Kurds

Who “Owns” The United States

My grandmother was my love, my protector and one of the reasons I was tubby. She was also a master of negotiations with the innate skill of protecting ones’ turf and a keen sense of when to strike when her feelings of what was right were violated. She also knew when she had blundered by immediately saying: “I didn’t said it “which foreclosed any further discussion of her mistake. No one owned her, not even the cancer that killed her.

My feelings today, as I peek under the veneer that distorts reality, is that we as a nation are owned , manipulated , and at times being told to bug off by nations that take our billions in aid. The first to come to mind is Turkey who with a slight-of-hand movement pokes a finger in our eye. The U.S. is investigating whether Turkey violated agreements with Washington about the use of U.S.-provided weapons and equipment, including whether Ankara knowingly and improperly transferred those weapons to its proxies in Syria, groups that U.S. officials say may have committed war crimes and ethnic cleaning .Why won’t I be surprised by its findings. And while Congress moves to sanction Turkey, the President nevertheless invites its leader to the White House as Turkey announces it will not remove its troops from Syria, threatens to further inflame tensions between the two nations by indicating its purchasing of Russian military fighter jets, and once again attacks the Kurds. Former national security adviser John Bolton suggested during a private speech in Miami last week that the president’s approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by his personal and financial interests in that country.

When we talk about our national debt (which keeps rising under Trump, notwithstanding his promise to reduce it) we must frame what may seem like a strange question — who owns America – who owns our U.S. released treasury bills, notes and bonds? The answer is startling — China owns 27% of our world’s value. They have a big key to our pantry.

Under Putin, the Russian economy is based solely upon how much gas, oil and minerals it can extract from the ground. In all senses, the former Soviet Union has little if any resemblance to the economic diversity necessary for a strong national economy. Putin, thus strong arms weaker and smaller nations to bend to his needs to shore up Russia’s economic deficiency, while his paranoia has encouraged the successor to the KGB, the FSB (a strong arm group he wholly supports) to be “enforcers” so that so-called “vital” scientific material and knowledge (as determined by him) may not be sold abroad without proper (his) authorization. In other words keep everything at home in the hope of developing a monopoly to benefit his cronies. His latest method is to have major Russian scientific institutions raided and scientists (some recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize) detained for long periods of questing. People’s lives have been put on indefinite hold. None of this has upset the leader of the United States to help him achieve his goal to make Russia great again (MRGA). Putin, not only the master of a vast nation seeking to drain the will and resources of those who dare cross his line in the sand, has mastered the mechanics of a mystical cloak that has just produced what bombs and thugs could not. He winked twice with his right eye and “The “ President of the United States handed over control of the Syrian “crisis” and its complex fault lines throughout that area to the Russians. Trump pulled out our troops (with no consultation with those with any understanding of consequences), the Kurds were swept into a dust bin and the Israelis were further surrounded by their emboldened enemies. The rocket launching toward Israel started once again this week after a long interval of quiet.

Muhammad Hussein Al-Momani, on the board of directors of Jordan’s Al-Ghad daily and Jordan’s former government spokesman and state minister for media affairs, “slammed the U.S. for its decision to withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria”.

Al-Momani warned that this “hasty, miscalculated and uncoordinated” step would harm America’s interests in Syria as well as the interests of its allies. Russia becomes the clear winner in the area since the withdrawal only reinforces its standing as the major decision-maker in Syria and Iran. That position will be the launching pad for it to be able to expand its regional influence with little or no resistance. All to our detriment.

“The mutual hostilities in northern Syria go far beyond Turkey, the U.S. and Russia. The events there have placed all the countries in the region in a state of doubt and uncertainty, causing complete chaos and granting Russia and Iran an opportunity to fill the strategic vacuum created by America’s hasty, uncalculated and uncoordinated unilateral withdrawal.”

President Trump has created a dangerous strategic quagmire by the withdrawal, ignoring the interests of our supporting allies and clearly upsetting what regional stability there is. What happens to our interests in combating terror and preventing the reemergence of ISIS, at the same moment curbing Iran’s influence in Syria? His precipitous withdrawal has threatened not merely the region’s stability but our own interests in the area. We have, by throwing the Kurds to the wolves, not only diminished their ability and will to fight ISIS in northern Syria but created the obvious strategic vacuum that will be filled by Iran. Our growing aggressive nuclear enemy!

As noted, Mr. Putin and Russia will benefit most from these developments. They will have greater credibility, undermining whatever standing we may have had in the region and opens the way for Iran to expand and increase it influence politically. Boldly, Iran announced this week that it is increasing its nuclear capabilities and advancing it timetable for nuclear development.

But the unsettling story doesn’t end there, on the other side of the world– Trump has caved to China giving them a major trade victory. In an article by Brian Klaas,: “Early in his presidency, President Trump scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade bloc that would have put the United States at the center of a trade zone that represented about a third of the global economy. Now, 2½ years later, China is putting itself at the center of an alternative trade zone that represents about a third of the global economy.” Trump’s animosity toward China is governed by his personal, unwieldy political desires instead of our national interests. His rational is blindsiding our involvement in a $49 trillion dollar trade bloc that might embrace half the world’s population. As Mr. Klass noted: “And China couldn’t be happier.”

And it doesn’t end there! lost in the back pages of any decent newspaper is the story that in mid-January, Kevin Moley, the senior State Department official responsible for overseeing U.S. relations with the United Nations and other international organizations, “issued a stern command to a gathering of visiting U.S. diplomats in Washington: China was on the rise, and America’s diplomatic corps needed to do everything in its power to thwart Beijing’s ambitions. It doesn’t seem like much of an important event, but the news illustrates China’s bid to place itself ahead of the U.S. on all fronts.” As I have written in the past China’s aggressiveness started last year with it militarization of uninhabited rocks in the South China Sea into military installations.

China’s move to place one of its own top officials at the head of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which helps direct agricultural and food security policies worldwide, is a perfect example of China’s international efforts in achieving world dominance. Defeating China would become a key U.S. foreign-policy goal. Five months later, the race ended in a harsh rout for the United States. Beijing’s candidate, the vice minister of agriculture and rural affairs won. U.S. diplomats initially anticipated their favored candidate, a former Georgian agriculture minister, receiving at least 60 votes. He ended up getting 12.

While the nation is focused on impeachment, and the President is attempting to change the subject of the daily news by lashing out in all directions we, as nation, are fast losing our international importance, status and moral compass—our leadership. In other words –our international clout. And even if Trump is defeated in 2020, his failures, his lack of self-discipline and the damage he has inflicted on this nation to enhance and defend his purse and unhealthy ego will last far beyond the end of his presidency. It will take years to right the wrongs he has created.

Richard Allan,  Editor

By Richard Allan, ago

The Escalating Dangerous Conflict Between Turkey and the United States

In order to appreciate our present, very dangerous relationship with Turkey, it is important to understand its world history however briefly reviewed: The Ottomans Empire lasted a bit over 624 years (ending in 1923). If you were to visualize a map of the Mediterranean Sea with your anchor in present day Turkey and then create a backward letter “C” – moving west on the rim of its northern and southern shores you would begin to visualize its vast control of that part of the world. In essence, the “empire” was an assemblage of voluntary and captured countries. Admittedly, the Empire became one of the most powerful and controlling world powers in all history.

The Empire was very much pro German before the start of WWI. I would suggest you go back to see the marvelous movie: Lawrence of Arabia. It deals with another aspect of the area’s history during the same time-frame as Lawrence led a revolt of the Arab people against the Empire. When the United States entered WWI it declared hostilities against Germany. The Ottoman Empire in April 1917, then severed its diplomatic ties with the United States. It wasn’t until 10 years later, long after the secession of hostilities, that formal diplomatic relations were re-established with the Ottoman Empire’s successor, now the created independent nation state, Turkey. For reasons that are immaterial at his juncture, the United States never declared war against the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey’s place, this very day, is front and center on the United States’ military and political map. The complexities created by the waring parities, local and international, in Iraq, the Syrian civil war, the fight against ISIS and the Kurdish peoples demand for nation status, has created an ongoing volatile conflict worthy of a Shakespeare drama. In this geo-political arena, two long allies– Turkey and the United States– have collided and have escalated their collision on a daily basis as they represent, at the same moment, different, overlapping and in some cases violently competing military goals and parties. In addition, Turkey’s political structure has undergone profound political upheaval that complicates the areas security and our long standing relationship. The future does not present a good picture for our interest in that region of the world as our diplomacy with succeeding administrations has been less than successful. America’s voice in that region is but a feeble croak.

The time line of the United States and its present day confrontation with an ever increasingly anti-American hostile Turkey can start with the Cold War and the West’s confrontation with the swelling political, geographic and aggressive engagements of the Soviet Union. A reasonable marking date is 1974, with the advent of the Truman Doctrine. The United States Congress chose Turkey, among other nations, as the recipient of extraordinary economic and military aid, with the heating of the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine would be the foundation, with its immense financial assistance to help to create a major Turkish military force now attached to NATO and a strong, hardened army in the war against ISIS forces. It would become the basis upon which these two countries would build their relationship for the next four decades. It is also prudent to know that 2.5 billion dollars found its way into Istanbul in just one twenty year period, and help jolted Turkey’s shift toward massive democratic reforms in the election process, political representation and substantial social restructuring, until its recent swift and politically violent flipping of that Muslin nation. Its present stance while not altogether hostile is clearly strongly anti-American.

There were political and military actions that the United States undertook in Iraq that caused increasing strident outrages in Istanbul, but those headlines did not became the reason for its political transformation. Today, Turkey can be defined as a quasi-dictatorship.

Turkey has fought a long, costly insurgent war against the Kurdish people in general and the Kurdistan Worker Party (the PKK) in particular. The PKK is recognized by the EU and the United States as a terrorist group. But, and equally important, there is more than one Kurdistan group seeking its people’s independence. Turkey has been involved in an increasingly hostile war toward the Kurdish people in general and their demands. (Either as an independent Kurdish state within the borders of its destabilizing neighboring state or within its own national boundaries.)

Turkey’s turn away from democracy and its norms began with Erdogan’s grab for political power in mid-2016. He accused the U.S. Military Command of siding with the architects of a failed coup while Istanbul arrested certain Pentagon contacts in Turkey. With the crushing of the coup, there were deep mass arrests ordered by Erdogan not only up and down the ranks within the army but also in the judiciary and civil service. Istanbul then demanded the United States government extradite a Turkish cleric and national living in the States as the coup’s instigator. The United States government, in turn, demanded that Turkey produce the “evidence” that the cleric was in fact connected with the attempted coup. The Turkish controlled press followed, claiming that a United States general was behind the coup which was followed quickly by the American suspension “indefinitely” of all non-immigrant visas from Turkey with the traditional tic-for-tac suspensions by Turkey.

To complicate both the political clash and the war on the ground, during the ongoing Syrian Civil War, the United States forces have been openly allied with the Kurdish YPG fighters and have been supporting them with military and logistic help. Turkey considers these Kurdish fighters in the same light as the PKK, namely as terrorists and has told Washington they will attack those Kurds with the same force as those they employed against the PKK. It has been alleged, in current headlines, that the deadly nanpan has been deployed against civilians in the town of Azaz in northern Syria. This puts the United States and Turkey in direct military conflict.

In addition, in its lurch from a secular democratic nation state, Turkey has joined Qatar as the prime source of funding to speed the spread of extreme Islamism “everywhere from western Africa to Southeast Asia”.

The news reports describing the area’s conflict both politically and on the battlefield is Russia’s physical arrival in the area with its continued support of Syria’s Assad against United States’ interests in the region. This in turn will not only complicate the delicate state of our security interests but complicate the ground hostiles. It will then stall or even more than likely collapse any meaningful democratic move in Syria’s future and will permit yet another tyrant, Assad to remain in office.

Intertwined is the predictable direct military clash between United States and Turkish forces with Russia sitting at Istanbul’s side. Turkey, which looks less each day like a NATO ally, it is claimed consulted Moscow before attacking U.S. Kurdish allies in northern Syria and has obtained surface air-to air missiles from its sponsor the Russians.

The future of the Kurdish people and their lives as a people is in jeopardy. And their outcome can be reliably predicted by examining the United States’ previous behavior– it will leave unconscionably yet another weaker ally in the lurch, as we did with the Iraqi Kurds in Kirkuk, and now to abandon the Syrian Kurds as soon as it is expedient, advantageous, and politic for us. Why do we choose the strongest military ally however faulted and compromised instead of the appropriate one?

Richard Allan,
The Editor

By Richard Allan, ago