Annie
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On the blow up and what it portends:
» Behind the blow-out at Davos Middle East Strategy at Harvard
» Behind the blow-out at Davos Middle East Strategy at Harvard
Behind the blow-out at Davos
Feb 2nd, 2009 by MESH
From Michael Reynolds
...
The fact that they enjoyed close ties to the United States facilitated their cooperation; indeed, their bilateral ties cannot be understood in isolation from their ties with America. Their pro-American orientation was reinforced by their identification with liberal democracy and even lent their relationship a broader civilizational sheen. Finally, their cooperation was complementary in very practical ways in a number of areas, ranging from the military-security field to planned projects to bring natural gas and water to Israel.
Beginnings of estrangement. Recent years, however, have seen a definite deterioration in Turkish-Israeli ties. Several reasons explain this, but perhaps the most fundamental lies in the post-9/11 shift in United States policy under George Bush from support of the status quo in the Middle East to revision of it through the toppling of multiple regimes in the Middle East, starting with Saddam Husseins. Although no one in Washington even imagined targeting the Turkish Republic in the project to remake the Greater Middle Eastto the contrary, American policy makers saw the goal of creating more secular, democratic, and thus pro-American regimes as one complementary to Turkish interestsTurkish opinion across the board was profoundly skeptical of American motives and fearful of American plans.
Not a few Turks, including those in think tanks and the military, believed that the ultimate target of Operation Iraqi Freedom was not Middle Eastern despotism but the Turkish Republic. Once the United States was in Iraq, it would proceed to incite and agitate Kurdish groups inside Turkey. Then, in the name of democracy, it would detach Turkeys eastern provinces to form a Kurdish state. By breaking the Middle East up into a greater number of smaller, more pliable, states, the United States could maintain its hegemony over the Middle East more easily. Because Israel, in turn, would be a prime beneficiary of this fracturing of Middle Eastern states, it was seen as complicit in this project.
It is an utterly fantastic, not to mention paranoid, reading of U.S. (and Israeli) policies and capabilities. But it is a worldview embedded in the institutions of the Turkish Republic, from the schools to the Turkish military....