasn’t the invasion - it was letting partners retain the ability to say no.