The plot against Turkey, and why its failing.
Hey there.
Today we are going to talk about the plot against Turkey, and why it is failing.
I lived in Turkey for 6 years and I can tell you that the Turks are a super paranoid people.
But after the past month it's impossible to hold that against them.
The plot against Turkey is very real.
On October 6th the US president gave Turkey the go ahead to invade Northern Syria, a mission
that Turkish President Erdogan had been threatening for years.
Due to an international outcry, their offensive stalled before it actually got to any of the
historic centers of Kurdish life in Syria.
On October 22nd a deal was signed between Russia and Turkey that should, in theory,
work well for everyone.
All the historically Kurdish areas will be run by the Russian and Syrian governments
that the Kurds have been allied with throughout the war, and Turkey has blocked the formation
of an independent Kurdish state on its Southern border.
The whole thing has been wrapped up quite quickly, with nowhere near as much loss of
life as Turkey's incursion into Afrin in January of 2018.
A couple hundred people have been killed, which is always tragic, but if you're being
honest its hard to distinguish from the daily churn of this savage 8 year war.
A month later, Turkey has changed the dynamics of the war, but hasn't taken any real cities
or important Kurdish territories.
To be clear, I do not support this action, and, as I talked about last week, I think
that the Turkish occupation of Northern Syria will end up being a disaster for Turkey in
the long run.
Turkish President Erdogan is invading to consolidate power, not because Turkey is in any real danger.
But if the deal between Russia and Turkey holds it is a big step towards real peace
in Syria, and it looks to me more like progress than a problem.
That is not the story we are being told in the United States.
No, according to most US news outlets and politicians, what is going on in Syria is
somewhere between the Rwandan Genocide and the second coming of Genghis Khan.
Current and retired US officials are using terms like genocide and ethnic cleansing,
and some of the usually more respectable arms merchants at the Council of Foreign Relations
are calling for a coup Turkey.
Wondering whether Turkey should be kicked out of NATO is now becoming a standard clever
thing for media people who know nothing about the country or region to say.
Again, this is all for an invasion that is largely over, has only killed a couple hundred
civilians, has met its goals and hasn't gotten close to the cities were large numbers of
unarmed Kurdish people live.
Watching this absurd spectacle, it's impossible to deny that there is a plot against Turkey.
As regular viewers know, I hate to talk about this sort of thing, but yes, it does have
something to do with Israel.
Since at least 2009 Erdogan has made himself a rock star across the middle East by occasionally
complaining about Israel's shameful treatment of the Palestinians.
This bad blood stepped up after Israeli soldiers killed a bunch of Turkish activists for trying
to get humanitarian goods into Gaza in 2010.
Erdogan's attitude towards Israel has not helped him in Washington DC.
His transition from admired Muslim Democrat to leading candidate for the next Saddam Hussein
started with his Israel views, but he has added a lot of fodder since, from the suppression
of the Gezi park uprising in 2013 to the pointless arrest of an American missionary.
As I have pointed out before the right wing elements that run Israel right now are just
employees of the US military Industrial Complex.
In 2012, with the end of Obama's Afghanistan surge, and withdrawal from Iraq, that weird
mix of defense companies, the Pentagon and the journalists think tanks and congresspeople
that work for them started looking for a new candidate to bomb.
Turkey actually helped the Military Industrial Complex create their next lucrative enemy,
the Islamic State, by creating a vast ungoverned territory for ISIS in Northern Syria.
But the Military Industrial Complex is always looking for its next victim and despite his
loyalty to the Get Assad project, Erdogan looked promising.
That's why most casual news consumers in the US now think Turkey is doing a genocide.
That's why the New York Times can run a headline like this, even though the actual Turkey experts
in the article agree that Turkey is not looking for the bomb.
That's why the US House of Representatives decided to consolidate Erdogan's power last
week by condemning the Armenian Genocide and getting any Turks who were mad at Erdogan
mad at the US instead.
That's also why the Wall Street Journal can run an article like this, which came out in
May and still pisses me off immensely.
This article combines some very serious historical truth, at least one outright lie, and mixes
it with such profound historical ignorance that it blows my mind.
The Armenian Genocide was very real, but the authors of this article have the same attitude
towards history as those who deny that genocide.
I think I will talk about this gob smackingly malicious article in detail on a blog post
on the website to avoid derailing this video any further.
So the US Military Industrial Complex and all of its employees from the Israeli government,
to the New York Times to Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham, are all participating
in this massive plot against Turkey.
The hope is to end the US Turkish relationship and turn the country into a candidate for
lucrative bombing.
Will they succeed?
No.
Turkey will stay in NATO, serious sanctions are not coming, and fantasies of Turkish regime
change are going to stay in the fever swamps of the Council on Foreign Relations where
they belong.
The US Military Industrial Complex is powerful, but it's not as powerful as we pretend it
is.
I am as guilty of this as anybody else is.
What the United States has done to Yemen and Syria over the past decade is horrible.
But Raytheon and Boeing and the rest were allowed to destroy these places because Economically
speaking, Yemen and Syria just aren't all that important.
Turkey is.
Even after a rough few years Turkey's economy is 20 times larger than Yemen's or Syria's
were before their wars.
Put simply Turkey is too big and rich to be sacrificed to the Military Industrial Complex.
Let's say you are Raytheon a big US defense contractor who would love the excuse to bomb
Istanbul, so you tell your congressmen to put Turkey under sanctions and start that
process.
But then McDonald's, a much larger corporation than Raytheon starts complaining.
They have over 250 franchises in Turkey and don't want to screw that up.
Raytheon is a more fundamentally corrupt organization, it doesn't exist without its government relationships,
so it's more powerful on this issue in Congress.
But there are only 3 or 4 Raytheon sized defense companies, and in a country like Turkey dozens
of McDonalds sized US companies have interests.
Boeing, the biggest defense contractor, is about the size of Mcdonalds, but it also sells
a ton of civilian planes to Turkish airlines, and Turkish low cost carriers like Pegasus
and Atlas global as well.
The Boeing lobbyists don't want to screw up a market Turkey's size.
Even the MIC is divided on this one.
This is why I am pretty sure the 2016 coup in Turkey was not a US plot by the way.
There are plenty of idiots in Washington, DC who would have been happy to see it happen,
but the folks who actually run the US economy and government are smarter than that.
Obama did a lot of dumb shit that the Military Industrial Complex wanted, but he had advisors
who would have told him not to go too far towards destabilizing the Turkish economy.
Too many US companies are making too much money there.
You may be thinking of a couple counterexamples here.
Venezuela and Iraq are two very obvious targets of the US military Industrial Complex, and
they werent Turkey size but they were big economies before the MIC wheels started turning.
But Venezuela and Iraq are prosperous because of their oil and gas resources.
Turkey doesn't have any, or at least not enough to keep them from being super reliant on outside
sources.
That means that the big oil companies make money selling oil and gas to Turkey.
Turning Turkey into a war zone would just kill a market, and disrupt important pipelines,
it doesn't give Exxon access to better deals for supply.
So unlike Iraq and Venezuela, none of the oil companies have an interest in invading
Turkey either.
I haven't even begun to talk about the Massive US and multinational banking sector that is
owed billions of dollars for their financing of Turkish power plants shopping malls and
other infrastructure.
You think Goldman Sachs wants to see cities it owns chunks of get bombed?
You may think Russia is a counter example here but it's really not.
Russia is an official enemy of the US Military Industrial Complex, but that's more to help
both US and Russian companies sell weapons.
Nobody really wants regime change there.
If Vladimir Putin was voted out of office the CEO of Raytheon would probably have a
heart attack.
Russia has supposedly been under these debilitating sanctions since 2014, but if you actually
look at the list they are not all that impressive.
The US is trying to strangle all economic activity in Iran.
Outside of a few individuals and sectors, business as usual is largely proceeding with
Russia, and it's looking like Europe is now eager to ramp that business back up.
The US Military Industrial Complex is powerful, but when they try to mess with countries with
real economic weight it gets reigned in.
So yes, there is a plot against Turkey, and it's pretty gross.
But that plot is failing and will continue to fail.
Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham can whine all they want, the US Turkish alliance isn't going
anywhere.
Some things are bigger than the US defense industry's thirst for death.
The Turkish economy is one of those things.
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