Turkey – America’s New Sweetheart | New Eastern Outlook
Israel has been the American sweetheart in the Middle East for nearly 70 years, trying to expand its influence over other countries of the region “in the name of US prosperity.” However, times have changed and this “union” has been going down in flames.
But it is not alone, since a similar fate awaited yet another favorite of Washington – Saudi Arabia who in exchange for certain “services”, like control over international oil markets, the creation of Al-Qaeda, and the implanting of the seeds of religious discord in certain states is now repaid by the total disregard and the future disintegration of the kingdom, in accordance to Ralph Peters’ map.
That is why, while Washington has been busy redrawing the Middle East for it to better serve its own best interests, America decided to choose a new favorite – Turkey, that should replace the old ones which are of little use for the White House anymore.
This choice, of course, was not random. The Unites States has been developing the plan that would allow it to approach Turkey, while containing its influence at the same time, for quite a while. In order to achieve this, American think tanks decided to exploit a number of regional problems and contradictions. In some ways Washington is actively using its influence to block Turkey’s expansion, but leaving its ambitions intact, in hopes that this would result in clashes with major regional powers, including Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and others.
Turkey is marked by a combination of military and non-military advancements, with a strong emphasis on the former aspect. Close bilateral military cooperation was perfectly complemented by the fact that Turkey did join the North Atlantic Alliance, which allowed Washington to install a number of bases on Turkish territory along with providing training to Turkish army units by using NATO’s capabilities.
Today Turkish armed forces are a force to be reckoned with, with a total of 630,000 soldiers who are well trained and provided with modern weapons and naval ships. In fact, the Turkish army is the second largest in NATO, which can be explained by the fact that army is a key element of the Turkish traditional society.
Once the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq began, the importance of the role Turkey played in the United States political games greatly increased. The Republic of Turkey is also pivotal in the diversification of exports of hydrocarbons on the Eurasian continent. This goal is facilitated by the fact that Turkey has the largest oil port – Iskenderun, which is strategically important for the economies of the West, as well as the armies and navies of NATO countries.
Turkey’s special status in American foreign policy was underlined by the visit of Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, General John Allen to Ankara in early July. John Allen has not simply negotiated the use of the Incirlik Air Base for American military operations in the region, he has also talked Turkish generals into taking part in them. This time it’s the Kurds who must take the beating, despite the fact that Washington has repeatedly used them for its own purposes only to turn its back on them later on, but Turks are willing to allow their territory to be used against Iran, Russia and China as well.
How this “love duet” of US and Turkey plays out – only time will tell, but for some reason the sight of former American minions implies that Turkey is compelled to join their ranks in the near future, once it has fulfilled the role that has been assigned to it by Washington.
NATO member Turkey has been busted supporting ISIS.
In the wake of the raid that killed Abu Sayyaf, suspicions of an undeclared alliance have hardened. One senior western official familiar with the intelligence gathered at the slain leader’s compound said that direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now “undeniable”.
“There are hundreds of flash drives and documents that were seized there,” the official told the Observer. “They are being analysed at the moment, but the links are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.”
However, Turkey has openly supported other jihadi groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, which espouses much of al-Qaida’s ideology, and Jabhat al-Nusra, which is proscribed as a terror organisation by much of the US and Europe. “The distinctions they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin indeed,” said the western official. “There is no doubt at all that they militarily cooperate with both.”
While the Guardian is one of Britain’s leading newspapers, many in the alternative press have longpointed out Turkey’s support for ISIS.
On Tuesday, Turkey proclaimed that it will now help to fight ISIS.
Don’t buy it …
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and now distinguished adjunct professor of Government and Public Policy at William & Mary – asked yesterday:
What is [Turkish president] Erdogan’s ultimate purpose? He hates Assad. He’d love to bring him down. Is that why he’s doing this?
There’s also the Kurds …
Ethnic Kurds—who on Tuesday scored their second and third significant victories over ISIS in the space of eight days—are by far the most effective force fighting ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.
And yet Turkey is trying to destroy the Kurds. Time writes:
Since [Turkey announced that it was joining the war against ISIS] it has arrested more than 1,000 people in Turkey and carried out waves of air raids in neighboring Syria and Iraq. But most of those arrests and air strikes, say Kurdish leaders, have hit Kurdish and left wing groups, not ISIS.
Hoshang Waziri, a political analyst based in Erbil, says the Kurds’ recent territorial gains in Syria along Turkey’s border and their increasing political legitimacy in the eyes of the West, have made the Kurds a bigger threat to Turkey than ISIS. “The fear of the Turkish state started with the Kurdish defeat of ISIS in Tel Abyad,” says Waziri.
“The image in the West of the Kurds as a reliable ally on the ground is terrifying for Turkey,” says Waziri. “So before it’s too late, Turkey waged its war — not against ISIS, but against the PKK.”
Some see the war against ISIS simply as a cover for an attack on Kurdish groups. Of the more than 1,000 people Turkey has arrested in security sweeps in recent days, 80% are Kurdish, associated either with the PKK or the non-violent Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), says İbrahim Ayhan, a member of parliament for the HDP.
The Kurds are Islamic State’s ideological opposites. The Kurds have been fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq for some time; in particular, the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) in northern Syria has been among the most effective forces at repelling ISIS efforts to take control of the Syrian-Turkish border. Kurdish military resistance in Syria and, to a lesser extent, the Kurdish autonomous government in Iraq have shouldered the lion’s share of the ground conflict against Islamic State, standing their ground at high cost and with limited support from the Western coalition
Even the most mainstream of news outlets are unable to completely obscure the fact that Turkey’s ISIS “offensive” may amount to nothing more than a smokescreen, as Erdogan launches a renewed effort to crush the PKK and nullify opposition gains won at the ballot box early last month when, for the first time in more than a decade, AKP [Erdogan’s party] lost its parliamentary majority.
In the final analysis, Turkey wants Assad out of Syria and that means backing anyone and everyone who is willing to help make that happen (including ISIS) with the exception of the PKK, who Ankara is keen on crushing especially after June’s election results. So now, Turkey will use ISIS as an excuse to procure NATO support for a politically motivated rout of Kurdish “terrorists”. The West will hope that ISIS will suffer more damage than YPG, Turkey will hope that PKK and, by extension, YPG will suffer more damage than ISIS, and everyone – Ankara, Washington, ISIS, and PKK – will hope the when the dust (and blood) finally settles, Bashar al-Assad will have met a Gaddafi-esque end.
So Turkey isn’t really going after ISIS … instead, the ruling party is going after its main political threat – the Kurds – and continuing its long-term effort to overthrow Syria’s Assad.
My 87-year-old black Dad called to say he wanted to congratulate me for my perseverance. “You finally have me and all your siblings (4) agreeing with you.”
My deep desire is to alert my son, daughter, and other non-political hard-working Americans of the moral, spiritual, and cultural evil threatening to overtake our great nation. No longer are we simply engaged in a battle of ideas -- Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative. America's choice of governing has become far more daunting -- light vs. darkness, good vs. evil. “Choose ye this day, whom you will serve.”
Despite Leftist merchants of evil using big words and arrogant condescension to convince us that morality is relative, we instinctively know some things are good and some things are bad. Equally annoying is Leftists' air of superiority -- claiming to care more than us commoners about equality, saving the planet and all life; their evil intentions hidden beneath a shroud of faux compassion.
Leftists have what I call their no-pictures-please policy. They get fuming mad whenever anyone accurately describes, visualizes, or shows pictures of procedures and behaviors the Left has demanded that Americans embrace.
For example: Leftists want women to freely kill their babies all the way up to moments before birth. The last thing they want the public to see is video of the partial birth abortion procedure.
Yes, I am unequivocally saying liberals/Democrats (Leftists) are forcing their evil agenda down America's throat. “Forcing” is exactly what the Left is doing. Americans typically vote against Leftists' desire to make abhorrent behavior mainstream and transform America into a welfare state. Leftists send in their activist judges to overturn the will of We the People. After verbally slapping us around calling us racist, sexist, and homophobic, Leftist judges make what the people voted against into law.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood… against spiritual wickedness in high places.” As I lay out the facts, you judge for yourself.
Well, guess where the majority of PP chop shops are located? Black neighborhoods. PP founder Margaret Sanger pulled no punches. PP was started to deal with “the negro problem.” Sanger believed blacks were inferior and bred too often. Black abortions are disproportionately higher than whites.
Blacks who have not been seduced by the dark side are sounding the alarm, letting blacks know they are aborting themselves into extinction. A billboard in a black neighborhood read, “The Most Dangerous Place for An African-American Is in the Womb.” Guess who was outraged and demanded the billboard be taken down? Al Sharpton and other assorted Leftists who claim to be advocates for blacks.
Sharpton is leading the charge in the hate inspired “Black Lives Matter” movement; founded on the lie that white cops routinely murder blacks. I guess black baby lives do not matter to Sharpton when they are killed by his Leftists homeys at PP.
Here's another thing that causes one to scratch his head. Leftists are fanatical about protecting the rain forest. They say it may hold a cure for AIDS. And yet, most Leftists are obsessed with killing babies. Even after a baby survives a failed abortion, Leftists demand that medical staff let the baby die. Amazingly, a law had to be passed to end this barbaric practice.
Why haven't Leftists considered the possibility that the doctor or researcher with a cure for cancer, AIDS and other diseases may have been among the 55 million babies aborted in America since 1973?
Leftists are defending PP black marketing baby body parts. And yet, these same Leftists are tearfully outraged over the death of a furry animal and fight to their death to protect trees and imprisoned cop killers. There is something seriously wrong in people who possess such a mindset.
Good morning, Ma'am. We appreciate your patronage over the years. However, our religious conscience prevents us from baking a wedding cake for your marriage to a woman. I imagine this is pretty much how the conversation went. Well, all heck broke loose. Christian bakers Aaron and Melisa Klein had to close down their shop and state ordered to pay a lesbian couple $135,000 in absurd damages.
Good morning, Ma'am. We appreciate your patronage over the years. However, our religious conscience prevents us from baking a wedding cake for your marriage to a woman. I imagine this is pretty much how the conversation went. Well, all heck broke loose. Christian bakers Aaron and Melisa Klein had to close down their shop and state ordered to pay a lesbian couple $135,000 in absurd damages.
Check this out folks. America rallied behind the Kleins and started a donations account. When the account reached $100,000, homosexuals pressured Go-Fund-Me into shutting down the account -- claiming Go-Fund-Me was supporting hate.
Okay, so first homosexual activists fined the Kleins $135k. Then, they attempted to block efforts to pay the fine. So, the fine is not about paying the lesbian couple, it is about destroying the Kleins.
In essence, Leftists want to hang the Kleins' economically bloody carcass in the public square as a warning to Christians who refuse to betray their faith. Can you say an assault on Christians' constitutional “free exercise of religion”, boys and girls?
Scripture says “no weapon formed against us shall prosper” and “what they meant for evil, God meant for good.” The Kleins' account has reached $372,000, thus far. http://nbcnews.to/1SgNk5t Praise God!
The Kleins have five kids with whom they planned to leave their business. Leftists have other plans for the Klein family.
Dad calling me about his and my siblings' conversion was really cool. However, I am constantly thinking and praying for wisdom to awaken fellow blacks and other Americans continuously played by Leftists. I rest in the knowledge that surrendering to evil is the only way we fail.
Interviewers have asked on numerous occasions, “How do you endure the name calling and hate you receive as a black conservative Republican?” I reply, “It is easy because I know I am on the right side....God's.”
[Below represents the second half of this article, which comes after citing example after example of what we have been seeing on the streets of America]
If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and your property, you should be. Never before have “we the people” been so seemingly defenseless in the face of police misconduct, lacking advocates in the courts and in the legislatures.
So how do you survive a police encounter with your life and wallet intact?
The courts have already given police the green light to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons. In an 8-1 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that police officers can pull someone over based on a “reasonable” but mistaken belief about the law.
Of course, what’s reasonable to agents of the police state may be completely unreasonable to the populace. Nevertheless, the moment those lights start flashing and that siren goes off, we’re all in the same boat: we must pull over.
However, it’s what happens after you’ve been pulled over that’s critical. Survival is the key.
Technically, you have the right to remain silent (beyond the basic requirement to identify yourself and show your registration). You have the right to refuse to have your vehicle searched. You have the right to film your interaction with police. You have the right to ask to leave. You also have the right to resist an unlawful order such as a police officer directing you to extinguish your cigarette, put away your phone or stop recording them.
However, as Bland learned the hard way, there is a price for asserting one’s rights. “Faced with an authority figure unwilling to de-escalate the situation, Bland refused to be bullied or intimidated,” writes Boston Globe contributor Renee Graham. “She understood her rights, but for African-Americans in encounters with police, the appalling price for asserting even the most basic rights can be their lives.”
So if you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance when it comes to interactions with police.
One police officer advised that if you feel as if you’re being treated unfairly, comply anyhow and contest it in court later. Similarly, black parents, advising their kids on how to deal with police, tell them to just obey the officer’s orders. “The goal,” as one parent pointed out, “is to stay alive.”
It seems that “comply or die” has become the new maxim for the American police state.
Then again, not even compliance is a guarantee of safety anymore. “Police are specialists in violence,” warns Kristian Williams, who has written extensively on the phenomenon of police militarization and brutality. “They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”
In other words, in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat that needs to be “neutralized” is a dangerous one that is part of a greater nationwide trend that sets the police beyond the reach of the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, when police officers are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question, that serves to chill the First Amendment’s assurances of free speech, free assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. If you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re under arrest from the moment a cop stops you.
Sad, isn’t it, how quickly we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat us all like suspects and criminals?
Clearly, the language of freedom is no longer the common tongue spoken by the citizenry and their government. With the government having shifted into a language of force, “we the people” have been reduced to suspects in a surveillance state, criminals in a police state, and enemy combatants in a military empire.
What happens to the Iran nuclear deal if Iran already has a nuclear weapon?
Both Iran and North Korea were part of the A.Q. Kahn proliferation network, and bilateral trade in oil and weapons has continued despite UN resolutions designed to stop it. Ballistic missile cooperation is documented, and nuclear cooperation has been an unspoken theme in Washington. Pyongyang helped Damascus, Iran’s ally, build a secret reactor. There are reports that North Korean experts visited Iran in May to help Iran with its missile program. Pressed by reporters on the subject of North Korea-Iran nuclear cooperation a few weeks ago, even the State Department acknowledged that it takes reports of such cooperation seriously.
In 2006, again in 2009, and more recently in 2013, North Korea carried out what appear to have been nuclear tests. The tests were all small, well below the blast that was achieved by the first Hiroshima atomic bomb and the subsequent Nagasaki explosion.
When America dropped a uranium-fueled simple bomb on Hiroshima (August 1945) it achieved a blast rated at about 15 kilotons (KT). The plutonium bomb with a sophisticated triggering system, used at Nagasaki three days later, had a yield of about 20 KT. The most recent North Korean nuclear explosion, by contrast, was approximately 6 KT, much smaller and it was detonated underground. Such a bomb is not trivial: its fireball would cover about four Manhattan blocks. It is, by itself, not sufficient to destroy the city of New York, but it would do a lot of damage.
Experts think the North Koreans have been developing small nuclear warheads, which they believe explains why the blasts were so small. DIA expressed "moderate confidence" that North Korea had mastered a nuclear weapon small enough to mount on a ballistic missile, and other senior American officials agree. But in May, an NSC representative said, ““We do not think that they have that capacity.” Both sides caveat their views with the fact that there is no direct, observable evidence -- only extrapolations from events in a closed country.
If North Korea can make a small nuclear weapon, why would it?
The main threat for North Korea lies to its south. If Pyongyang wanted to use its ballistic missiles to attack South Korea with atomic warheads, U.S. spy satellites would surely pick up the preparation and preemptive action could be taken to make sure they were never launched. Thus the better nuclear option for North Korea is to do it in a more stealthy way: perhaps by using a mini submarine or a fishing boat in a key South Korean harbor. In that case, the bigger the bomb the better.
North Korea desperately needs cash to prop up a regime that has been teetering for a long time. A good part of that cash comes from abroad, and outside of illicit activities the big money seems to be from Iran.
Given relations between the two and North Korean capabilities, it is quite possible that the North Korean tests have either been of Iranian-made warheads or of warheads made for Iran by North Korea. Which may mean Iran is shipping uranium (and possibly plutonium) to North Korea and the North Koreans are developing the warheads and testing them.
If Iran already has nuclear weapons, the agreement with the United States, Europe, and Russia is a canard, enabling Iran to bring in a lot of cash and technology while continuing to expand its nuclear program outside its borders. Ending the UN arms embargo against Iran would also allow it to ship items (warheads?) into the country without international inspection.
The nuclear deal with Iran does not consider these external relationships, or even officially recognize that they exist. Nor does it take into account that the explosions in North Korea could have been Iranian bombs. Although American intelligence is not completely confident on the matter, it is clear that the administration has heard voices of concern from within its own establishment.
This is another example of the ardor with which the Obama administration has pursued the Iran nuclear deal without regard for Iranian behavior before and during the negotiation.
Also see:
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