Who will fight the next US war? On ground

 

Who will fight the next US war? On ground , the American Youth !

 

Given below is an interesting article on the readiness of the American youth, in spite of various inducements by the government to enlist in USA's ground forces.. Since the invention of the catapult if not earlier and its upgrading to bombing and killing by aircraft and helicopters, it needs physical courage and dedication to fight on the ground, which is a major motivation for the home countries around forces to defend themselves. Many a military commanders happen to be Airforce officers who provide glib scenario by video presentation of how the enemy positions on the ground can be bombed and quick victory achieved. But ultimately it takes a human being and infantry soldier to go , occupy the place and defend it. This of course leads to many casualties which the American youth is not ready to bargain for.

 

As I have maintained it was the Soviet Armed Forces which destroyed 80% of the Nazi war machine at great sacrifice involving 15 million soldiers and citizens. The Americans only joined the war later and with little sacrifice moved up to Berlin. Later they produced many films like "The longest day", "Gen Patton" to glamorise and propagandise their contributions in the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. US claims are rubbish.

 

The American youth in spite of many inducements are not ready to join the ground Armed Forces and for this the credit go should go to the Iraqi resistance after U.S.-led illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its brutal occupation. There are many estimates ,which run into million and half or even more of Iraqis killed directly following the invasion and incitement of sectorial wars financed , overseen and encouraged by the United States government.

 

Nevertheless after a loss of between 5 to 6000 US GIs on the ground but with many score thousands  of US soldiers , mentally disturbed and deranged in Iraq, the American youth has no heart to sacrifice itself for a government which is basically an oligopoly of Jewish controlled military industry complex , and energy and financial interests .

 

Only when the raging inhuman beast, the white racists from West Europe who invaded and destroyed the indigenous Indian nations in the continent of America goes down financially as many people hopefully expect sooner than later that the world might see some signs of peace on planet Earth.

 

Civil-military relations

Who will fight the next war?

Failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have widened the gulf between most Americans and the armed forces

Oct 24th 2015 | ATLANTA | From the print edition

 

CRUISING a Walmart in Clayton County, Georgia, with Sergeant Russell Haney of US army recruiting, it would be easy to think most Americans are aching to serve Uncle Sam. Almost every teenager or 20-something he hails, in his cheery Tennessee drawl, amid the mounds of plastic buckets and cut-price tortilla chips, appears tempted by his offer. Lemeanfa, a 19-year-old former football star, says he is halfway sold on it; Dseanna, an 18-year-old shopper, says she is too, provided she won't have to go to war. Serving in the coffee shop, Archel and Lily, a brother and sister from the US Virgin Islands, listen greedily to the education, training and other benefits the recruiting sergeant reels off. "You don't want a job, you want a career!" he tells them, as a passer-by thrusts a packet of cookies into his hands, to thank him for his service.

Southern, poorer than the national average, mostly black and with longstanding ties to the army, the inhabitants of Clayton County are among the army's likeliest recruits. Last year they furnished it with more soldiers than most of the rest of the greater Atlanta area put together. Yet Sergeant's Haney's battalion, which is responsible for it, still failed to make its annual recruiting target—and a day out with the unit suggests why.

 

Much of the friendly reception for Sergeant Haney he puts down to fine southern manners; in fact, no one in Walmart is likely to enlist. Lemeanfa has a tattoo behind his ear, an immediate disqualifier. Dseanna has a one-year-old baby, and would have to sign away custody of him. Lily's girlfriend has a toddler she does not want to leave; Archel won't leave his sister. Even the cookie-giver is less propitious than he seems: he symbolises, Sergeant Haney says ruefully, as he bins his gift, that paying lip-service to the armed forces, as opposed to doing military service, is all most Americans are good for. 

 

In a society given to ostentatious public obeisance to the services—during National Military Appreciation Month, on Military Spouse Day and on countless other such public holidays and occasions—the figures that support this claim are astonishing. In the financial year that ended on September 30th America's four armed services—army, navy, air force and marines—aimed to recruit 177,000 people, mainly from among the 21m Americans aged 17-21. Yet all struggled, and the army, which accounted for nearly half that target, made its number, at great cost and the eleventh hour, only by cannibalising its store of recruits for the current year. It failed by 2,000 to meet its target of 17,300 recruits for the army reserve, which is becoming more important to national security as the full-time army shrinks from a recent peak of 566,000 to a projected 440,000 by 2019—its lowest level since the second world war. "I find it remarkable," says the commander of army recruiting, Major-General Jeffrey Snow. "That we have been in two protracted land campaigns and we have an American public that thinks very highly of the military, yet the vast majority has lost touch with it. Less than 1% of Americans are willing and able to serve."

 

That is part of a longstanding trend: a growing disconnect between American society and the armed forces that claim to represent it, which has many causes, starting with the ending of the draft in 1973. Ever since, military experience has been steadily fading from American life. In 1990, 40% of young Americans had at least one parent who had served in the forces; by 2014, only 16% had, and the measure continues to fall. Among American leaders, the decline is similarly pronounced. In 1981, 64% of congressmen were veterans; now around 18% are.

 

Seasonal factors, including a strengthening labour market and negative media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have widened the gulf. So have the dismal standards of education and physical fitness that prevail in modern American society. At a time of post-war introspection, these factors raise two big questions. The first concerns America's ability to hold to account a military sector its leaders feel bound to applaud, but no longer competent to criticise. Andrew Bacevich, a former army officer, academic and longstanding critic of what he terms the militarism of American society, derides that support as "superficial and fraudulent". Sanctified by politicians and the public, he argues, the army's top brass have been given too much power and too little scrutiny, with the recent disastrous campaigns, and similarly profligate appropriations, the almost inevitable result. The second question raised by the civil-military disconnect is similarly fundamental: it concerns America's future ability to mobilise for war.

 

During the Korean war, around 70% of draft-age American men served in the armed forces; during Vietnam, the unpopularity of the conflict and ease of draft-dodging ensured that only 43% did. These days, even if every young American wanted to join up, less than 30% would be eligible to. Of the starting 21m, around 9.5m would fail a rudimentary academic qualification, either because they had dropped out of high school or, typically, because most young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator. Of the remainder, 7m would be disqualified because they are too fat, or have a criminal record, or tattoos on their hands or faces. According to Sergeant Haney, about half the high-school students in Clayton County are inked somewhere or other; according to his boss, Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Parilli, a bigger problem is simply that "America is obese."

 

Spurned by the elite

That leaves 4.5m young Americans eligible to serve, of whom only around 390,000 are minded to, provided they do not get snapped up by a college or private firm instead—as tends to happen to the best of them. Indeed, a favourite mantra of army recruiters, that they are competing with Microsoft and Google, is not really true. With the annual exception of a few hundred sons and daughters of retired officers, America's elite has long since turned its nose up at military service. Well under 10% of army recruits have a college degree; nearly half belong to an ethnic minority.

 

The pool of potential recruits is too small to meet America's, albeit shrunken, military needs; especially, as now, when the unemployment rate dips below 6%. This leaves the army, the least-favoured of the four services, having either to drop its standards or entice those not minded to serve with generous perks. After it failed to meet its recruiting target in 2005, a time of high employment and bad news from Baghdad, it employed both strategies zealously. To sustain what was, by historical standards, only a modest surge in Iraq, around 2% of army recruits were accepted despite having failed to meet academic and other criteria; "We accepted a risk on quality," grimaces General Snow, an Iraq veteran. Meanwhile the cost of the army's signing-on bonuses ballooned unsustainably, to $860m in 2008 alone.

 

That figure has since fallen, as part of a wider effort to peg back the personnel costs that consume around a quarter of the defence budget. Yet the remaining sweeteners are still generous: the army's pay and allowances have risen by 90% since 2000. In a role-play back at Sergeant Haney's recruiting station, your correspondent, posing as an aimless school-leaver, asked what the army could offer him. The answer, besides the usual bed, board and medical insurance, included $78,000 in college fees, some of which could be transferred to a close relative; professional training, including for 46 jobs that still offer a fat signing-on bonus; and post-service careers advice. Could the army perhaps also overlook the youthful drugs misdemeanour your correspondent, in character, admitted to? Sergeant Fred Pedro thought it could.

 

It is a good offer, especially set against the bad jobs and wage stagnation prevalent among the Americans it is mostly aimed at. That the army is having such trouble selling it is partly testament to the effects on public opinion of its recent wars. In the three decades following America's withdrawal from Vietnam, in 1973, the army fought a dozen small wars and one big one, the first Gulf war, in which it suffered only a few hundred casualties in total. Even as Americans grew apart from their soldiers, therefore, they were also encouraged to forget that war usually entails killing on both sides.

In that blithe context, America's 5,366 combat deaths, and tens of thousands of wounded, in Iraq and Afghanistan have come as a terrible shock. Most young Americans associate the army with "coming home broken, physically, mentally and emotionally", says James Ortiz, director of army marketing. Almost every member of the journalism class at D.M. Therrell High School in Atlanta concurs with that: "I'd maybe join if there's no other option. But I just don't like the violence," shudders 16-year-old Mayowa.

 

Decades of army advertising that focused largely on the college money and other perks of service probably added to the misapprehension. "Americans do not understand the army, so do not value it," says Mr Ortiz. A marketing campaign launched last year, Enterprise Army, instead emphasises the high values and good works the army seeks to promulgate. Yet it will take more than this to turn Americans back to a life which many consider incompatible with atomised, sceptical, irreverent modern living. Moreover, it is also likely that, when the army next needs to surge, it will be for a war much bloodier than the recent ones. America's biggest battlefield advantage in recent decades, its mastery of precision-guided weapons, is fading, as these become widely available even to the bigger militant groups, such as Hamas or Hizbullah.

 

The result is that America may be unable, within reasonable cost limits and without reinstituting the draft, to raise the much bigger army it might need for such wars. "Could we field the force we would need?" asks Andrew Krepinevich of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Probably not: "The risk is that our desire to ask only those who are willing to fight to do so is pricing us out of some kinds of warfare."

 

From the print edition: United States

 

 

 

 

The Longest War in U.S. History

 The Longest War in U.S. History 

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act,"George Orwell

 

 'Be nice to America otherwise we will bring you Democracy,' A protest placard in New York against US led 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq.

 

In fact, the complete United States history from the beginning has been a history of bigotry, apartheid, criminality, brutality and inhumanity .The European settlers war on American continent has never come to an end .After the conquest and domination of the America, attacks and wars have continued throughout their history, all over the world .The Middle East is the latest theatre of devastation .War and destruction is embedded in the US DNA.

 

Since 16^th century Europeans have been raiding, attacking, bombing and destroying peoples and nations , beginning from  the new world, north America ie USA and the allover the world .This mayhem continues, based in the belief of the survival of the fittest . But the means of destruction are now so powerful that a large part of humanity will be destroyed and killed if a nuclear clash takes place between US and Russia .The last escape was in 1962 in Cuban waters.

 

US had full sway after 1990  , when USSR and its scientific socialism collapsed , allowing US crooks to transfer billions of wealth under the charade of Globalisation , a higher form of exploitation and loot after colonialism .Yes ,there are pure and simple lootings as after any war like first and second World Wars. Iraq and Libya .And India too, after 1857 revolt, the English authorities exiled all citizens of the Moghul capital Delhi, dug up silver, gold and jewels and carted the loot to London. (Those who praise British imperialism in India are sick in mind and suffer from Stockholm syndrome and have done well for themselves) More than a million young men in north areas of revolt, a possible future threat were eliminated)

 

See the results below for UK and Europe .Since WWII, when US world share of GDP went up to 50% has now been reduced to 40%, result of rise of China, India etc .Of 40%, 25% is financial economy, ie various kind of derivatives ie jiggery pokery with no Gold Support, the real unit of exchange as even Fed Reserve head Alan Greenspan admitted.

 

 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS by Paul Kennedy

 

TABLE 6. Relative Shares of World Manufacturing Output, 1750-1900

                                          1750  1800   1830   1860   1880  1900    

(Europe as a whole)         23.2  28.1  34.2  53.2  61.3  62.0

United Kingdom              1:9    4.3    9.5    19.9  22.9  18.5

Habsburg Empire             2.9    3.2    3.2    4.2    4.4    4.7   

France                                         4.0    4.2    5.2    7,9    7.8    6.8   

German States/Germany  2.9    3.5    3.5    4,9    8.5    13.2

Italian States Italy              2.4    2.5    2.3    2.5    2.5    2.5   

Russia                                            5.0 ~ 5.6    5.6    7.0    7.6    8.8   

United States                             0.1    0.8    2.4    7.2    14.7  23.6

Japan                                       3.8    3.5    2.8    2.6    2.4    2.4   

Third World                               73.0  67.7  60.5  36.6  20.9  11.0

China                                                32.8  33.3  29.8  19.7  12.5  6.2   

India -Pakistan                       24.5  19.?  17.6  8.6    2.8    1.7

 

After WWII till mid 1980s US led Nato  block and Russia led Warsaw blocks provided some balance .Leaders like Nehru ,Nasser ,Tito and others tried to keep out of cold war to build their institutions and industry according to their genius ,balancing one block against the other.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union ,Washington had a free run till Vladimir Putin took over te Russian leadership .Mercifully the two sides remain in touch to avoid Armageddon ,as they are doing now in Syria and the Middle East .China is the 3^rd useful leg for Russia at the moment and vice versa.

 

Both in1965 and1971, US and Russia kept in touch and would not allow any major changes

 Between India and Pakistan So the cacophony that India could have occupied Pak Punjab and other areas are claims of dimwits .In Middle East ,both Russia and US are in contact playing military chess and poker , along with Allie like China, Europeans and Arab states .

 

The Longest War in U.S. History 

Extracts ; While the First Nations( original native inhabitants of north America ) were falling beneath the juggernaut of settler colonialism, there were few voices in opposition. Their struggle was not a struggle for most labor unions, parties of the political Left, and in some important cases, not even for other peoples who were victimized by white supremacist racial and national oppression. That silence made each of these movements not neutral, but complicit in one of the greatest horrors of the last five hundred years.

There was a 30 year-long war from 1860-1890, spanning many nations, led by the U.S. government against "insurgents" who populated what would become Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Part of a larger, longer genocide, this was one sustained war, which looked unsurprisingly similar to today's campaigns in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Fought by the U.S. Army against the Apache, Cheyenne, Navajo, Sioux, and other nations, this war saw resistance armies, led by Geronimo and Sitting Bull, give birth to the guerrilla warriors like Crazy Horse and Little Wolf, and saw the introduction of "counter-insurgency" tactics by the U.S. Cavalry. War crimes abounded as the United States systematically eradicated the buffalo with the intention of depriving the guerrilla warriors of food, to bring an end to their peoples and nations, and to steal their land.

The myths associated with US history, including rugged individualism or even some myths associated with the Civil War, run up against the reality of what took place for Native Americans.  Consider the US Civil War.  Some of the greatest Union generals, e.g., William Tecumseh Sherman, who fought valiantly against the Confederacy, were themselves—or became—leaders in the genocide against Native Americans.  General Sherman, who issued an order that opened up the possibility for the redistribution of land to the African former slaves, became one of the major architects of the war against the First Nations, a war in which he and many other military leaders had little interest in ending without the total destruction of the First Nations. It was also during the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln opened up more land for settlers and sought the removal of First Nations in order that the homesteaders could claim territory.

The (US Settlers') aim, as became quite clear in the case of North America, was to remove the Native Americans from the land and, indeed, from the Earth. This took various forms ranging from repeated forced removals of Native Americans from their land by the settlers upon a military victory; to mass murder; to the introduction of bacteriological warfare (by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in the 1760s via smallpox). 

Consider the US Civil War.  Some of the greatest Union generals, e.g., William Tecumseh Sherman, who fought valiantly against the Confederacy, were themselves—or became—leaders in the genocide against Native Americans.  General Sherman, who issued an order that opened up the possibility for the redistribution of land to the African former slaves, became one of the major architects of the war against the First Nations, a war in which he and many other military leaders had little interest in ending without the total destruction of the First Nations. It was also during the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln opened up more land for settlers and sought the removal of First Nations in order that the homesteaders could claim territory.

In reading An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States it is actually quite easy to understand the historic basis for support among large sections of the US population for Israel against the Palestinians.  The Palestinians are today's Native Americans.  They are in the way of progress. The Israelis are a largely European population that is on a mission, and, much like the European and Euro-American settlers of the 17th through 19thcenturies (in North America), believe that they have an entitlement to the land either because God allegedly offered it to them or because the Israelis are somehow allegedly superior to or more civilized than the Palestinians. It all fits together. The Israelis look like 'us' (European); they have built cities that look like Miami or Los Angeles; and they are bringing civilization to a 'barbaric' region of the planet.

 

Note on Writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz , who reminds us that it is actually never too late to turn history on its head.  That is where this book has its immense value.

By Ryan Harvey

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43121.htm

 

October 12, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "teleSur" - Though it has been a long 14 years, it is historically inaccurate to call the war in Afghanistan "The Longest War in U.S. History." This title reveals a deep-seated problem in the popular mythology of U.S. history – that the nations and assemblies of peoples that existed here before Europeans came were not sovereign, or even real. Let's get the facts right:

There was a 30 year-long war from 1860-1890, spanning many nations, led by the U.S. government against "insurgents" who populated what would become Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Part of a larger, longer genocide, this was one sustained war, which looked unsurprisingly similar to today's campaigns in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Fought by the U.S. Army against the Apache, Cheyenne, Navajo, Sioux, and other nations, this war saw resistance armies, led by Geronimo and Sitting Bull, give birth to the guerrilla warriors like Crazy Horse and Little Wolf, and saw the introduction of "counter-insurgency" tactics by the U.S. Cavalry. War crimes abounded as the United States systematically eradicated the buffalo with the intention of depriving the guerrilla warriors of food, to bring an end to their peoples and nations, and to steal their land.

The chapters of this tragic story – Red Cloud's War, The Battle of Powder River, The Battle of Little Bighorn, The Apache Wars – were book-ended by brutal massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Native Americans, children and infants included.

Ryan Harvey is a musician, writer, and activist from Baltimore, MD.

=====

An Indigenous People's History of the United States

History Is Not the Past: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Takes on the Mega-Genocide Against the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

By Bill Fletcher Jr

Dunbar-Ortiz has constructed a very accessible examination of the history of the USA as seen through the eyes of the Native American/First Nations/Indigenous peoples.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Boston, MA:  Beacon Press, 2014).  296 pps.  U.S. $27.95, CAN $32.95

(Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born September 10, 1939) is an American historian, writer and feminist.Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a half-Native American mother. )

There are two things that immediately emerged for me after reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's outstanding book, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. The first had to do with US history itself.  The second, and this may at first glance appear strange, was the plight of the Palestinians.

Dunbar-Ortiz has constructed a very accessible examination of the history of the USA as seen through the eyes of the Native American/First Nations/Indigenous peoples. In a remarkably condensed yet comprehensive form, she begins with an explanation of what Indigenous societies looked like prior to the European invasion. From there she takes the reader into an emotionally troubling, yet historically rigorous look at the European invasion/colonization of the Western Hemisphere and its ramifications.

What Dunbar-Ortiz helps the reader to understand, more than anything else, was that the genocide carried out against the Native Americans was not accidental. That may sound like a strange choice of words, but throughout so-called mainstream US history there is a tendency to suggest that the European colonization was, at least at first, well-intentioned, relatively benign, and had the unfortunate consequence of introducing deadly diseases into the Western Hemisphere which the immune systems of the peoples of the First Nations were unprepared to resist.

Dunbar-Ortiz demolishes such arguments and points to the mythology that has been connected with the European colonization of the hemisphere and, in the USA, the expansion westward.  The aim, as became quite clear in the case of North America, was to remove the Native Americans from the land and, indeed, from the Earth. This took various forms ranging from repeated forced removals of Native Americans from their land by the settlers upon a military victory; to mass murder; to the introduction of bacteriological warfare (by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in the 1760s via smallpox).  

Dunbar-Ortiz points out that in North America, as opposed to Central and South America, the settlers had no interest in mixing with the Indigenous people and certainly no interest in creating a North American mestizo grouping. The Indigenous were seen as an obstacle to progress, a progress that was dictated by a certain religious zeal that linked with empire.  This use of religion by the settler-colonists is a very important factor in all settler states, most notably Northern Ireland, apartheid South Africa, the United States and Israel. In each case, God allegedly spoke to the settlers and told them that this land was to be their land. Why God did not speak to the Indigenous and tell them to move on has never been explained.

The difficulty in reading An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is that it upends the entire mythology connected with US history. This is not only a 'problem' for the mainstream USA, but it is also a problem for many progressives and leftists in the USA who have, to varying degrees, accepted elements of the settler narrative.

There are obvious examples of the mythology such as the story connected to Thanksgiving. But the brutality of the westward expansion is rarely addressed in mainstream history or fiction.  Instead, the Native American is regularly painted as the aggressor, and the ungrateful aggressor at that.  The other component of this myth, however, is the idea that the land was vacant.  There are many examples of this but in the realm of fiction, if one thinks of the classic Western Shane (with Alan Ladd), there is not one sense that that beautiful land had been occupied by a prior civilization.  In watching such films, one views the magnificence of that late 19th century West and thinks of the challenges facing the people who entered into that vacant land…

…Except for one problem:  the land was not vacant.  It had been occupied and the people living there were removed.

For many of us to the left of center, there are complications when viewing US history. The myths associated with US history, including rugged individualism or even some myths associated with the Civil War, run up against the reality of what took place for Native Americans.  Consider the US Civil War.  Some of the greatest Union generals, e.g., William Tecumseh Sherman, who fought valiantly against the Confederacy, were themselves—or became—leaders in the genocide against Native Americans.  General Sherman, who issued an order that opened up the possibility for the redistribution of land to the African former slaves, became one of the major architects of the war against the First Nations, a war in which he and many other military leaders had little interest in ending without the total destruction of the First Nations. It was also during the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln opened up more land for settlers and sought the removal of First Nations in order that the homesteaders could claim territory.

Thus, when looking at the Civil War, for instance, one must rethink the entire period. It was not a binary of good vs. evil or even the Union (fighting against slavery) vs. the Confederacy (fighting to support slavery), but an overdetermined moment in which multiple contradictions were at play. An example of this was the siding with the Confederacy by some Native Americans because they believed that a victory by the Union would set the stage for their own annihilation. 

Another example of the challenge to those of us to the Left of center is contained in the critique offered by Dunbar-Ortiz of the widely praised documentary by Oliver Stone and Peter Kusnick (The Untold History of the United States). Stone and Kusnick suggest that much of what happened after World War II, vis a vis US foreign policy, was inconsistent with the direction of the so-called Founding Fathers.  Dunbar-Ortiz disputes this and argues that the path has been entirely consistent. There was no 'golden age', in other words, wherein there was not an aggressive, imperial instinct within the Republic.  While it may have taken various forms, it was not something that was rooted in one or another Presidential administration or Congressional Session, but rather has been hard-wired into that which we have come to understand to be the United States of America.  This has been demonstrated in the unfolding of the continuous wars of expansion since 1783.

The genocide against the Native Americans, does not exist in the past, but is a continuing reality as evidenced in the violation of treaties or the inconsistency of the US government (and state governments) in recognizing the need for restitution.  Demands for restitution and resistance to continued oppression—and genocide—have been very important features of the movement among Native Americans, both in the USA and throughout the Western Hemisphere.  This is a key component of the book, not simply to ward off despair, but to remind the reader that through the hundreds of years of genocidal expansion and against all odds, the First Nations have continued to fight back and, at various moments, reconstitute their resistance.

I mentioned in the beginning of this review the Palestinians. As I turned each page of this book I found myself thinking about the Palestinians. In the two visits that I have made to the Occupied Palestinian Territories I have found myself thinking about the Native Americans. It is not only that the land, itself, reminds one of the Southwest, but the conditions of the people is so familiar and so similar.

In the case of the Occupied Territories, one of the key features in common is that the Israelis have no interest in 'integrating' with the Palestinians.  As opposed to the Spanish in Latin America who did not send the same proportion of settlers to the Western Hemisphere and who found it useful to mix with the Indigenous and Africans (thereby creating intermediary groups as an instrument of social control), the English in North America were interested in the removal of the Indigenous. The same is true of Israel and the Palestinians. The more extreme elements of the Israeli political class openly and audaciously advocate the forced transfer of Palestinians out of Israel and the Occupied Territories into Jordan (which the Zionists claim to be the actual Palestinian homeland).  

In reading An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States it is actually quite easy to understand the historic basis for support among large sections of the US population for Israel against the Palestinians.  The Palestinians are today's Native Americans.  They are in the way of progress. The Israelis are a largely European population that is on a mission, and, much like the European and Euro-American settlers of the 17th through 19thcenturies (in North America), believe that they have an entitlement to the land either because God allegedly offered it to them or because the Israelis are somehow allegedly superior to or more civilized than the Palestinians. It all fits together. The Israelis look like 'us' (European); they have built cities that look like Miami or Los Angeles; and they are bringing civilization to a 'barbaric' region of the planet.

To the extent to which this narrative is ignored or goes unchallenged, what awaits the Palestinians will, at best, be silent complicity in their removal, if not an actual genocide.  And, perhaps this is the concluding point of this review. While the First Nations were falling beneath the juggernaut of settler colonialism, there were few voices in opposition. Their struggle was not a struggle for most labor unions, parties of the political Left, and in some important cases, not even for other peoples who were victimized by white supremacist racial and national oppression. That silence made each of these movements not neutral, but complicit in one of the greatest horrors of the last five hundred years.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us that it is actually never too late to turn history on its head.  That is where this book has its immense value.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Telesur-English.  He is a racial justice, labor and global justice activist and writer.   Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com. 

 

Re: Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 10:29 PM, gajendra singh <kgajendrasingh@gmail.com> wrote:

Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

 

Having spent ten years in Turkey and kept a watch over it since 1967 and enjoyed my travels to savor its 40 civilisations, it has been a very painful feeling to see the secular republic, a possible model for Muslim majority states being dismantled by Erdogan led AKP party.

 

Before Turkey reached the current denouement  , Erdogan had dismantled Ataturk established secular republic from the ashes of the Ottoman empire after WWI and turned it into something like Saudi Arabia without oil resources . Here is the book how it was done.

 

The transformation of Turkey's state identity

 

Around 10 years ago, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayep Erdoğan were at the height of their international reputation. Praised almost universally abroad, they were seen as bringing about a democratic transformation in Turkey. Such has been the decline since then; those days are sometimes hard to remember.

How this perception took root is the subject of a stimulating new title by Toni Alaranta of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. The book argues that international conditions combined with Turkey's internal politics to legitimize a crude power grab dressed up in the language of liberalization and human rights.

But it is only during the AKP era that Turkey has declared itself as being the protector of a specifically Muslim cause in the international field across the globe. This is a very radical departure from the previous era, when Turkey wanted itself to be seen as a modern nation state taking its place in what it thought was a universal civilization characterized by cultural modernity. For the previous political elite, the idea of being seen specifically as a "Muslim" power would have been astonishing and even insulting. Because the Kemalist foreign policy tradition saw religious identification as something anachronistic, defining a past world. 

 

I have maintained since a decade that Turkey was being taken along the wrong path .My worst fears are coming true. The frontiers of the Greater Middle East were drawn by British led victorious powers after WWI. New frontiers are being created via illegal intervention and violence and chaos created thereby.

 

Turkey should have followed Ataturk's motto; Peace at home and peace abroad .Instead AKP under Erdogan has followed the policy of creating a greater Middle East under Ankara's control. What a horrible disaster and blowback is has become

 

Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

 

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN on OCTOBER 10, 2015 

http://atimes.com/2015/10/turkey-is-the-next-failed-state-in-the-middle-east/

We do not know just who detonated the two bombs that killed 95 Kurdish and allied activists in Ankara Saturday, but the least likely conjecture is that President Erdogan's government is guiltless in the matter. As Turkish member of parliamentLutfu Turkkan, tweeted after the bombing, the attack "was either a failure by the intelligence service, or it was done by the intelligence service."

Betrayed by both the United States and Russia, and faced with the emergence of a Kurdish state on its borders and the rise of Kurdish parties in the parliamentary opposition, Erdogan is cornered. At risk in the short-term is the ability of his AKP party to govern after the upcoming November elections. At risk in the medium term is the cohesion of the Turkish state itself.

In public, Western leaders have hailed Turkey as "a great Islamic democracy," as President Obama characterized it in a 2010 interview. That was the view of the George W. Bush administration before Obama, which invited Erdogan to the White House before his election as prime minister in November 2002. A minority of military and intelligence analysts, though, has warned that Turkey may not be viable within its present borders in the medium term. The trouble is that its Kurdish minority, now at 20% of the overall population, has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so many that half of Turkey's military-age population will speak Kurdish as a first language in fewer than twenty years.

 

An existential crisis for Turkey has been in the making for years, as I reported in my 2011 book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). During the past week, a perfect storm has overtaken Turkish policy, and threatens to provoke deep political instability. Turkey may become the region's next failed state.

 

There has to be a fall guy in the Middle East's film noire, and that unenviable role has fallen to Turkey. Prior to the bombings, the worst terrorist incident in modern Turkish history, Erdogan suffered public humiliation by Washington as well as Moscow. As Laura Rozen reported Oct. 9 in Al-Monitor, Washington announced a 180-degree turn in its Syrian intervention, abandoning the Sunni opposition in favor of Syrian Kurds.

The United States will supply arms, equipment and air support to Syrian Arab and Kurdish groups already fighting the so-called Islamic State (IS) on the ground in Syria, the White House and Pentagon announced Oct. 9.

The decision to refocus the beleaguered, $500 million Pentagon program from training and equipping a new force to fight IS in Syria to "equip and enable" rebel groups already fighting on the ground came after an interagency review of the train and equip program, US officials said.

"A key part of our strategy is to try to work with capable, indigenous forces on the ground … to provide them with equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our air strikes," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth told journalists on a call on the new strategy Oct. 9.

Until last Friday, America and Turkey both supported the Sunni opposition to the Assad government with a view to eliminating Assad and installing a Sunni regime. That policy has been in shambles for months, but it allowed the Turks leeway to provide covert support to ISIS, the one Sunni force that shows effectiveness in the field. Russian intervention exposed the fecklessness of America's attempts to find a "moderate" Syrian opposition to back. As the veteran strategist Edward Luttwak wrote last week in Tablet magazine:

Putin must certainly be innocent of the accusation that his air force has bombed the U.S.-trained "pro-democracy" freedom fighters, because the trainers themselves have admitted that the first lot on which one-tenth of the budget has been spent, i.e., $50 million, are exactly five in number, the rest having deserted after receiving their big family-support signing bonus and first paycheck, or after they were first issued with weapons (which they sold), or after first entering Syria in groups, when they promptly joined the anti-American Jabhat an-Nuṣrah,whose Sunni Islam they understand, unlike talk of democracy.

The Russians forced Washington to find something credible on the ground to support, and Washington turned to the Kurds, the only effective fighting force not linked to ISIS or al-Qaeda. That was precisely the result Turkey had wanted to avoid; the Kurdish military zone in northern Syria links up with Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq, and the two zones form the core of a prospective Kurdish state.

Russia humiliated Turkey, meanwhile, by challenging Turkish fighters inside Turkish airspace, leaving NATO to protest loudly. Nonetheless the US and Germany have deactivated Patriot missile batteries–the only weapon system that represents a threat to Russian fighters–despite urgent Turkish requests to leave them in place. Russian fighters over Syria prevent the Turks from providing air cover for ISIS and other Islamist groups in Syria, as I noted Oct. 6 in our Chatham House Rules blog. M.K. Bhadrakumar observed in Asia Times Oct. 9, "Turkey's scope for maneuvering vis-à-vis Russia is actually very limited and it has no option but to reach an understanding with Russia over Syria."

Less obvious but no less ominous is the deterioration of Sino-Turkish relations due to Ankara's covert support for the East Turkestan Independence Movement, a terrorist organization active among the Uyghurs of Western China. Despite official assurances, Turkey continues to provide safe passage to Turkey to thousands of Chinese Uyghurs via Southeast Asia, some of whom are fighting with ISIS in Syria. Thailand claims that Uyghur militants carried out the Aug. 17 bombing at Bangkok's Erawan shrine after Thailand sent 109 Chinese Uyghurs back to China.

Erdogan has suffered not merely a collapse of his foreign policy, but a public humiliation by countries that backed his regime in the interests of regional stability–and this just before November's parliamentary elections. After the Kurdish-backed HDP party took 13% of the national vote in last June's elections and removed Erdogan's majority in parliament, Erdogan called new elections rather than accept a coalition government. Erdogan also revived military operations against Turkish Kurds in order to elicit support from Turkish nationalists, a transparent maneuver widely reported in the major media.

 

As the New York Times reported Aug. 5, "Having already delayed the formation of a coalition government, analysts say, Mr. Erdogan is now buttressing his party's chances of winning new elections by appealing to Turkish nationalists opposed to self-determination for the Kurdish minority. Parallel to the military operations against the Kurds has been an effort to undermine the political side of the Kurdish movement by associating it with the violence of the P.K.K., which has also seemed eager to return to fighting."

 

Instead of responding to Erdogan's provocation, the Kurds have shelved military operations in order to concentrate on winning votes in the November elections. After the Saturday bomb attacks, Thomas Seibert noted in the Daily Beast:

Observers agreed that the Ankara blast was probably linked to a decision by the PKK rebels to suspend hostilities with Ankara. The PKK had hinted in recent days that it would declare a new ceasefire in order to boost the HDP's election chances. The people behind the attack wanted to "prevent the ceasefire" from coming into effect, respected journalist Kadri Gursel tweeted. The PKK's ceasefire announcement became public shortly after the attack, but the decision by the rebels had probably been taken before.

In short, Erdogan now contemplates American heavy weapons in the hands of Syrian Kurds; the end of Turkey's ability to provide air support for Sunni rebels in Syria; a Russian campaign to roll up the Sunni opposition, including Turkey's assets in the field; and a collapse of his parliamentary majority due to an expanding Kurdish vote at home.

Whether the AKP government itself ordered the Ankara bombing, or simply looked the other way while ISIS conducted the bombing, both Turkey and global opinion will assume that the ghastly events in Ankara on Saturday reflect the desperation of the Erdogan regime. Regimes that resort to this sort of atrocity do not last very long.

The best thing that Turkey could do under the circumstances would be to ask the United Nations to supervise a plebiscite to allow Kurdish-majority areas to secede if they so chose. The mountains of southeastern Turkey with the highest concentration of Kurds are a drain on the national budget and of no strategic importance. Neither Erdogan nor his nationalist opposition, though, will consider such action; that would undermine both Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism as well as the old secular nationalism. The pressures under the tectonic plates will only get worse. Saturday's bombing may have demarcated the end of the Turkish state that arose out of the First World War.

 

 

Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

 

Having spent ten years in Turkey and kept a watch over it since 1967 and enjoyed my travels to savor its 40 civilisations, it has been a very painful feeling to see the secular republic, a possible model for Muslim majority states being dismantled by Erdogan led AKP party.

 

Before Turkey reached the current denouement  , Erdogan had dismantled Ataturk established secular republic from the ashes of the Ottoman empire after WWI and turned it into something like Saudi Arabia without oil resources . Here is the book how it was done.

 

The transformation of Turkey's state identity

 

Around 10 years ago, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayep Erdoğan were at the height of their international reputation. Praised almost universally abroad, they were seen as bringing about a democratic transformation in Turkey. Such has been the decline since then; those days are sometimes hard to remember.

How this perception took root is the subject of a stimulating new title by Toni Alaranta of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. The book argues that international conditions combined with Turkey's internal politics to legitimize a crude power grab dressed up in the language of liberalization and human rights.

But it is only during the AKP era that Turkey has declared itself as being the protector of a specifically Muslim cause in the international field across the globe. This is a very radical departure from the previous era, when Turkey wanted itself to be seen as a modern nation state taking its place in what it thought was a universal civilization characterized by cultural modernity. For the previous political elite, the idea of being seen specifically as a "Muslim" power would have been astonishing and even insulting. Because the Kemalist foreign policy tradition saw religious identification as something anachronistic, defining a past world. 

 

I have maintained since a decade that Turkey was being taken along the wrong path .My worst fears are coming true. The frontiers of the Greater Middle East were drawn by British led victorious powers after WWI. New frontiers are being created via illegal intervention and violence and chaos created thereby.

 

Turkey should have followed Ataturk's motto; Peace at home and peace abroad .Instead AKP under Erdogan has followed the policy of creating a greater Middle East under Ankara's control. What a horrible disaster and blowback is has become

 

Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East

 

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN on OCTOBER 10, 2015 

http://atimes.com/2015/10/turkey-is-the-next-failed-state-in-the-middle-east/

We do not know just who detonated the two bombs that killed 95 Kurdish and allied activists in Ankara Saturday, but the least likely conjecture is that President Erdogan's government is guiltless in the matter. As Turkish member of parliamentLutfu Turkkan, tweeted after the bombing, the attack "was either a failure by the intelligence service, or it was done by the intelligence service."

Betrayed by both the United States and Russia, and faced with the emergence of a Kurdish state on its borders and the rise of Kurdish parties in the parliamentary opposition, Erdogan is cornered. At risk in the short-term is the ability of his AKP party to govern after the upcoming November elections. At risk in the medium term is the cohesion of the Turkish state itself.

In public, Western leaders have hailed Turkey as "a great Islamic democracy," as President Obama characterized it in a 2010 interview. That was the view of the George W. Bush administration before Obama, which invited Erdogan to the White House before his election as prime minister in November 2002. A minority of military and intelligence analysts, though, has warned that Turkey may not be viable within its present borders in the medium term. The trouble is that its Kurdish minority, now at 20% of the overall population, has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so many that half of Turkey's military-age population will speak Kurdish as a first language in fewer than twenty years.

 

An existential crisis for Turkey has been in the making for years, as I reported in my 2011 book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). During the past week, a perfect storm has overtaken Turkish policy, and threatens to provoke deep political instability. Turkey may become the region's next failed state.

 

There has to be a fall guy in the Middle East's film noire, and that unenviable role has fallen to Turkey. Prior to the bombings, the worst terrorist incident in modern Turkish history, Erdogan suffered public humiliation by Washington as well as Moscow. As Laura Rozen reported Oct. 9 in Al-Monitor, Washington announced a 180-degree turn in its Syrian intervention, abandoning the Sunni opposition in favor of Syrian Kurds.

The United States will supply arms, equipment and air support to Syrian Arab and Kurdish groups already fighting the so-called Islamic State (IS) on the ground in Syria, the White House and Pentagon announced Oct. 9.

The decision to refocus the beleaguered, $500 million Pentagon program from training and equipping a new force to fight IS in Syria to "equip and enable" rebel groups already fighting on the ground came after an interagency review of the train and equip program, US officials said.

"A key part of our strategy is to try to work with capable, indigenous forces on the ground … to provide them with equipment to make them more effective, in combination with our air strikes," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth told journalists on a call on the new strategy Oct. 9.

Until last Friday, America and Turkey both supported the Sunni opposition to the Assad government with a view to eliminating Assad and installing a Sunni regime. That policy has been in shambles for months, but it allowed the Turks leeway to provide covert support to ISIS, the one Sunni force that shows effectiveness in the field. Russian intervention exposed the fecklessness of America's attempts to find a "moderate" Syrian opposition to back. As the veteran strategist Edward Luttwak wrote last week in Tablet magazine:

Putin must certainly be innocent of the accusation that his air force has bombed the U.S.-trained "pro-democracy" freedom fighters, because the trainers themselves have admitted that the first lot on which one-tenth of the budget has been spent, i.e., $50 million, are exactly five in number, the rest having deserted after receiving their big family-support signing bonus and first paycheck, or after they were first issued with weapons (which they sold), or after first entering Syria in groups, when they promptly joined the anti-American Jabhat an-Nuṣrah,whose Sunni Islam they understand, unlike talk of democracy.

The Russians forced Washington to find something credible on the ground to support, and Washington turned to the Kurds, the only effective fighting force not linked to ISIS or al-Qaeda. That was precisely the result Turkey had wanted to avoid; the Kurdish military zone in northern Syria links up with Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq, and the two zones form the core of a prospective Kurdish state.

Russia humiliated Turkey, meanwhile, by challenging Turkish fighters inside Turkish airspace, leaving NATO to protest loudly. Nonetheless the US and Germany have deactivated Patriot missile batteries–the only weapon system that represents a threat to Russian fighters–despite urgent Turkish requests to leave them in place. Russian fighters over Syria prevent the Turks from providing air cover for ISIS and other Islamist groups in Syria, as I noted Oct. 6 in our Chatham House Rules blog. M.K. Bhadrakumar observed in Asia Times Oct. 9, "Turkey's scope for maneuvering vis-à-vis Russia is actually very limited and it has no option but to reach an understanding with Russia over Syria."

Less obvious but no less ominous is the deterioration of Sino-Turkish relations due to Ankara's covert support for the East Turkestan Independence Movement, a terrorist organization active among the Uyghurs of Western China. Despite official assurances, Turkey continues to provide safe passage to Turkey to thousands of Chinese Uyghurs via Southeast Asia, some of whom are fighting with ISIS in Syria. Thailand claims that Uyghur militants carried out the Aug. 17 bombing at Bangkok's Erawan shrine after Thailand sent 109 Chinese Uyghurs back to China.

Erdogan has suffered not merely a collapse of his foreign policy, but a public humiliation by countries that backed his regime in the interests of regional stability–and this just before November's parliamentary elections. After the Kurdish-backed HDP party took 13% of the national vote in last June's elections and removed Erdogan's majority in parliament, Erdogan called new elections rather than accept a coalition government. Erdogan also revived military operations against Turkish Kurds in order to elicit support from Turkish nationalists, a transparent maneuver widely reported in the major media.

 

As the New York Times reported Aug. 5, "Having already delayed the formation of a coalition government, analysts say, Mr. Erdogan is now buttressing his party's chances of winning new elections by appealing to Turkish nationalists opposed to self-determination for the Kurdish minority. Parallel to the military operations against the Kurds has been an effort to undermine the political side of the Kurdish movement by associating it with the violence of the P.K.K., which has also seemed eager to return to fighting."

 

Instead of responding to Erdogan's provocation, the Kurds have shelved military operations in order to concentrate on winning votes in the November elections. After the Saturday bomb attacks, Thomas Seibert noted in the Daily Beast:

Observers agreed that the Ankara blast was probably linked to a decision by the PKK rebels to suspend hostilities with Ankara. The PKK had hinted in recent days that it would declare a new ceasefire in order to boost the HDP's election chances. The people behind the attack wanted to "prevent the ceasefire" from coming into effect, respected journalist Kadri Gursel tweeted. The PKK's ceasefire announcement became public shortly after the attack, but the decision by the rebels had probably been taken before.

In short, Erdogan now contemplates American heavy weapons in the hands of Syrian Kurds; the end of Turkey's ability to provide air support for Sunni rebels in Syria; a Russian campaign to roll up the Sunni opposition, including Turkey's assets in the field; and a collapse of his parliamentary majority due to an expanding Kurdish vote at home.

Whether the AKP government itself ordered the Ankara bombing, or simply looked the other way while ISIS conducted the bombing, both Turkey and global opinion will assume that the ghastly events in Ankara on Saturday reflect the desperation of the Erdogan regime. Regimes that resort to this sort of atrocity do not last very long.

The best thing that Turkey could do under the circumstances would be to ask the United Nations to supervise a plebiscite to allow Kurdish-majority areas to secede if they so chose. The mountains of southeastern Turkey with the highest concentration of Kurds are a drain on the national budget and of no strategic importance. Neither Erdogan nor his nationalist opposition, though, will consider such action; that would undermine both Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism as well as the old secular nationalism. The pressures under the tectonic plates will only get worse. Saturday's bombing may have demarcated the end of the Turkish state that arose out of the First World War.

 

 

Re: Turkey in trouble under Wannabe Ottoman=President Erdogan

Turkey's Don Quixote & Sancho Panza

So called Zero friction Foreign policy morphs into conflicts with almost all neighbours and beyond under Wannabe President Sultan Recep Erdogan

Note ; by Amb K Gajendra Singh who has kept a watch over Turkey since 1967 as desk officer in Indian Foreign ministry up to 1969, then moved over to Indian Embassy in Ankara as Ambassador's deputy (1969-73 ) He then returned as Ambassador to Ankara ,( July 1992 to 96 ) and after retirement stayed there as accredited journalist up to 1998 .From Ankara Amb Singh also was concurrently accredited to Azerbaijan .In fact the first Indian ambassador to Baku.

 

Whatever  the regime ;Military, Republic, Left of centre, right of centre  ,with all restrictions on media personnel , including assaults, jailings ,the Turks are defiant .Unlike Indians , who when asked to bend , fall at the feet of authority. In Indian media is a disgrace .At the moment Turkey under Wannabe autocrat Ottoman Sultan Recep Erdogan has become a most difficult place to function. Specially for journalists.

 

Below are two pieces from Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News ( earlier known as Turkish Daily News, which used my many articles on Turkey and the region ,as did Zaman and Cumhuriyet. Since 1997

I have written over 300 articles on international events and problems and wars and maneuvers  ,mostly the Greater Middle East and adjoining areas .

 

Another Syrian nightmare, courtesy of the Russians

Turkey is now having to cope with multifaceted ramifications of Russia's intervention in Syria. What has made Ankara nervous is not only the failure of the government's Syria policy, but the collapse of plans for a safe zone to house Syrian refugees and withering away of the idea to support opposition forces with Turkey's rules of engagement. Now Turkey has to deal with new tensions created by the fleeing of armed Syrian militants from Russian bombings to Turkey.

Summary⎙ Print Russian operations are rattling Turkey as militants fleeing Syria infiltrate Turkey.

Author Fehim TaştekinPosted October 6, 2015

TranslatorTimur Göksel

 

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/10/turkey-syria-russia-airspace-violations-militants-infiltrate.html

Before going into implications of the Russian violations, it will help to take a look at the situation along the border that has been off the Turkish agenda for a while.

It is a fact that northern Syria acquires its logistics and manpower through Turkey. In earlier days, militants escaping from the Syrian army into refugee camps near the border had caused fatalities. Now the Russian air force is on the scene and the escape routes are once again active.

According to what Al-Monitor learned from local sources in Hatay on Oct. 15, 15 militants in full gear entered Turkey at the Turfanda village on the Syria-Turkey border and moved toward Antakya. Residents notified the gendarmerie but the men eventually disappeared in the company of soldiers.

On Oct. 3 at 11 p.m., a bus that entered Turkey from Yayladagi was forced to stop after crashing into a car at Hatay's Harbiye district. The bus with nonmatching back and front license plates and passengers inside attracted attention. When the passengers left the bus with their belongings and began to disperse through the side streets, rumors spread that jihadists had reached Harbiye. Subsequently, the police took the passengers to a nearby school building, until police reinforcement arrived and the passengers were taken away. Nobody really knew who they were.

As Russia intensifies pressure on the Aleppo, Idlib and Raqqa areas, this kind of militant movement is inevitable. Hatay has always been a city that has been fervently opposed to Ankara's Syria policy that backs jihadist groups.

Representatives of armed groups last week rushed to Istanbul to discuss how to respond to Russia's intervention. Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, Suqour al-Sham, Jaish al-Mujahideen and Sultan Murat Brigade attended the two-day meeting that concluded with a call from 41 organizations fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime to regional countries to unite against the Russia-Iran alliance.

Russia tested Turkish borders

As to Russian violations of Turkish airspace, what cannot escape notice is how Turkey's rules of engagement against the Syrian military operating near the Turkish border were invalidated by airspace violations of Russian jets.

On Oct. 3, a Russian Su-30 loaded with bombs violated the Turkish border south of Hatay-Yayladagi for two minutes, and Turkish warplanes scrambled to intercept. The violation was repeated the next day. Russia not only violated the airspace but also harassed the Turkish interceptors; according to a statement by the Turkish High Command, on Oct. 4, a MiG-29 jet locked its radar for five minutes and 40 seconds on two Turkish F-16s patrolling along the border.

Russia's Ankara-based Ambassador Andrey Karlov was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, and Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu called his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to convey Turkey's reaction. Turkey also engaged its NATO allies, and warnings issued to Russia multiplied. The Turkish government had concealed the developments until a TV broadcast on Oct. 5 informed the public of the recent events.

Has Russia changed the rules of the game, despite saying that its actions are not intentional? If so, how?

Russia sent a message that its operations in Syria will expand to the Turkey's border.

Russia showed its determination not only to target the Islamic State, but also the areas controlled by groups supported by the Gulf states and the West. Turkey reacted sharply to this development.

Russia challenged the veracity of Turkey's rules of engagement. After Syria had shot down a Turkish F-4 reconnaissance plane over the Mediterranean on June 22, 2012, Turkey had announced that it would hit Syrian military elements approaching its border. In the context of these rules of engagement, the Turkish air force shot down a Syrian helicopter on Sept. 16, 2013; a MiG-23 warplane on March 23, 2014; and a Syrian aircraft on May 16, 2015. But as the violating aircraft was a Russian plane, Turkey made do with an interception flight, thus suspending its rules of engagement.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu took a tough line after the incident. "Turkey's rules of engagement are valid for Syria, Russia or any other country. Turkish armed forces have clear instructions. Even if it is a bird, whatever violates Turkey's borders, it will be confronted," he said, without really impressing anyone.

The Turkish public is inured to Davutoglu's blustering statements of the sort that "nobody should try to test our power," which have no bearing on the events.

Although Ankara wants to make the issue again a NATO crisis, reactions by the alliance are far from meeting Ankara's expectations. In short, Russia tested the limits of Turkey's rules of engagement that also apply to NATO. The Western alliance that found it adequate to apply its Article 4, calling for consultations instead of Article 5 that calls for action when a Turkish jet is downed — which didn't react to the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and that couldn't take any deterrent position vis-a-vis the events in eastern Ukraine — will find it hard to do anything more than issuing warnings.

Despite such warnings, Russians staged their third harassment action on Oct. 5. According to information provided by the chief of General Staff on Oct. 5, while eight Turkish F-16s were on air patrol along the border, they were harassed by a MiG-29 that locked its radar on them for 4½ minutes. At the same time, Syria-based surface-to-air missiles locked their radars on Turkish planes for four minutes and 15 seconds.

This could well mean that Russia has established a de facto no-fly zone near the border. Has Turkey not tried so hard to declare a no-fly zone against the Syrian regime in this area?

It has now become clearer how Russia has changed the rules of the game since Oct. 5, right after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned, "What has been done to Turkey, has been done to NATO. Our relations with Russia are there to see, but they will lose."

These are signs that Russia is willing to take on all challenges and that it is ready to cope with whatever may happen.

Turks oppose military intervention in Syria, gloomy on economy: Survey

ISTANBUL

Citizens are gloomy about Turkey's economic prospects, suspicious of international partners, and opposed to military involvement in neighboring Syria, according to new research published on Oct. 7 by the German Marshall Fund. 

However, the Turkish Perceptions Survey revealed that a majority still favors membership in the European Union, Reuters reported.

Turkey has been battered by domestic and international headwinds in recent months, with inconclusive elections, weak economic growth, regional conflicts and a surge in outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant violence. 

In light of this, Turkish people overwhelmingly think the government should focus on domestic problems, according to the survey, carried out between July 4 and July 13 through face-to-face interviews with 1,018 respondents.

"Seventy percent of respondents said Turkey should deal first with its internal problems. Only 20 percent said Turkey should play a more active role in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central Asia," according to the survey, conducted with financial support from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. 

Slightly more than half of respondents, at 51 percent, disapproved of Turkey's current foreign policy, while 41 percent approved of it. 

Evidence of Turkish misgivings toward the country's international partners comes at a time when the U.S. is keen to see Ankara do more in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). 

The survey also paints a picture of a population with weakening faith in the economic outlook after a period of growth. Some 47 percent said the economy had worsened in the last five years and only 39 percent said it had improved. Looking forward to the next year, 44 percent predict the economy will worsen and 28 percent expect an upturn. 

Despite a stalled EU accession bid and bitter disagreements over migration and human rights, 44 percent of Turks still favor membership of the bloc, with 23 percent opposed. 

NATO and the United Nations were viewed as trustworthy by just one-third of respondents. Most Turks were unable to identify a single one of the country's international partners. Of those that did, most identified the United States.

However, U.S. foreign policies were widely distrusted, with just 17 percent saying they agreed with Washington's policies in the Middle East. 

Some 57 percent opposed military intervention against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while 29 percent would support military intervention. Just 17 percent said Turkey should be actively involved if the U.S.-led coalition decided to intervene, while 37 percent said they believe Turkey should stay out of the coalition altogether.

While majorities were against sending Turkish troops under all other scenarios, 46 percent of Turks supported the idea of sending troops to form a buffer zone to protect people in the region from ISIL. Forty-one percent of respondents were not in favor of this.

October/08/2015

 AHU ÖZYURT

Russian roulette in the Middle East

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/russian-roulette-in-the-middle-east.aspx?pageID=449&nID=89600&NewsCatID=515

 

 "Have a friend like a Russian, have an enemy like a Russian." These are the words of a high-level Turkish intelligence analyst who has personally had to deal with the Russians on issues like Chechnya, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), etc. "They stick to their word. They don't talk much, but they definitely do what they say," he added.

It was no surprise to many international observers that Russian President Vladimir Putin would get further involved in Syria after delivering his plan at the U.N. General Assembly last month. Despite all the criticism from Ankara, Moscow and Washington seem to be on the same page about Syria. But this is not all. 

Yalim Eralp, a seasoned advisor at CNN Turk and a former ambassador, told me that crying foul against Russia may fall on deaf ears these days. 

"Russia has been invited to Syria on the grounds of an anti-terror fight by a legal government, whether we like it or not. Bashar al-Assad and Putin are legally on the right side in terms of the U.N. Charter. Turkey's only priority at this point should be avoiding any military conflict like dogfights, etc," said Eralp.

On the road to Russia's latest move, let us rewind and question the event:

1)Right before Russia's Syria operation, Syrian refugees in Turkey suddenly moved en masse towards Europe. Did the military intelligence service of Syria, Al-Muhabarat, have a role in this mass exodus?

2)Is it a coincidence that Russia's intervention has come after the refugee crisis?

3)Were the European countries, most of which belong to NATO, involuntarily forced to say "yes" to Russia's operation?

4)Was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's urgent invitation and high-level reception in Brussels a result of this crisis, and did the EU ask him to take refugees back?

All the signs show that Russia was already planning to get more involved in Syria and the refugee influx accelerated the process. My intelligence sources tell me that hundreds of Al-Muhabarat agents and informers are actively present in Turkey. "They are not like the others," my source told me. "The KGB trained them; they know the region and the language well."

Turkey and Russia's recent air confrontation is not just a warning sign for the future. Former U.S. Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, in his latest article for the Washington Institute, stressed the symbolism of Russian overflights over Hatay. 

"Syria never officially acknowledged the loss of Hatay and its considerable Alawite community, however. Syrian maps still do not show Hatay as a part of Turkey (until recently, the regime maintained a similar cartographical attitude toward the entire country of Lebanon). While Damascus stopped emphasizing Hatay as its own territory during a thaw in relations a decade ago between Assad and then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it did not officially recognize Turkey's sovereignty," wrote Jeffrey. 

"As Syria's president and the informal leader of the Alawite community, Assad obviously knows this entire story. But does Moscow? It is hard to believe that a country so obsessed with its past and its historical claims (Crimea being only one of many examples) would have missed this connection," he added.

If Washington can see the big picture from that distance, maybe Ankara should too.

October/09/2015