http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2015/11/27/522891did-washington-just-tell-erdogan-to-man-up/
Did Washington just tell Erdogan to ‘man up’?
The unsettling conclusion beckoned: the Russian jet was hit unlawfully by the Turks.
by Finian Cunningham
In
the space of a few hours, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went
from running scared to defiant belligerence over the shooting down of
the Russian fighter jet. It would appear that someone had a stiff word
in his ear.
Tough-talking Turkish President? No. More like somebody’s message boy.
When
the news first broke on Tuesday that Turkish F-16s had downed a Russian
Su-24 bomber near the Syrian border, the Erdogan government in Ankara
immediately called for an emergency NATO summit.
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Ankara
rushed to explain that it was the party that had incurred an act of
aggression from Russia. Erdogan was running scared because the facts
were such that it was the Turks who had actually carried out an act of
aggression against Russia, not the other way around.
And they knew it.
Suspiciously,
Ankara did not contact Moscow about the incident, which would have
seemed a normal thing to do in the aftermath of a serious incident in
which a Russian aircrew was forced to eject and one of the pilots was
subsequently killed.
Recall
that Turkey claimed that it did not know the identity of the Russian
warplane as it allegedly approached Turkish airspace. So if, as it
turned out, the Turks shot down a Russian jet in a rapid encounter of
uncertainty about its “national security”, then why didn’t Ankara make
subsequent attempts to resolve the matter with the Russians as an urgent
matter when the circumstances soon became clear? That would have been
the expected behavior if the incident was simply an unfortunate,
unforeseen confrontation.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin angrily called the Turkish attack a “stab in
the back delivered by the accomplices of terrorists.
Again, the inference is that Ankara knew full well that it was committing a sinister deed.
As
noted, Ankara hastily conferred with NATO, rather than Moscow. That act
alone of running off to NATO suggests that the Turks were well aware
from the outset that they had carried out something underhand against
Russia, and they were hurriedly seeking a line of protection from the
US-led military alliance.
The
day after the incident, Erdogan and his Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
were seriously back-pedaling over the whole incident. The Turkish
version of the confrontation appeared to be unraveling from a lack of
credibility with several anomalies in terms of the flight path of the
Russian fighter jet. Even Western sources were beginning to acknowledge
that Moscow’s version of the incident was correct in the details that
the Russian jet did not cross the Syrian border.
The unsettling conclusion beckoned: the Russian jet was hit unlawfully by the Turks.
Erdogan
was busily saying through Wednesday that he did not want an escalation
of the conflict between Turkey and Russia. Davutoglu was even more
craven, saying, in pleading tones, that “Russia is a friend and a neighbor.” Ankara’s
foreign ministry sounded abject by almost begging for Moscow not to cut
off supplies of natural gas on which Turkey depends for 60 per cent of
its fuel consumption.
Then
came a sudden, dramatic gear-change in Ankara. On Thursday, Erdogan
sounded a markedly different, more belligerent tone, more in line with
the initial event of the shooting down. Maybe it was because Moscow had
said that Russia was not contemplating going to war with Turkey over the
downed jet. But Erdogan appeared to become emboldened in contrast to
his sheepish conduct over the preceding 24 hours.
The
Turkish president said that his country would not be offering an
apology to Russia over the downed jet and the loss of its pilot, as well
as the death of a Russian marine soldier killed by militants while
trying to rescue the second airman where the Su-24 bomber came down in
northern Syria. Erdogan instead upped the defiant rhetoric and implied
that Russia should be the one to offer an apology for its alleged
infringement of Turkish territory, even though the evidence points to
the opposite.
Erdogan
also spoke publicly on Thursday to rubbish Russian accusations that
Turkey is financing the Islamic State (IS) and other jihadist groups
through sales of crude oil. The Turkish leader, moreover, claimed that
Turkey’s “fight against IS is indisputable” and
he asserted that only the US-led military coalition, which includes
Ankara, is combating terror groups in Syria. Russia and Iran are not
waging a fight against the IS network, claimed Erdogan, implying that
they are merely propping up their ally – the government of Syrian
President Bashar al Assad.
Erdogan
told France 24 news channel that he tried to phone Russian President
Vladimir Putin about the downing of the jet, but that Putin did not take
his call. Earlier, Moscow had bitterly remarked that it had not
received any communication from Ankara over the incident.
So
what happened, whereby Erdogan and his ruling clique appeared to go
through a remarkable shift in attitude in the space of a few hours? From
pugnacious to pusillanimous and back to pugnacious almost overnight.
Assuming
that the shooting down was approved at the highest level of the Ankara
government in circumstances that merit the description of an act of
aggression or even war against Russia, that was certainly a bold,
recklessly daring move. However, for the next 24 hours, Ankara appeared
to have been overcome with trepidation about what it has just done. But
then Erdogan seemed to acquire some backbone from somewhere by resuming a
truculent attitude towards Russia.
The
erratic behavior points to Erdogan and his cronies in Ankara not being
in control of their own conduct. Of course, we can only speculate at
this stage. But let’s make the reasonable conjecture that Ankara carried
out the aerial ambush of the Russian jet in a cold-blooded,
premeditated way, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
Let’s
also conjecture, reasonably, that the deliberate act of aggression was
carried out with the collusion of the United States, which operates a
NATO base in Turkey’s Hatay Province adjacent to the Syrian border where
the incident occurred.
It
makes sense that Washington sanctioned the aerial ambush knowing that
the resulting geopolitical tension would scupper moves elsewhere from
French President Francois Hollande for the formation of a broader
anti-IS coalition to include the participation of Russia.
Obama: Turkey has the right to defend itself and its airspace.
Why
the US is not serious about forming such a coalition, indeed is
implacably opposed to it, is because Islamic State and other jihadist
mercenaries are a covert creation of the US and its NATO allies,
including Turkey, for the objective of regime change in Syria.
Thus,
Erdogan’s Turkey carried out the dirty deed against Russia under US
authorization. But in the immediate aftermath, Ankara evidently got cold
feet about what it had just done, no doubt fearing the wrath of Russia.
That’s when Washington got on to Erdogan and told him to grow some
balls. Hence the apparent turnaround feistiness out of Ankara in the
space of 24 hours.
Which just goes to show that Erdogan,
for all his tough talk, is really nothing more than a pathetic,
sniveling little message boy for his boss in Washington.
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