AFTER THE RETREAT: TURKEY PUSHES EASTWARD

Rough draft.

(Please read IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER at end of post.)

Turkey is expanding eastward. It has crowned with open borders the years of rapprochement with Syria. It’s wrapping up deals with Iraq. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his foreign minister shuttle eastward so hyperactively they’ve put to shame Sarkozi and his foreign minister.

The issue: Will this expansion eastward by the Turkish team collide head-on into Iran’s strategic interests and achievements?

A RECENT HISTORY OF SOUND STRATEGY

Turkey is unabashedly playing the Gaza card. (Gaza’s suffering is real, but Gaza and the suffering of its people do politically constitute a card.) I wouldn’t question the authenticity of the Turkish team’s empathy. The refusal years ago by Turkey to allow the harmful idiots to channel troops through Turkish territory into Arab Iraq (pre-Retreat) was proof enough that the team’s current feelings (post-Retreat) are genuine.

Though, then as now, it wasn’t really about feelings. It mostly was about sound strategy. Refusing the harmful idiots the use of Turkish territory to vanquish Arab Iraq was as much a smart and tactically masterful move as it was a move dictated by empathy with the Arab and Muslim Street - - and responsive to that Street within Turkey. Turkey could see (as could any sophomore, so long as free of the Israel shackle) that eliminating Arab Iraq would turn Iran into a regional power, unhindered. If anything, the idiots’ strategy should’ve been to rehabilitate Arab Iraq. But they shut us up then, and now they’re at it again—to shut up any independent Arab-American - - any Arab-American who’s not Israel-centric.

Too, the Turkish team, Islamic, wasn’t about to have its strategic alliance with the harmful idiots and their Israel be used the wrong way. The Turkish team could see a campaign by its strategic partners that, in its American domestic/mobilization aspects, smacked of a joint “Jewish” -“Christian” effort. The Muslim World is huge and the Turkish team wasn’t about to see Turkey turn itself into a ghetto vis-à-vis that World, as the “Christian”-“Jewish” strategists had turned the United States.

WILL TURKEY AND IRAN LOSE CONTROL?

But the primordially-sectarian feelings of the Turkish team, genuine though they are, hardly should prove decisive in Turkey’s future relations with Iran. Turkey already has begun the free fall into the regional power vacuum trap. It’ll possibly make the same mistake this newsletter had deemed Iran might commit: to spread across the empty divide that is the Arab nation, starting in Plantation Iraq, where the power vacuum is most severe. For now it seems the Turkish team is in control of that expansion, and conscious about the dangers-for-war it portends. That consciousness is mandated by the fact that the Turkish team is forever aware of its Achilles’ heel - - the Kurds and the Alevis. Accordingly, it’ll factor Iran into everything it does.

But politics is such that the Turkish Islamists might lose control over the expansion eastward. For one, consciously-or-not, they’re competing with Iran over the Arab Street. What with the Turkish team’s use of the Gaza card. That’s an important card for Iran and it wouldn’t want to lose it to Turkey or to anyone. Turkey, if it gains credibility on Gaza, might turn the Sunni masses of the Levant into a weapon against Iran’s dominance in Iraq. Suddenly, the Arab Sunnis of Iraq would no longer be a minority in the plantation-nation-state. They would be a majority if Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria are factored in. It’s not an imminent threat to Iran, but it is a threat nonetheless.

(What helps Iran vitiate that threat is the fact that the governments of the Arabian Peninsula in their wealth turn their back on the poorer Arabs. The wealthy and privileged Gulf ruling elites become, in effect, self-hating Arabs. So, instead of Saudi Arabia re-opening its doors to the Arab workers of Yemen, for Arab reasons and to defuse the economic woes of it poor Arab neighbor, rumor has it that Saudi Arabia is trying to lure China away from Iran by promising to hire hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers.)

For another, Iraqi Kurdistan is an Israeli fiefdom. (I don’t know that it still is; but contacts developed over years of Israeli presence there shouldn’t be expected to evaporate too fast.) Think of the possibilities Israel has to drain Erdogan’s government. For instance, what if Israel supplies aid to the PKK, and in that have the tacit approval of Turkey’s military? What if Iran, aware of the Israeli stratagem, remains silent about it in order to block the push eastward of a rival? For now, it seems that the harmful idiots-and-the-Israelis are rooting for an alliance between Turkey and the de facto nation-state of Iraqi Kurdistan. (Note the visit there a couple of months ago of U.S. Senator John McCain.) But what the harmful idiots may desire likely wouldn’t be determinative. Israel might go its own way. Iran does. And so does Turkey. The scenarios are many.

CONCLUSION

Turkey and Iran will be doing a lot of management of their relationship as they fill the power vacuum left by the harmful idiots in Iraq. Both teams, however, would be fools to think that that management and the control they now exercise will be theirs to keep.

As we retreat, expect many - - not only Iran and Turkey - - to fall into systemic power vacuum traps. Let's then retreat faster! Long live RETREATS!


IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

This newsletter has no connection WHATSOEVER to any government, INCLUDING the U.S. - - regardless of what the intelligence-industrial complex tells its snoops when they recruit them. How do they get these acquaintances, two of them I referred out to attorneys, as friends-of-friends, never having been retained by them, to snoop on me? What do they tell them? They most definitely teach the low-life snooping techniques - - that much is obvious. Obviously, too, they must pay them handsomely to become treacherous, low-life, snitches. Or something else; but I’d rather not talk about the “something else.” The parasites, the pests, and assholes.