Page 4 of
5 GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY PART 1: Readiness for
endless war By Axel Brot
Sharia, nor putsch" (trying
to taint the AKP with the fundamentalist brush),
to the the collusion between acting President
Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the Constitutional Court
(sworn to uphold the military prerogatives) in
provoking a constitutional crisis to block the
election of the popular Foreign Minister Abdullah
Gul to the presidency.
Since Turkey's main
Western allies are decidedly unhappy with
the
successes of reform and the growing
self-confidence of the government of Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Merkel and her
cohorts are engaged in a rather vicious game of
delegitimizing Turkish aspirations through veiled
threats and humiliations. It is not only the
moving goal posts game that Turkey has to
negotiate.
It is the kind of cued European
discussion that says in effect, "We will make sure
to prevent the EU membership of Turkey" (whatever
the domestic repercussions in the several million
strong Turkish community in Germany), that is
designed to coerce the AKP into giving up. There
is also the tidy side-payment to consider, namely,
the domestic delegitimization of the AKP and the
reempowerment of the deep state, now represented
by the Nationalist Movement (MHP) party and
Turkey's oldest political party, the Turkish
Republican Party (CHP) that has served Western
geopolitics oh-so-well.
Tying the Turkish
government into knots, the US government and many
of the European media are lauding the
constitutional vocation of the Turkish military to
protect the secular state (implying again that the
AKP is intent on turning Turkey into a sharia
state) while, at the same time, European
politicians raise the specter of the threat of
military intervention in Turkish politics as proof
that Turkey is not EU material. In the same
fashion, "high European officials" do background
briefings on how a military campaign against the
PKK in Iraq would strain NATO and end Turkey's
accession negotiations because it would be proof
that the Turkish government - which is against
intervention - cannot control its military. It is
a perfidious set-up because the US and Israel
(with German support) are doing everything to
strengthen and use the Iranian PKK network for its
proxy campaign against Tehran.
But why are
these forces fighting so hard to terminate
Turkey's EU prospects?
The answer lies not
in the new conservative/right-wing obsession with
occidental identity politics or with the
enlargement blues. The US was denied the use of
Turkish territory for attacking Iraq from the
north; Turkey insisted, instead, on its Montreux
Treaty prerogative of refusing a permanent
American naval squadron in the Black Sea. It has
rather relaxed political, and high-growth economic
relations with its neighbors, Syria and Iran. It
has been accused of dragging its feet on the
Nabucco gas pipeline, designed to bring Central
Asian gas to Europe and to circumvent the Russian
pipeline system.
It has, in fact,
excellent political and economic relations with
Russia while having gone out of the 1990s business
of subverting the Central Asian republics.
Furthermore, it angered Israel with its discreet
contacts with Hamas and by cooling down the
political scope of the military and intelligence
relationship (as well as its attendant business
opportunties). And it hurt powerful interests with
a more serious engagement with Interpol.
In other words, the AKP government is
striving to scale down the use of Turkey as a
strategic platform for all sorts of mayhem,
focusing instead quite successfully on regional
trade and investment opportunities to maintain
Turkey's economic growth - thus stabilizing a
growing middle class of "black Turks". This
approach, though, crimps US efforts to expand the
strategic threat against Iran. Even more
importantly, it limits American access to the
Caucasus and Central Asia and hampers its plans
for pulling the Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan
into a permanent and much more extensive military
relationship.
In sum: though prudent
enough to have accomodated the Turkish military's
usual level of cooperation with Western (US,
Israeli, and German) operations against its
neighbors, it still disregarded the demands of the
Western grand strategy. Its policies did nothing
to help in the "great game" of turning the
Caucasus and Central Asia into a lever to be used
against Russia and China. Neither did the Turkish
government do enough for the shorter-term payoff,
ie, gaining control over Central Asian oil and
gas. All of this did not win the Turkish
government friends in the right places. It set
itself up, instead, for some variant of a
regime-change operation in which the campaign
against Turkey's EU aspirations will play a
pivotal role.
Though the Turkish military
is always good for a coup d'etat, it may be
difficult to do it this time without an
inopportune level of violence ("Chileanization")
since the AKP won the elections resoundingly.
There are other options available that might teach
the forces of Turkish reform lessons about red
lines and overreaching. A short walk down memory
lane might illustrate what is possible.
One of the most successful - and
"blackest" - of US-British "black operation"
against a Western, albeit neutral, country was
carried out in first half of the 1980s. In 2000,
none other than Reagan's secretary of defense,
Caspar Weinberger, declassified it in an interview
with Swedish TV in the context of an investigation
into the affair of the "Soviet submarines".
Then Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme was
a real thorn in Western flesh. Apart from his
backing for the Afrincan National Congress and the
Palestine Liberation Organization, he was very
vocal in his criticism of the increasingly
dangerous American confrontation policies towards
the Soviet Union. His stance enjoyed widespread
support within the Swedish population. This
changed rather dramatically with the worldwide
frenzy about "the Soviet aggression of neutral
Sweden", when Swedish territorial waters were
repeatedly "violated by Soviet submarines" and by
landings of "Soviet special forces" on the Swedish
coast. These "incursions" stopped with the still
unresolved murder of Palme in 1986, despite two
unsuccessful attempts to convict a man named
Christer Pettersson for the crime.
With a
pleased smirk, Weinberger confirmed that there was
nothing Soviet in the violation of Swedish
territorial waters (the Soviets "didn't have the
capabilities"). There were, instead, routine
exercises, "between the Swedish navy and the
American and British navies and since they were
routine, the Swedish admiral responsible saw
obviously no need to inform his superiors or his
subordinates about the nature of the "enemy".
It was, in fact, not quite a "regime
change", but a joint US-UK operation together with
the top brass of the Swedish navy and Swedish
intelligence, conducted against the foreign policy
of the Swedish government. Since then Sweden has
been rather careful not to challenge American
policies - with the exception perhaps of the very
popular Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, in line to
become the next prime minister. She was stabbed to
death in 2003 by a mentally disturbed young
immigrant.
At the time, such operations
brought the world close to the brink of nuclear
war. The Soviets understandably saw this as a
crucial
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