I remember a movie I know President Erdoğan watched, a movie he seems to have forgotten entirely…

While closely following the Turkish cross-border operation in Syria, I really wonder if these days Tayyip Erdoğan would remember the movie ‘Thirteen Days’ that he had watched long before he became prime minister and president, during the days that he was busy with setting up a new party as a politician banned from politics by the judiciary?

The movie was about the ‘Cuban Missle Crisis’ between the USA and Russia (then named the Soviet Union) which Turkey too was indirectly involved in.

I had watched the film with a journalist couple, and come across Mr. Erdoğan who was just leaving the movie house with a crowd of people around him. We had a very brief talk with him, and learned that he had liked the film very much.

[Columnist Hüseyin Besli, who was to become an AK Party MP for one parliamentary period, and write a biography of Tayyip Erdoğan in the later years, was among the crowd accompanying Erdoğan that day in the movie house. In a piece in the daily Akşam a few days ago, Besli reminded my encounter and my brief talk with Erdoğan that day. He recalls one point in my conversation with Erdoğan wrong: I was hesitant not about Erdoğan’s success but rather about his men around himself with whom he watched the film together that day, and got them elected as MPs or brought to important positions as ministers in his governments in the later years. I may be far from being good in my political anticipations, but not so bad as failing to predict Erdoğan’s success in politics.]

Kennedy prevented an imminent war managing to achieve his goals

The film is about an immensely important crisis that could have led to a war between the two superpowers.