We dhimmis are expected to lie about so much: Islam as a religion of peace, Muslim Spain as a proto-multicultural paradise of tolerance, the Turks as guiltless of genocide. Wouldn't it be refreshing if we started telling the truth about history as well as present-day realities, and let the devil take the hindmost? "Turkish army chief says U.S. ties at risk," by Paul de Bendern for Reuters (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's powerful military chief said on Sunday if the U.S. Congress approved a resolution branding the 1915 killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide ties between the NATO allies would never be the same again.Ankara is a crucial ally for Washington, which relies on Turkey as a logistical base for the war in Iraq.
Some analysts believe the vote could weaken Washington's influence over Turkey and increase the likelihood of a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish separatist rebels, who use the territory to stage attacks into Turkey.
"If the resolution that has passed in the U.S. committee is accepted by the assembly of the House of Representatives our military relations with the United States can never be the same again," chief of General Staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, told newspaper Milliyet in his first public comments on the issue.
"We could not explain this to Turkish public opinion."...
Ankara recalled its ambassador from the United States for consultations after the U.S. congressional committee vote, which was condemned in predominantly Muslim but secular Turkey.
The non-binding Armenian bill now goes to the floor of the House, where Democrat leaders say there will be a vote next month. The resolution, the culmination of decades of pressure, was proposed by a lawmaker who represents many Armenian-Americans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a long-time supporter of such a move.
Potential retaliatory moves by Turkey could include blocking U.S. access to the Incirlik air base, cancelling procurement contracts, denying airspace to U.S. aircraft and halting joint military exercises, diplomats say.
"I'm the chief of General Staff. I deal with security issues, I'm not a politician ... in this respect the United States has shot itself in the foot," Buyukanit said.
Turkey rejects the Armenian position, backed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments, that up to 1.5 million Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks.
Greetings:
General Buyukanit: "We could not explain this to Turkish public opinion."
How's about, "Our ancestor's messed up bigtime; Turks and Muslims do mess up."
Good to see the truth is coming out, and lines being drawn
And here is another good reason we should not be to close to turkey
http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2007/10/poppy-no-good-revisited-pt-2.html
Over more than fifty years the American military has poured money and weapons into various Muslim states, and built expensive bases in Muslim states, assuming that certain alliances would last.
What has been the result? Along with the British, the Americans poured money and weapons into the ill-fated and essentially worthless CENTO -- with Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq being the recipients of money and weaponry. That whole thing came to a final end with the 1958 coup in Baghdad, in which young King Faisal was killed, and "strongman" (that was the Homeric epithet Time magazine applied to him) Nuri es-Said's mutilated corpse was dragged through the streets of Baghdad. The alliance with those straight-shooting, highly reliable Pakistani generals continued (they were so much more trustworthy than left-wing Nehru and Krishna Menon), and the Pakistani military is essentially the creation of American aid, that sustains it, absurdly, to this day. And American economic aid made possible the development of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, and American planes may make possible the delivery of such weapons to others, either other Muslim states or groups that might use them, or attempted dropping of such weaponry on an Infidel enemy, India or Israel.
Iran was our true friend under the Shah, but the Shah, that "pillar of stability" (as Carter called him) fell, and instead the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was established. And even if that regime falters or falls, and a much better regime follows, who can say whether or not, in Iran's future, there is not another Islamic Republic of Iran, as long as Iranians remain Muslims?
And then there is Turkey. Turkey, that sent troops to the Korean War. Turkey, whose officers have for decades received training and weapons from the American military. Turkey, that it has always been assumed was, and would forever remain, "secular" Turkey, the Turkey of Kemalism, the Turkey that would never go back. But of course eighty years of Kemalism have been slowly undone, for Kemalism has not spread to all of Turkish society, and the secular class failed to extend the constrains on Islam, preferring to lazily rely on intermittent interventions by the army. But the army itself has to constantl monitor to make sure that those who take their Islam seriously are not working their way up the ranks -- but despite that monitoring, such people are indeed infiltrating.
Furthermore, under the "replacement theology" of Kemalism, with Ataturk replacing Muhammad as "uswa hasana" and "al-insan al-kamil," and the cult of "the Turk" (see Inonu's "Sun People") replacing the cult of the Believer (and especially, the Arab Believer, best of all Muslims), lies the same kind of mental set. The "Turk" for example, can not be a Christian, Armenian or Greek, or a Jew, but must be a Muslim. It is the same as in Malaysia, where "Malays" who benefit from the Bumiputra system must be Muslim Malays.
That the Turks cannot own up to their own past, that their moderation is skin-deep, that they are so defensive and so quick to demand that history be ignored or else, that even before this the Turkish public was snapping up copies of "Mein Kampf" and making the box-office smash of all time a movie that depicted American soldiers as Nazis (and a Jewish doctor as harvesting the organs of dead Iraqis for buyers in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv), that Hrant Dink was killed, that important figures in the Turkish establishment denounced the Americans as "worse than Nazis" in Iraq and were not in turn denounced by other Turks, that Turkey refused to allow the Americans to make use of its own bases to send a fourth division into Iraq in March 2003 (to quickly subdue Anbar Province), that this and much more has taken place and the Turks think we will not notice any of this, or not notice a good deal more that could be mentioned, shows that in dealing with a predominately Muslim population, in a Muslmi state, those who count on the "moderates" are whistling in the dark, and always will be.
I don't know if Incirlik will be lost. The airbase in Morocco had to be given up in 1967. The huge Wheelus Air Base in Libya was lost when Khaddafy came to power. The bases in Saudi Arabia are not worth a thing, for they cannot be used except against sworn enemies of the Al-Saud (as in 1991), abroad or within the country. The bases temporarily permitted in Central Asian republics have been taken back, or are being phased out.
No, there is no Muslim state that can be relied on. That is the lesson.
Is there an alternative to Turkey? Of course there is. It is Bulgaria, one of the worst victims of Ottoman Muslim murder. See Gladstone, see what he wrote about the Ottomans round about 1876.
And learn from CENTO, from the reliance on those Pakistani generals, or the Shah of Iran, or, for that matter, Turkey. Should Turkey be kicked out of NATO? Of course it should. Then the NATO forces will be able to meet, and discuss the world-wide Jihad, and the demographic conquest of parts of Western Europe that hold deep significance for the armories of NATO, and who is to control them, and what kind of domestic tranquillity, or lack of it, the states and peoples of Western Europe will enjoy, or endure, in the future.
Turkey's exit is not to be deplored, but to be fondly wished. Unless, of course, the forces of Kemalism come to their senses, take power in Turkey, and force a much greater enlargement of the Kemalist program. That's a vast program, and unlikely to be undertaken.
Really well put Hugh...
For that matter, we wasted millions of dollars by pouring money into Europe after WWII.
The Marshall Plan has failed. Our attempts to rebuild Europe has resulted in a Europe that has chosen socialism, a culture of death, and rejected its Judeo Christian heritage.
Europe is fast becoming anti Semitic (good old fashioned Jew hating), Islamic and totalitarian.
General Yasar Buyukanit said the U.S. is shooting itself in the foot with this genocide bill. Last year France did the same thing and the result was less military cooperation. Incirlik air base is not just important to the war in Iraq, but the U.S.'s entire global strategy. Pelosi is up to something kinda dangerous me thinks.
Perhaps the US will now start taking seriously the complaints it has been hearing over the past decades from Greece about its 'NATO ally' Turkey.
Greece has been constantly harassed and threatened with war by Turkey ever since she gained her independence.
....history is history....you do not have to like it....
atheling,
The Marshall plan did not fail.
Also neither Europe or the US political heritige is properly termed "Judeo Christian". The are really Greek and Roman. Neither Christianity nor Judaism produced the political freedoms on which our counties are based.
Europe's issues are not based on "losing" religion, but kowtowing to intolerance it in the name of tolerance
I have no problem with the resolution, but I have to wonder why now. Why not a resolution about Darfur, Myanmar, or the mass murders in any number of places around the globe. Why now on something thats already been acknowledged by Presidents?
Why do something that will cut 60% of the supplies and 30% of the fuel delivered to the troops here in Iraq? That pretty much answers the question. They don't care about the troops here, havent from the beginning.
Grandstanding Has Consequences
by Michael Rubin
National Review Online
October 15, 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1765
Last week, a congressional committee passed a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. There is no doubt that up to a million Armenians died during World War I, although historians still debate whether their deaths constitute deliberate genocide or are collateral casualties of war.
House Democrats brought the resolution to a vote despite entreaties from the White House to postpone it. For Congress, though, the resolution was less about rectifying history than grandstanding. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Lantos (D., Cal.) called a vote. It passed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) pooh-poohed the episode. This was not about Turkey, she explained, but rather "about the Ottoman Empire." Unclear, though, is why congressional Democrats felt the urgent need to condemn an entity that hasn't existed for 85 years.
Unfortunately, grandstanding has consequences. Turkey recalled its ambassador; and now the State Department finds itself now devoid of leverage to prevent a Turkish incursion into Iraq to fight Kurdish terrorists. Pelosi's posturing has put U.S. use of the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to supply our forces both in Afghanistan and Iraq in jeopardy.
If only the Armenian Genocide resolution was an isolated event. It's amateur hour in Congress. The efforts of Sen. Joseph Biden (D., Del.) to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious grounds threaten to spark civil war just as U.S. servicemen make inroads in preventing it. Biden's motivation may be to garner media attention. He has succeeded. The problem, though, his statements get more airtime in Iran and Iraq, where revolutionary mullahs use his pronouncements to convince Iraqis that U.S. forces seek to destroy Iraq rather than rebuild it.
The list goes on. In May 2006, Rep. Jack Murtha (D., Pa.) said that U.S. Marines executed Iraqis "in cold blood." Overnight, his clip became an Al-Jazeera favorite. Islamist terrorists used Murtha's words to justify their murder of Americans. Now, a court martial has dismissed murder charges against the servicemen Murtha accused; Murtha has yet to apologize.
Other congressmen see intelligence briefings as an a la carte menu for chest-thumping leaks than part of confidential oversight duties. Every leak splashed across a New York Times undercuts the war on terror.
Junkets also have a cost. Basking in the glow of Pelosi's headline-garnering visit to Damascus — again in contravention of a State Department request — Syrian leader Bashar al-Asad upgraded his support for Hezbollah and his nuclear dealings with North Korea.
The resolution, while important to the Armenian-American community — perhaps less so to Armenians living in Armenia who worry much more about economic development — also raises a host of questions about how Congress picks and chooses which atrocities to weigh in on. While Condoleezza Rice seeks to bring Beijing on board with Iran sanctions — a Herculean if not impossible task — will the House Foreign Affairs Committee condemn Beijing for the millions who perished during the Cultural Revolution? Their murders — politically motivated and, as far as the historical record is concerned, far more deliberate and coordinated — also occurred much more recently. Perhaps the House Foreign Affairs Committee will also act to bring Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Iraqi Kurdistan Region President Masud Barzani to justice for ordering the disappearance and summary executions of perhaps 3,000 Kurds during the 1994-1997 Kurdish civil war. This is not to suggest that such cases should not be pursued. But, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is not the place to pursue such historical investigations; universities are.
In an election season, Pelosi, Biden, and Murtha, may have no greater goal than to garner headlines, but U.S. servicemen fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan do. Countering proliferation and fighting terrorism will dominate diplomacy regardless of who next occupies the White House. There's no time for amateur hour. As U.S. troops continue to sacrifice to defend U.S. national security, it is unfortunate that headline seeking congressmen seek to make their job that much harder.
Michael Rubin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
some good thought provoking comments about timing and motive, and consequence above.
however can someone explain what spending uncountable amount of money in Iraq does for national security when the "allies" in this war on terror are so much more effective at destroying the USA than some guys flying plans into buildings?
The ivory tower is far above the skirmish on the battlefield, and what amounts to a victory on paper for the Armenians, is emerging as so potentially detrimental as to make this another needless and costly mistake.
...Biden is a jerk.....