Guest Post by Pat Buchanan
In this new century, leaders of both parties have plunged our country into at least five wars in the Middle and Near East… None of these wars has produced a victory or success for us. But taken together, they did produce a multitrillion-dollar strategic and human rights disaster.
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions.
Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade.”
President Harry Truman awarded the brigade a Presidential Unit Citation.
In 1951, Turkey ended a neutrality dating to the end of World War I and joined NATO. In the seven decades since, there has been no graver crisis in U.S.-Turkish relations than the one that erupted this week.
Turkey has just received the first components of a Russian S-400 air and missile defense system, despite U.S. warnings this would require the cancellation of Turkey’s purchase of 100 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
“The F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities,” said the White House.
The sale has been canceled. The Turkish pilots and instructors training in the U.S. are being sent home. Contracts with Turkish companies producing parts for the F-35 are being terminated. Under U.S. law, the administration is also required to impose sanctions on Turkey for buying Russian weaponry.
Wednesday, the Pentagon warned Turkey against military action in an area of Syria where U.S. troops are deployed. The Turks appear to be massing for an incursion against U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces Ankara regards as terrorist allies of the Kurdish PKK inside Turkey.
How America and Turkey avoid a collision that could wreck NATO, where the Turks field the second-largest army in the alliance, is not easy to see.
U.S. hawks are already calling for the expulsion of Turkey from NATO. And expulsion of U.S. forces and nuclear weapons from the Incirlik air base in Turkey in retaliation is not out of the question.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sounds defiant: “We have begun to receive our S-400s. … God willing, they will have been installed in their sites by April 2020. … The S-400s are the strongest defense system against those who want to attack our country. Now the aim is joint production with Russia. We will do that.”
While potentially the most crucial of recent developments in the Middle East, the U.S.-Turkish situation is not the only one.
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The UAE is pulling its forces out of Yemen as Congress seeks to restrict U.S. support for Saudi forces fighting Houthi rebels there and to sanction Riyadh for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
If the UAE pulls out, and the U.S. cuts its military aid, the Saudis cannot prevail in a war they have been unable to win with our help after four years of fighting. And if the Houthis win, the Saudis and Sunni Arabs lose, and Iran wins.
This week, to strengthen the U.S. presence for any confrontation with Iran, President Donald Trump is sending 500 additional U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia.
While the U.S. and Iran have thus far avoided a military or naval clash that could ignite a major war, the “maximum pressure” sanctions Trump has imposed are choking Iran’s economy to death. How this ends in a negotiated resolution and not a shooting war remains difficult to see.
In Doha, Qatar, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban over the conditions for a withdrawal of the 14,000 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan. And with the Taliban controlling more of the countryside than they have since being ousted from power in 2001, and conducting regular suicide bombings in Afghan cities and towns, it is hard to see how this Kabul regime and its army prevail in a civil war when we are gone, when they could not while we were there.
In this new century, leaders of both parties have plunged our country into at least five wars in the Middle and Near East.
In 2001, after ousting the Taliban and driving al-Qaida out, we decided to use our power and ideas to build a new democratic Afghanistan. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq to create a pro-Western bastion in the heart of the Middle East.
In 2011, Barack Obama ordered U.S. planes to attack Colonel Gadhafi’s forces in Libya. We brought him down. Obama then backed Syrian rebels to overthrow the dictator Bashar Assad. In 2015, U.S. forces supported a Saudi war to roll back the Houthi rebels’ victory in Yemen’s civil war.
None of these wars has produced a victory or success for us.
But taken together, they did produce a multitrillion-dollar strategic and human rights disaster. Meanwhile, China gained much from having its great rival, the world’s last superpower, thrashing about ineffectually in the forever wars of the Middle East.
“Great nations do not fight endless wars,” said Trump.
Yes, they do. As the British, French, Germans, Japanese and Russians showed in the last century, that is how they cease to be great nations.
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Resource wars, Pat, have nothing to do with democracy, pro-western anythings, and de-throning dictators. Those are the “excuse words/phrases” used by the propagandists to justify the pillaging of resources/bolstering the MIC; they are FOR continuation of power (and the power of cartel bankers, apparently -in the case of Gadhafi, at least). Nothing more.
While “greatness” remains within the ideals at its heart, the US ceased to be a great nation around the time that “we” decided it was expedient (for whatever beneficiary) to feed our sons to the grave in order to perpetrate “defense of freedom” (NOT conquest, of course) on foreign soil . . . sometime after 1913. Once the corporation got hold of the bank, corporate interests took control of everything else. Including “human resources”. So long as this continues . . . the US is a puppet nation.
The “elephant in the room” is israel. israel has been “chomping at the bit” to get the USA to fight another war for israel’s benefit.
If israel wants war, let it start one itself. Keep the USA out of it.
Wait until there’s a real crisis in Saudi Arabia and the clans start squabbling over internal problems a devalued dollar is going to cause their economy. Arabs are some of the laziest, most entitled free sh*tters in the world who can’t even be bothered to pay cheap rates to their Third World slave laborers.
A new one?
Haven’t we been in one for 18 years or so?
As long as the neocons are in charge in DC, the answer is yes.
The Turks actually became US allies in 1945 when they joined the UN, which was then an anti-fascist military alliance. That made them America’s third oldest ally.
One reason for purchasing the Russian system is that the Turks do not trust an American system that could be turned off in another coup attempt. The Turkish air force was involved in that coup, and they were looking to shoot down Erdogan’s plane or bomb him on the ground.
If we are so foolish as to drive Turkey into and alliance with Russia and China, we will have committed a world-historic strategic blunder, on a par with Operation Barbarossa or Pearl Harbor. Russia would have strategic control of the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Eastern Mediterranean. With both Turkey and Iran, Russia would be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Our position in Central Asia and the Middle East would be untenable.
No one has said it better than President Washington. Avoid those foreign entanglements. PLEASE! Just what would possibly be wrong with keeping our own money here, defending our interests and using the entanglements money to explore space or the bottom of the ocean or things like that?
Perhaps it is ploy for us to get our hands on the bear’s spears. But what you say is true based on my experience. It ain’t the benjamins, it’s all*ah about da oil.
Buchanan = daily softball columns
Just another fake conservative if I ever saw one.
Some of you may find this interesting. A group of people re-translated the works of Nostradamus (as they were mistranslated from the start), and deciphering the most complex quatrains, were able to discern the information he was trying to get to us. Identifying information on the third anti-Christ.
This man was born on 02/04/1962 in Jerusalem. He is not a Jew but an Arab, and therefor a Muslim. He will be the worst of the three because he will learn from the mistakes of the other two. His parents were killed when he was young. His uncle has been caring for him, grooming him for what is to come. He is part of a powerful group of people in the Middle East. He is being hosted in different places, has no home of his own. He went to school in Egypt and took economics, philosophy, and computer science. Computers are a big part of what is to come. He will at first appear to have all the answers, a smooth talker, but he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He has a destiny but it is our choice to NOT let him do his worst.