Kudos to you, Sir. The entire English speaking world sits in speechless awe of your sublime reasoning, your laser-like insight, and your fiery intellect.
Posted on 03/30/2003 7:00:02 AM PST by pkpjamestown
I was coming out of a taxi in Istanbul, and unknowingly spilled some money out of my pocket as I paid the driver. He drove off, and I walked away. Some Turkish street urchin ran up to me and started yanking on my shirt, yelling, "Efendim! Efendim!" as well as a long string of Turkish. In his hand was the fifty dollar bill that had spilled out of my pocket.
I thanked the lad, took my money, (he was about ten or eleven) and, may I say, he refused the money which I offered him in compensation.
Make of this what you will. I was able to infer quite a bit.
I reiterate...the only salient fact is immutable...turkey betrayed us to climb into bed with the EU. Our troops are paying for that betrayal in blood, even as we speak.
Turks can make the same valid observation about the USA's coddling of PKK supporters over here. The Turks dealt with a 9/11 every time the PKK rolled into a village and shot it to pieces, killing everything that drew breath. After the First Gulf War, I may add. Turkish security was compromised, not enhanced, by US actions after that war. There was no confrontation or repudiation of these Pol Pot types here in the USA by anyone worth mention, and promised aid to supplant the loss of revenue from Turkey's unilateral decision to cut off trade with Iraq never materialized. Turkey lost tens of thousands of people and suffered an economic catastrophe in the aftermath.
In the mature, adult world, it is understood that nations form alliances on the basis of mutual advantage. American actions regarding Turkey are little better than JFK's undermining anti-Castro Cubans during the Bay of Pigs and the overthrow of the Diem government in South Vietnam.
US actions have established the fact that any nation trying to free themselves from communist subversion are damned fools to trust the socialists running Washington. It gets you betrayed, stranded on the beach, and killed. The president of South Viet Nam, assassinated with Kennedy White House approval, found this to be true. The Turks, fighting mass murdering Communists, have also found this to be true.
If you are fighting Communism, working with Americans, or the American government, is likely to get you betrayed and killed, whether you are a Cuban, a South Vietnamese, or a Turk.
As far as fighting Marxism-Leninism is concerned, it appears to the countries with most to lose from Marxist subversion, that the American government has switched sides.
The Turks want command and control of Turkish forces in Northern Iraq to subdue and destroy Communist Kurdish terrorists there. Washington said no, and you apparently see no problem with that. No country in its right mind will support an action which potentially threatens it, and can not support any action which ensures that it is absolutely unable to protect itself.
This is really a new variation on a forty year old problem. If you want to blame anyone for this Northern Iraq debacle, and for the damage US troops will incur as a result, blame yourself and those who think like you. It's folks like you and those who think like you who helped us lose Vietnam. You will ensure that yet more Red barbarians rise up and slaughter everyone unable to resist them.
You have not and it seems cannot address what I consider the bottom line...Americans are dying because our "ally" and "friend" sees no more need for us and so, true to historical form, climbed out of our bed and into France's arms.
Wait...what's that I hear? Oh, the silence on the northern front...you know the one that would have hastened the end of the war and saved lives if your friends the turks been principalled.
As far as the Northern Iraqi front is concerned, I am as irritated as you are about it. Even more, because we are now arming these same PKK monsters who've killed over 35,000 people since the first Gulf War ended. They are certain to bite us in the rear at their first opportunity. In contrast, we could have had a Turkish armored division there months ago, chomping at the bit to finally burn out the hornets' nests.
What I can't ignore, and which you dismiss as if such denial were an article of faith, is that in the sane, moral, adult world, alliances are to the mutual benefit of the participants.
Arming Communist guerillas, and then preventing the nation they primarily prey upon from defending themselves is insane. Expecting the victims of such terrorism to ignore fifteen years of such terrorism is insane. Expecting these same guerillas to blithely reject years and years of daily Marxist-Leninist totalitarian indoctrination, becoming converted in a matter of days to become Our Gallant Allies is something out of a comic book. Expecting sane people to agree with such policy is also insane.
No, me old son, it's your reasoning, or rather, your lack of it, which has produced this problem in Northern Iraq. If you had been reading the papers you would have known that the war against terrorism in that part of the world has been going on for more than ten years now, with the Turks in the front lines.
Don't talk to me about principles. You understand the psychological impact of the connotations the use of the word produces, but you certainly haven't much of a grip on the actual, real, meaning of the concept.
Kudos to you, Sir. The entire English speaking world sits in speechless awe of your sublime reasoning, your laser-like insight, and your fiery intellect.
This is one of my primary concerns after we oust Saddam's regime. Bloodletting and revenge.
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