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MAGNES
10th June 2010, 09:21 PM
This is an excellent article by Jim Lobe, an excellent
author in covering the NeoCons for years.

Must reading to understand Turkey and their partners
the NeoCons and Israel, all wars, war on terror, etc .

Sibel Edmonds is key too, "all the same people".
All major issues and crimes of the NeoCons.

Covers many issues. Original is good with comments.
Anti War is great on the NeoCons, Raimondo Archive.

Neoconservatives Lead Charge Against Turkey
by Jim Lobe, June 10, 2010
http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2010/06/09/neoconservatives-lead-charge-against-turkey/

As the right-wing leadership of the organized U.S. Jewish community defends Israel against international condemnation for its deadly seizure of a flotilla bearing humanitarian supplies for Gaza, a familiar clutch of neoconservative hawks is going on the offensive against what they see as the flotilla’s chief defender, Turkey.

Outraged by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip’s Erdogan’s repeated denunciations of the May 31 Israeli raid, as well as his co-sponsorship with Brazil of an agreement with Iran designed to promote renewed negotiations with the West on Tehran’s nuclear program, some neoconservatives are even demanding that the U.S. try to expel Ankara from NATO as one among of several suggested actions aimed at punishing Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) government.

"Turkey, as a member of NATO, is privy to intelligence information having to do with terrorism and with Iran," noted the latest report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a hard-line neoconservative group that promotes U.S.-Israeli military ties and has historically cultivated close ties to Turkey’s military, as well.

"If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from the organization," suggested the group.

Its board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.

Neoconservative publications, notably the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, have also been firing away at the AKP government since the raid.

"Turkey now represents a major element in the global panorama of radical Islam," declared the Standard’s Stephen Schwartz, while Daniel Pipes, the controversial director of the Likudist Middle East Forum (MEF), echoed JINSA’s call for ousting Ankara from NATO and urged Washington to provide direct support for Turkey’s opposition parties in an article published by the National Review Online.

The Journal has been running editorials and op-eds attacking Turkey on virtually a daily basis since the raid, accusing its government, among other things, of having "an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH (the Islamist group that sponsored the flotilla’s flagship, the Mavi Marmara) that borders on complicity."

On Monday, it ran an op-ed by long-time hawk Victor Davis Hanson that labeled the IHH "a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda", while an earlier op-ed, by Robert Pollock, its editorial features editor, called Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, "demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East."

Meanwhile, in an op-ed published by The Forward, a Jewish weekly, Michael Rubin, a Perle protégé at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), accused Turkey of having "become a conduit for the smuggling of weapons to Israel’s enemies", notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The onslaught is ironic both because of the neo- conservatives’ long cultivation of Turkey and their avowed support for promoting democratic governance — of which they have singled out Turkey for special praise — in the Muslim world.

Neoconservatives were among the most important promoters of the military alliance between Israel and Turkey that began to take shape in the late 1980s and was consolidated by the mid-1990s.

In fact, Perle and another of his protégés, former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, worked as paid lobbyists for Turkey during that period, in major part to persuade the powerful "Israel Lobby" on Capitol Hill to promote Ankara’s interests on Capitol Hill.

[ they were also involved together as partners in arming muslims and
importing them to Europe to wage war against the Serbs and made
money out of Israeli law firm Feith and Zell doing this ]


[ Sibel Edmonds covers their crimes, "all the same people", covers 9/11,
drugs, money laundering, WMD's, PlameGate, the Albanians they put in
power distribute the heroin from Afghanistan, it goes through Turkish
military and area called "green line" by intell agencies into Europe.
ATC = AIPAC Turks have even been implicated with Israel in organ
smuggling. ]

In 1996, the two men participated in a task force chaired by Perle that proposed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he work with Turkey and Jordan to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power as part of an alliance designed to transform the strategic balance in the Middle East permanently in favor of Israel.

But the Turkey promoted by Perle and his fellow-neocons in the 1980s and ’90s was one that was dominated by a secular business and political elite carefully monitored by an all- powerful military institution that mounted three coup d’etats between 1960 and 1980 and intervened a fourth time in 1997 to oust an Islamist-led government.

Despite its close links to both the U.S. and Israel, however, the Turkish military badly disappointed the neo- cons in the run-up to Washington’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Instead of insisting that the civilian government at the time grant U.S. requests to use Turkish territory as a major launching pad into northern Iraq, the armed forces decided to defer to overwhelming parliamentary and public opposition to the invasion.

"I think for whatever reason they did not play the strong leadership role on that issue that we would have expected," complained then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a long-time Perle friend and colleague who, despite his lavish praise of Turkey as a model Muslim democracy, headed repeated efforts by the George W. Bush administration to persuade Turkey’s national security council — where the military’s voice was dominant — to effectively overrule its parliament.

Erdogan, who became prime minister just a week before the invasion and whose political and economic reforms have been widely praised in the West, at first sought good relations with Israel. As late as 2007, he arranged for Shimon Peres to become the first Israeli president to address the Turkish parliament.

[ Erdogan is the populist islamist that the military tried to remove,
now they are in jail, tens of them ]

By then, however, many neocons had become concerned about Erdogan’s efforts to weaken the military’s power, his warm reception of a top Hamas leader in 2005, criticism of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in 2006, and rapprochement with Syria.

When the military not so subtly threatened to intervene against Erdogan and the AKP in 2007, some neocons, notably Perle, suggested that the U.S. should not try to discourage it. Others, including the Standard’s Schwartz and Pipes, encouraged it as the lesser of two evils, even as the Journal defended the AKP as "more democratic than the secularists."

Since Erdogan’s furious denunciation of Israel, and Peres personally, at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) of Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza in Jan 2009, however, neocons of virtually all stripes — including those, like the Journal’s editorial writers, who have praised the AKP as a democratizing force — have turned against Ankara. And the flotilla incident, combined with Erdogan’s perceived defense of Iran’s nuclear program, has raised their animus to new heights.

"A combination of Islamist rule, resentment at exclusion from Europe, and a neo-Ottomanist ideology that envisions Turkey as a great power in the Middle East have made Turkey a state that is often plainly hostile not only to Israel but to American aims and interests," wrote Eliot Cohen, professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a Journal op-ed Monday.

[ they exclude themselves from Europe through their belligerent behavior
and total non qualification but TPTB the NeoCon press lobbied for them ]

(Inter Press Service)

MAGNES
10th June 2010, 09:24 PM
Israel Threatens War if Turkish PM Tries to Deliver Gaza Aid
Israeli Official Warns of Casus Belli on Israeli Army Radio

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/06/09/israel-threatens-war-if-turkish-pm-tries-to-deliver-gaza-aid/

Israeli Army commander and top Likud member Uzi Dayan today warned on Israeli Army Radio that Israel would consider any attempt by the Turkish military to protect future aid ships from attack an “act of war.”
With Israeli protesters already condemning Erdogan, is war on the table?

Dayan then added that if Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan attempted to accompany the aid ships personally, as he has reportedly considered “we would not try to take over the ship he was on, but would sink it.” He added that Erdogan’s presence on a future aid ship would also be a casus belli for an Israeli war against Turkey.




Turkey's Erdogan: Never a "yes" man
By Sami Moubayed

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LF10Ak03.html

On March 1, 2003, two weeks before Erdogan assumed office as prime minister, Ankara - headed by his Justice and Development Party (AKP) - vetoed a proposal to allow the United States to use Turkish territory to open a second front against Iraq from the north, in order to topple Saddam Hussein.

That scored him his first points with Arabs and Muslims at large. Two years later, in March 2005, then-US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld bitterly complained to Fox News, "Clearly, if we had been able to get the 4th Infantry Division in from the north, in through Turkey, more of the Hussein-Ba'athist regime would have been captured or killed." Had Turkey been more cooperative, "the insurgency today [in Iraq] would be less", he added.

Quiet unintentionally, Rumsfeld's frustration pinned another medal of honor on Erdogan in the eyes of millions of Arabs. That same year Erdogan refused to accept US dictates, strengthening his relations with Syria at a time ties between Damascus and the George W Bush administration were souring, and he become a frequent visitor to the Syrian capital.

Erdogan again defied the US by receiving Khalid Meshaal, the head of the political bureau of Hamas, after the Palestinian movement emerged victorious in parliamentary elections in 2005. He also declined an invitation from former prime minister Ariel Sharon to visit Israel in 2004, again arousing US ire, and did not meet Ehud Olmert on the then-Israeli minister of labor and trade's visit to Turkey in July 2004.

Erdogan stood up for the Palestinians during the war on Gaza in 2008, accusing Israel of committing war crimes. Addressing Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2009, he told the Israeli president, "President Peres, you are old, and your voice is loud out of a guilty conscience. When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill. I know well how you hit and kill children on beaches."

That single statement sky-rocketed him to pan-Arab and pan-Islamic fame, and his photos began appearing in major Arab capitals. But his outburst in Switzerland was nothing compared to his angry words last week after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stormed the Free Gaza flotilla off the shores of Gaza, killing nine Turkish citizens onboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara.

The Arab world went into uproar in defense of the Turkish prime minister, who angrily withdrew his ambassador from Israel, leading to his country's flag being hoisted by protesters in massive demonstrations that stretched throughout Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo.


Gates: Turkey 'pushed eastward' by Europe

[ GATES a proven NeoCon sent to slow down the NeoCons
but on the same program directing Obama even now ]

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3902700,00.html

Relations between Israel and Turkey broke down after a deadly Israeli raid on an aid flotilla bound for the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, but Gates attributed the broader shift by Turkey to European reluctance to accept the country.

"I personally think that if there is anything to the notion that Turkey is, if you will, moving eastward, it is, in my view, in no small part because it was pushed, and pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought."

[ blame Europe, ROFL ! ]