The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a
free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly
ripped open when it invaded Iraq!
The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has
dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds
wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of
extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization
that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in
Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity
completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal
assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular
misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical
extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by
whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the
border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly
protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish
forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of
the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their
Saudi-style beheadings.
The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and
artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we
can assume by extension the British government, supports, given
today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For
exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow
Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds
the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of
course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are
also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.
So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask
Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan,
predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and
sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to
Biden.
So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting
ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting
him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting
Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the
Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or
even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting
"terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the
always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces."
(Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they
suddenly decide they don't like.)
The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are
fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though
they're fighting ISIS.
In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S.
is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.
U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that
are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that
Turkey is bombing and shelling.
Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni
extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia
has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces"
(commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist
ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of
their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain,
France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or
aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime,
will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime
minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)
Is that all clear now?
I didn't think so.
1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist
president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state
with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's
entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free
speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands
of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried
out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which
he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and
other depredations against human rights. The actual history of
Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an
absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in
self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda
manifested yet again.
The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her
political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the
Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds
have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I
suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army
waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a
decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and
killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for
being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers,
broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But
that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC
forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds.
And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict,"
even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming
majority of the now-dead.
By the way, that NATO
army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants
there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.
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