From Gregory Copley's 3/4/16 conversation with John Batchelor, Ceasefire Update: Turkey and US Resupplying the Jihadists; Russia and Syria Attacking the Jihadists starting at the 15 minute mark of the podcast:
BATCHELOR: There is also this; help me interpret this. [reading] "The United States has approved a deal to sell $683 million worth of precision-guided munitions to Turkey. This is the first reported sale of BLU 109 bunker-busting bombs to Turkey to Ellwood National Forge and General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems. Turkish officials said they expect all the bombs by 2020."
Gregory, do we supply the Turkish military with the weapons they're using against the Kurds?
COPLEY: Absolutely; that's explicit and it's understood in Washington that that's what they're being used for. By the way the US also supplied virtually all of the military equipment which the Turkish armed forces used to invade Northern Cyprus in 1974 and which the Turkish army of occupation in Northern Cyprus now uses.
That's in contravention of U.S. law and the agreement signed with Turkey when the weapons were provided. The US has tolerated that and has never said anything about it even when it's been raised at international legal fora in the past. They're certainly not going to stop doing it with Turkey at this stage given the relationship which the Obama Administration has -- the Obama White House, specifically -- has with the Turkish leadership.
BATCHELOR: So these remarks by Lavrov and others in Russia that the Turks continue to thumb their nose at the ceasefire and resupply al Nusra, which continues in its campaign to [overthrow] the Assad regime, and resupply ISIS, which of course is a threat to all of Mesopotamia -- the U.S. supports Turkey knowing all that, and continues in any event. I just want to clarify because I understand that those are the facts.
COPLEY: Yes, it's explicit. I keep raising this around Washington even with senior military people, saying, "Do you not find it a contradiction that the United States is wittingly supporting with intelligence assets, with training, with weapons directly to the al Qaeda-linked groups who launched the attack on the United States on 9/11, and supporting Turkey in its ongoing support of those groups; and also supporting Saudi Arabia in its ongoing support of those groups -- particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia, the al Nusra Front?"
Basically people just want to change the topic because there is no coherent answer to that claim and there's certainly no refutation of it. The bottom line is that nobody in the Pentagon is going to refuse a direct order from the White House on this. And yet it is distinctly against U.S. national interests.
And it's always supported by the claim, 'Well, we have to get rid of Assad.'
And yet when you ask, "First, why is it in the U.S. interests to get rid of Assad? Second, wasn't the war in Syria started largely by Turkey to expand into the old Ottoman Empire areas of Syria? And third, having started that war and created millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of killed, tell me how this also benefits U.S. strategic interests or even the interests of the Syrian people?"
[...]
****
At that point John moves on to another question because there is no answer in Washington to the questions Gregory poses, beyond incoherent remarks and the chirping of crickets. But one really needs to think about what Gregory recounts, the huge number of lives it alludes to, the destructiveness. Yet Americans experience no penalty for a defense policy that treats millions of people distant from them like ciphers.
********
No comments:
Post a Comment