Category Archives: Middle East

Talking Turkey

Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, The West

Ever wonder what’s up between Turkey and Syria? Mainstream media is unlikely to talk turkey about the developing conflict between the two countries on their shared border.

Robert Fisk of The Independent fills in the blanks:

…Bashar al-Assad is a despot, his regime is awful … BUT. When it comes to international law, to moral compromise, to sheer hypocrisy, the Western powers take the biscuit. La Clinton raves on about Syrian depravity when Syrian shells slaughter a Turkish woman and her four children – which they did – but gives succour to the gunmen who torture and kill and suicide-bomb the regime’s supporters inside Syria.
…And another story that isn’t being told. Syrian shells exploding in Turkey are largely landing in the province of Hatay (Akçakale is further east), but what is not being reported is that until 1939, Hatay was part of Syria – and that Syria still claims this coastal province as Syrian territory. The real story – since it involves Europe and Hitler – should be told. For hundreds of years, this territory was Syrian. Alexandretta (now Iskenderun) was the finest port in Syria. But as the power of Nazi Germany grew in the 1930s, the French, who then held the League of Nations mandate for Syria, decided to hand the whole place over to the Turks – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allied side against Hitler.
A fraudulent referendum was held and the mass of Arabs in the province – tens of thousands of them Alawites, who form the backbone of Assad’s regime today – fled south, along with an almost equal number of Armenians who had survived the 1915 Turkish genocide. Today, the children and grandchildren of those Armenians tacitly support the Assad regime.

MORE.

UPDATED: Benghazigate And The True Tools of Deception

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Media, Middle East

Intimately familiar with the way information flows in and from the White House, Pat Buchanan relates that the day after the Benghazi attack, the intelligence community would have known this was terrorism. Yet 2 days after that, Jay Carney was talking a spontaneous attack. Who was it, asks Buchanan, who briefed Carney, and told him to go out and lie? In the White house Buchanan worked in it would have been the chief of staff and the NSC (National Security Council) adviser.

Next, 4 days on, out Susan Rice was trotted , she too a (willing) tool (in more than one ways) of deception. The FBI never went in to investigate the scene of the attack because Benghazi is an “utterly unsafe” city, although fifteen days following the attack, Rice promised the FBI was in there. That never happened, says Buchanan.

There is nothing new or particular galling, on the political scale of ethic, about what Buchanan has outlined.

The bigger scandal in all this is the “cover up of the cover up.” And the real tools (of deception) are the media Mafia, focusing as they are on poor Mitt Romney’s assorted hiccups, so as to cover for their Godfather Obama.

UPDATE (10/2): The consulate in Benghazi was, of course, a typical US government operation. There was full-on access to anyone who wanted it after the attack as before it. Arwa Damon of CNN tells of a scene unsecured after the attack, locals coming and going, rummaging through the compound and taking mementos (paid for by US taxpayers). Would that this manifest hostility to American presence in Libya deterred future diplomats from “duty,” but it won’t. What the fiasco in Benghazi means is not that America will divest from democratizing the word, but, rather, that the American taxpayer will fork out for fortresses, for Green Zones everywhere.

Deconstructing Reality In Benghazi

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Islam, Middle East, War

So why do you suppose the storyline as to why “they” attacked our consulate in Benghazi last week keeps morphing?

First it was because of an obscure, online, YouTube preview that has been in cyberspace for months, and takes its place among many similar films.

Presumably, that was preferable to accepting the fact of a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. The maternal instincts of the revered Hillary and her she warlords—these guided the intervention in Libya’s affairs—could not have been wrong!

You dare not concede that by leveling Libya, the Americans “invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives.”

The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.” To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

Reality is always deconstructed to suit the political purposes of the powers that be. Witness the way Iraq-related War stories kept “evolving.”

“RATIONALIZE WITH LIES“ details some of the “rather creative post hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on that sovereign nation—a nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us, and was certainly no match for us.”

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

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UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)