The dilemma isn’t only over the required response but what the target of punitive measures should be. Why, for example, should Saudi Arabia be targeted but not Russia or Bulgaria, or Egypt or Turkey, where journalists, male and female, have been killed or raped or arrested without trial, or have disappeared? [...]
One can only assume that if it had been any other country besides Saudi Arabia that had been involved in the disappearance of the journalist on Turkish soil, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have immediately severed diplomatic relations with the other country and probably even demanded an immediate emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the incident. But Turkey, which has links to the Russian-Iranian-Qatari axis of power, has still not given up on its dream to exert influence on the Middle East.
It’s difficult for Ankara to forgo the huge achievement that it snagged in 2015 when it became a member of the Saudi coalition in the war against the Islamic State, which then gave Turkey an admission ticket into the Arab club of Middle Eastern countries, many of which still view Erdogan's republic as hostile. In addition, too much Saudi money is invested in Turkey: Last year alone, the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait invested nearly $2 billion, equal to all of the other foreign investments in the Turkish markets. But these interests and investments, it should be noted, didn’t keep the UAE's ambassador in Washington from labeling Turkey as a threat. [...]
On top of this, initial reports about Khashoggi's disappearance in the Arab press, particularly the Egyptian media, actually portrayed Turkey rather than the Saudis as the culprit. Dandrawi al-Harawi, editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Yawm al-Sabaa, has alleged that Turkey was directly involved in abducting Khashoggi, and added that the Turks falsified evidence to sully the Saudis’ reputation, as part of an effort by the Muslim Brotherhood to harm Arab regimes, “since it is well known that Khashoggi was part of the Muslim Brotherhood and was previously even a close associate of [Osama] Bin Laden and radical Muslim movements.”
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