THE ROVING
EYE The
deadly Israeli and the mad
Turk By Pepe Escobar
The inmates are running - or think they
are running - the asylum.
As Asia Times
Online already reported (See Bomb
Iran fever, Aug 8, 2012), Tel Aviv may be
inches away from turning the already declared
economic war on Iran into a hot war.
Take
a look at this madness: [1] The Bibi-Barak
warmongering duo (Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu
and Defense Minister Ehud
Barak) may be about to go for
broke on an Iran strike - against the advice of
Israel's top defense and intelligence experts.
Barak may even have had access to secret
US intel. He said, "there probably really is such
an American intelligence report - I don't know if
it is an NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] one
- making its way around senior offices [in
Washington]."
"Probably?" "Really?" "I
don't know?" And this forest of hypotheticals is a
justification for hot war?
Then Barak
added; "As far as we know it brings the American
assessment much closer to ours".
Not
really. Here's the response by a White House
National Security Council spokesman; the US
intelligence assessment remains the same. That is;
Iran is not conducting a nuclear weapons program.
And if any extra confirmation was needed,
Washington seems to have a pretty clear picture of
Iran's nuclear progress. [2]
According to
White House spokesman Jay Carney, "We would know
if and when Iran made what's called a breakout
move towards acquiring a weapon."
For
lethal Bibi, that's obviously not enough. It
doesn't matter that - technically and logistically
- Israel simply does not have what it takes to
conduct a successful strike on Iran's nuclear
facilities.
Take a look at this concise
infographics. [3] For starters, Israel does not
have the latest generation MOP GBU-57A bunker
buster bombs to hit deep underground Iranian
installations. It does not have the Northrop
Grumman's B-2 stealth bombers to deliver them. And
it does not have enough Lockheed Martin KC-130
aerial tankers (only 5; the US has 80) for
refueling its attacking F-15s and F-16s.
There is no evidence the Obama
administration will be authorizing the Pentagon to
supply all of the above to the Bibi-Barak duo
anytime soon.
And let's introduce a little
bit of sanity into this madness - courtesy of good
ol' Cold Warrior Yevgeny Primakov, former KGB
supremo and Russian foreign minister. Primakov
tells it like it is; go ahead, attack Iran; and
then, inevitably, they will go for a bomb. [4]
Meanwhile, in Ankara… Is Turkey
about to enter the 9th (Kurdish) circle of hell?
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has
just been to Turkey in a very Libyan "We came, we
saw, he died" mood; it's as if she was replaying
her Angel of Death role, presiding over the
imminent demise of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
Not so fast. The same applies to the State
Department influencing Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Shakespearean decision
whether to "invade" or "not invade" Western/Syrian
Kurdistan.
The fact is the AKP party in
Ankara won't ask the Turkish parliament for it.
They would simply invade Syrian Kurdistan - even
with a bunch of Turkish generals languishing in
jail, accused of plotting a coup. Three Turkish
brigades, tanks and artillery are already only two
kilometers away from the Syrian border.
Ankara has crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan
dozens of times in hot pursuit of PKK (Kurdistan
Workers' Party) guerrillas. The plot thickens,
because at the same time Ankara has very close
trade/diplomatic relations with the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG); in fact Ankara is now
pitted against the Nuri al-Maliki government in
Baghdad, as it began importing Kurdish oil
directly, bypassing Iraq's central government.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
went in person to Kirkuk and Irbil to close the
deal with Massoud Barzani, the president of the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
In
Pipelinestan terms, this is huge; Western Big Oil
is absolutely itching to get as much energy from
Iraqi Kurdistan (as well as from Azerbaijan) as
humanly possible - thus bypassing Iran and Russia.
A Turkish "invasion" of Syrian Kurdistan
will not be too much of a problem in terms of
Turkish relations with those paragons of democracy
at the Gulf Cooperation Council; after all Qatar
and the House of Saud are working side by side
with Turkey towards the total destabilization of
Syria.
But the Assad regime will see this
as a war on Syria - not only Syrian Kurdistan;
after all Turkey hosts not only the Syrian
National Council (SNC) but also thousands of Not
Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA) gangs,
Salafi-jihadis included. Turkey is their
logistical base.
And what happens if
there's a flurry of bodybags shipped back to
Ankara and Istanbul?
The Mad Turk Erdogan
power-play may be unraveling. The Turkish army,
the commercial bourgeoisie, the secular
bureaucracy, they are all getting increasingly fed
up with his Napoleonic dreams; hosting the FSA,
crammed with jihadis; smuggling weapons into Syria
alongside Qatar and the Saudis; deploying
anti-aircraft batteries and even missiles on the
border; threatening to invade Syrian Kurdistan;
that's a bit too much.
But then again,
maybe not. Ankara's wishful thinking big picture -
in a neo-Ottoman vein - would certainly include
some sort of economic annexation of northern Iraq
and northeast Syria; both happen to be energy-rich
- and Turkey badly needs the energy. The problem
is they're both inhabited mostly by Kurds.
Even Iranian Kurds are already stirring.
[5] What happens when 17 million Turkish Kurds
also decide to step into the action? Erdogan may
be on his way to face Turkey's ultimate nightmare;
the emergence of Greater Kurdistan.
Turkey
shares borders with Iraq, Syria and Iran. The
Kurds are beginning to sense the historical shift.
Rick Rozoff at Global Research [6] correctly
argues that "Turkey provides NATO - and through
NATO the Pentagon - direct access to those three
nations." But this may go way beyond "a new
redivision of the Levant modeled after the
Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916".
Neo-Ottoman Turkey, NATO and the Pentagon
may be on the same page at least for the moment.
But a Balkanization of the Levant can only advance
the emergence of Greater Kurdistan. It may advance
Washington's strategic interests. But when Erdogan
wakes up to the new reality - to which his own
policies have contributed - it may be too late.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
