Returning from the U.S. on Sunday, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought with him several prizes, including the top half of a statue of Hercules from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, returned after years of Turkish efforts to retrieve it.

The 1,800 year old "Weary Hercules" bust will be reattached to its bottom half, which resides in the resort city of Antalya on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Mr. Erdogan said triumphantly that his country had been trying to get it back for 20 years, after it was likely looted and then sold to the Boston museum.

But Hercules wasn't the most important prize that Mr. Erdogan scored while in the U.S. The Turkish leader spent roughly 90 minutes in a meeting with U.S. President Barrack Obama and it looks as though they made what amounts to a trade. While in New York, Mr. Erdogan said the U.S. had agreed "in principle" to sell or lease Predator drones to Turkey.

Re-elected for a third time in June, Mr. Erdogan has taken what many analysts see as a gamble on Turkey's highest stakes political and security issue. That isn't Israel or the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, on which Mr. Erdogan spent so much time in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Rather, it is resolving a decades long dispute over cultural and political rights between the Turkish state and its large ethnic Kurdish minority.

Mr. Erdogan has begun his third term with a major aerial assault against militants from the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, in their bases in the Kandil mountains of Northern Iraq. It is just the latest of many such Turkish assaults over the years, none of which have succeeded in eliminating the PKK. In the 1980s and '90s, some 30,000 people died in the conflict between the Turkish military and PKK. A steady drum roll of PKK killings of Turkish soldiers and police in recent weeks suggest the latest attempt to wipe the group out isn't yet succeeding either.