Turkey is a beautiful land, rich in resources, with many highly intelligent and warm people. It also happens to have a President who seems intent on destroying his once-proud nation. More and more details are coming to light revealing that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, variously known as ISIS, IS or Daesh, is being fed and kept alive by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish President and by his Turkish intelligence service, including MIT, the Turkish CIA. Turkey, as a result of Erdoğan’s pursuit of what some call a Neo-Ottoman Empire fantasies that stretch all the way to China, Syria and Iraq, threatens not only to destroy Turkey but much of the Middle East if he continues on his present path. In October 2014 US Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard gathering that Erdoğan’s regime was backing ISIS with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons…”
Category: Head Stories
“We have received additional information confirming that the oil controlled by Islamic State militants (ISIS) enters Turkish territory on an industrial scale. We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure the security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports where they are shipped in tankers.” –Russian President Vladimir Putin, Paris, 11-30-15 On Monday, the remains of Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkov were flown to Moscow where he was met by the Russian Minister of Defense, the Head of the Russian Airforce, family members and a full military drill team. Peshkov will be buried with honors and receive the Russian Federation’s highest award, the Medal of Valor, for his service in fighting US-backed terrorist groups in Syria. Peshkov’s Su-24 was ambushed last Tuesday by a Turkish F-16 when he allegedly drifted into Turkish airspace for 17 seconds.
The Real Reason for Turkey’s Shoot-down of the Russian Jet The United States and its NATO allies offered a ritual of NATO unity after Turkish officials presented their case that the shoot-down of a Russian jet occurred after two planes had penetrated Turkish airspace. The Turkish representative reportedly played a recording of a series warning the Turkish F16 pilots had issued to the Russian jets without a Russian response, and US and other NATO member states endorsed Turkey’s right to defend its airspace. US Defense Department spokesman Colonel Steve Warren supported the Turkish claim that 10 warnings had been issued over a period of five minutes. The Obama administration apparently expressed less concern about whether Russian planes had actually crossed into Turkish airspace. Col Warren admitted that US officials have still yet to establish where the Russian aircraft was located when a Turkish missile hit the plane.
Aspiring to Rule the World The idea that the United States has “interests” abroad is an affront to democracy and geography. How can a country have interests, and not only that, but vital ones, in every corner of the world, unless we ignore geography and the idea that the people who live in a place ought to own it, and organize their own affairs? All the same, US leaders regularly pronounce that the United States has vital interests abroad, and that the possession of these interests warrants the “projection of power,” which is to say the establishment of a military presence in a region to intimidate its people and governments to acquiesce to US demands. Rarely, if ever, do the mass media explore what these “vital interests” are. They simply exist, and must be defended. Occasionally, their nature is at least superficially glimpsed, as in the idea that the Middle East is a vital US interest owing to its vast reserves of oil, and that if these reserves were to come under the control of a “hostile” power, the world could be held to ransom. Elements of this view can be traced to the Carter Doctrine and form much of the basis of what is presented as US strategy in connection with the Middle East.
It all started with French President Francois Hollande, after the Paris attacks, having the temerity to advance the idea of France working together with Russia in the same coalition against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh in Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip “no excuse” Erdogan thought NATO and Russia by this time would be at each other’s – Cold War 2.0 – nuclear throats, while Washington had brushed off Hollande’s idea with a cascade of platitudes and distortions. And in less than 17 seconds, Prime Minister Ahmet “I ordered it myself” Davutoglu had authorized Turkey to shoot down a Russian Su-24 – only a few hours before Hollande met with President Obama. So everything seemed to be falling into place. No chance of a new détente between the Atlanticist powers and NATO. On the contrary. Erdogan was sure he had sabotaged for good the Hollande-Putin face-to-face meeting in Moscow.
Russia’s and Turkey’s objectives in fighting the Islamic State group are diametrically opposed. It’s absolutely impossible to understand why the Turkish government would engage in the suicidal strategy of downing a Russian Su-24 over Syrian territory – technically a NATO declaration of war on Russia – without putting in context the Turkish power play in northern Syria. President Vladmir Putin said the downing of the Russian fighter jet was a “stab in the back.” So let’s see how facts on the ground allowed it to happen. Ankara uses, finances, and weaponizes a basket case of extremist outfits across northern Syria, and needs by all means to keep supply line corridors from southern Turkey open for them; after all they need to conquer Aleppo, which would open the way for Ankara’s Holy Grail: regime change in Damascus. At the same time Ankara is terrified of the YPG – the Syrian Kurd People’s Protection Units – a sister organization of the leftist PKK. These must be contained at all costs. So the Islamic State group – against which the United Nations has declared war – is a mere detail in the overall Ankara strategy, which is essentially to fight, contain or even bomb Kurds; support all manner of Takfiris and Salafi-jihadis, including the Islamic State group; and get regime change in Damascus
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet shows the utter desperation currently sweeping through the regime change camp as Russia closes in on the death squads in Syria. At 9:30am, a Russian SU-24 jet was shot down by a Turkish fighter plane. The pilots were then allegedly killed by Syrian Turkmen anti-government militias, with the body of one being paraded on camera in a video that was immediately posted to YouTube. Turkey claimed the jet had encroached on Turkish airspace, but Russia maintains the plane was shot down inside Syrian territory, 4km from the Turkish border.
Russian Warplane Down: NATO’s Act of War Despite blatant provocation, Russia must continue toward the finish line. With cameras rolling, Turkey has claimed it has shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft. The New York Times in its article, “Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane Near Syria Border,” reports that: Turkish fighter jets on patrol near the Syrian border shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday after it violated Turkey’s airspace, a long-feared escalation that could further strain relations between Russia and the West. The escalation is “long feared” not because the Turkish government actually fears that Russian warplanes crossing their border pose a threat to it or its people, but because Russia has ended NATO’s proxy war, a proxy war spearheaded in part by Turkey itself, amid Russia’s joint military operations with Syria against the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) and supporting terrorist factions.
Europe is in free fall. Nobody can doubt that any more. In fact, the is EU simultaneous suffering from several crucial problems and any one of them could potentially become catastrophic. Let’s look at them one by one. The 28 member EU makes no economic sense The most obvious problem for the EU is that it makes absolutely no economic sense. Initially, in the early 1950s, there was a small group of not too dissimilar nations which decided to integrate their economies, these were the so-called Inner Six who founded the European Community (EC): Belgium , France , West Germany , Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In 1960 this “core group” was joined by seven more countries, the Outer Seven, who were unwilling to join the EC but wanted to join a European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Washington has learned that threats and coercion do not work against Russia. All the threats have done is to build Putin’s public support to astronomical levels and to unify Russia against the West’s assault. This is a failed policy that Washington is abandoning as Washington sees a new opportunity in Russia’s desire for Western cooperation, not only against ISIL but also on a wide range of other issues. Realizing that guile can be more effective than the stick, the West is moving toward drawing Russia into the Western system by offering a coalition against ISIL. Once Russia is in a coalition against ISIL, Russia will lose control. This is Washington’s strategy for counteracting the initiative that Russia seized in Syria.