Turkey Tries to Lure NATO Into War Against Russia

by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

When Turkey shot down a Russian bomber in Syria on November 24th, Turkish officials did so with the confidence that America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO, would protect Turkey against any possible military retaliation by Russia. And, so, Russia restricted its retaliation to merely economic measures.

Sunni Turkey is the increasingly fundamentalist and anti-Shiite NATO member-nation; and, as such, it’s doing what it can to draw the rest of America’s anti-Russian alliance, NATO, into a war by all of them to defeat Russia, because Russia is allied with the Shiite-led nations of Iran and Syria — nations that the Sunni aristocracies (especially the Sauds of Saudi Arabia, and the Thanis of Qatar) want to control, so as to have complete dominance over the Islamic world. Once they achieve that, they can then overtly and publicly support their jihadists to take over Western nations, as well, so as to establish the intended global “Caliphate.”

Turkey’s government is doing all it can to bring down the non-sectarian Shiite leader of its neighboring nation of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

America’s war to take over Russia (first taking down Russia-ally Saddam Hussein in 2003, then Russia-ally Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, then Russia-ally Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and now trying to take down Russia-ally Bashar al-Assad) is therefore being tugged at by NATO’s lone Sunni member Turkey. Turkey wants America and ‘the West’ to join their (and their Sunni friends, Saudi Arabia’s and Qatar’s) anti-Shiite war, so as to unify the Islamic powers as being all-Sunni, and thus enable them together to crush the other religions and beliefs.

Back in the year 1744, the gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud and the rabidly anti-Shiite cleric Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore an oath to each other in which Wahhab’s clerics would approve the Sauds’ right to rule, if the Sauds adhered to Wahhab’s teachings and waged war against Shiites, and spread the Wahhabist Sunni faith so as to create a Wahhabist Caliphate. This created what became Saudi Arabia. (Outside Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is called Salafism.)

The United States allied with the Sunnis (Saudi Islam) in 1945, when the British were losing control of Arabia. Sauds had the oil America needed; America had the weapons Sauds needed. During recent decades, Sunni oil aristocracies (especially the Saud family, such as via “Bandar Bush”) have increasingly come to control the U.S. aristocracy, which controls NATO, CENTCOM, and the European Union.

However, recently, the (previously illegal in Turkey) Islamic political party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took over Turkey in 2003 with him as Prime Minister, and in 2014 with him as President. Turkey has been rising within the Sunni alliance, because Turkey now carries the Sunni banner straight into the Western military alliance itself: NATO. For the first family of global Sunni Islam, the Sauds, this is now a likelier path to victory than is enabling Sunni Pakistan to stockpile nuclear weapons. Even with nuclear weapons, Pakistan has remained absent world power — those nuclear weapons terrify only the neighboring Hindu nation, India.

When Turkey was admitted into NATO in 1952, it entered as being the only Islamic-majority nation that had a non-religious, a secular, government, which had been established in 1922 by the non-sectarian military leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Consequently, until 2014, when Erdoğan took over Turkey and re-established the fundamentalist-Sunni, Salafist, Turkish nation, there was no direct representative of Islamic war-aims inside NATO. These are specifically war-aims against Shiite rulers — the present leaders of Iran and of Syria, in particular. The Sunni-fundamentalist agenda is therefore entirely in accord with Washington’s agenda against the Shiite-allied nation of Russia. Until Erdoğan took full control of Turkey in 2014, the Sauds and the Thanis shared leadership of the anti-Russian powers along with the United States. Turkey had no oil, nor anything else that was of strategic significance to the West. Turkey’s international power was thus inferior to that of the oil-sheikhdoms.

However, now that there is a fundamentalist Sunni nation, the new Turkey, inside NATO, Turkey joins those two fundamentalist-Sunni nations, alongside the U.S., as one of the Big Four nations in the ongoing war against Russia: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and now Turkey. What Turkey has access to, which the Sauds and Thanis don’t, is the military resources of the entire 28-nation bloc, NATO.

Consequently, with more fervor than ever before, the United States, and its European followers, are currently trying not only to crush Russia but to crush Shiite-led Islamic-majority nations, especially Iran and Syria. This is the consequence of Turkey’s not merely Islamicization but Sunni  Islamicization. Turkey now has a decidedly religious motive for bringing NATO to war. ‘God’ and war go great together. NATO could actually now become the non-religious dog that might be wagged by its fundamentalist Sunni-religious tail. Even the royal families of Saudi Arabia and of Qatar didn’t possess access to such power. They were never able to get into NATO. They had oil, and America had weapons, and that was the only deal. But now, Turkey is the Salafist member of NATO — as if the Sauds were now in NATO (something the Sauds’ longstanding jihadism — and their funding of Al Qaeda — prohibited).

If NATO is to be anti-jihadist, Turkey will have to be expelled from NATO. Turkey as a jihadist nation violates NATO’s charter. If Turkey remains within NATO, then NATO violates its own charter. Today’s NATO is a threat to the peace even of the 27 non-Salafist member-nations of NATO.

The danger that the U.S. (and its European allies) will be dragged into a World War III against Russia, because of the West’s bonds that had been established with Turkey prior to Turkey’s recent Islamicization — these bonds ignited by the machinations (such as the recent shoot-down of the Russian bomber) from Erdoğan — is recognized in official Washington.

Christina Lin, a long-time Western scholarly observer of Turkey’s strategic moves, is becoming alarmed that the increasingly overtly Islamic NATO member Turkey is trying to drag NATO towards war against Russia on behalf of Turkey and other Sunni Islamic powers, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. She is disturbed that together, the three Sunni Islamic nations of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, are trying to bring down the non-religious Shiite leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, for reasons that actually have nothing to do with NATO’s official purposes.

Lin has served at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses.

On November 24th, she wrote:

As NATO member Turkey is transforming from a secular, democratic system to one of an increasingly Islamist and autocratic presidential system under Erdogan, it appears the alliance is also transforming from a value-based alliance of human right, democracy, and rule of law to one that is increasingly interest-based.

In other words: she is coming to think that these Sunni Islamic powers are having success using their sole NATO representative, Turkey, as their wedge to provoke a Third World War, against Russia and its allies. She opens her commentary by mentioning, though only in passing, Turkey’s recent shoot-down of a Russian bomber.

She continues:

As [Turkey’s Islamic President] Erdogan embarks on expanding Turkey’s sovereignty through Islamist proxies in the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g., via Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, Salafi Army of Conquest in Syria), continues occupation of EU member Cyprus, and violates EU member Greece’s territorial airspace and waters, his personal ambition is posing a risk for the NATO alliance.

She concludes:

As Erdogan continues to goad NATO to stand in solidarity with Turkey and its territorial expansions in the Levant, it appears the world is now entering a dangerous new phase of an increasingly post-western and illiberal world order.”

She quotes former Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, the retired German General Harald Kujat, as asserting, “Turkey wants to provoke [NATO Article 5 on mutual defence]… Turkey basically wants to drag NATO into this situation because the actual goal of Turkey is to neutralize [euphemism for overthrowing  the non-sectarian Shiite ruler of Syria, Bashar Al] Assad” — to replace Assad with an Islamist Sunni, allied with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, no longer allied with the secular nation of Russia, which stands for separation of church and state (something that’s anathema to all fundamentalist nations, because all fundamentalisms seek rule by God, not by the given nation’s citizenry).

A nation such as today’s Turkey being in NATO is absurd, at best.

America’s President, Barack Obama, is being torn by this. Either he will continue to support the Sunni jihadist powers, who want NATO to go to war against Russia and its allies; or else, he will decide that his desire to crush Russia will have to take a back seat now, to his desire to crush Sunni jihadists, even though he has been supporting the overthrow-Assad Sunni jihadists (such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and all of the other groups now fighting to overthrow Assad in Syria) ever since becoming President in 2009.

Here is how America’s allies against Russia operate, while Obama complains of Assad’s “barrel bombs” and of the sarin gas attack in Syria that Obama himself had actually sponsored (if not planned) in order to have a ‘pretext’ to bomb Syria’s infrastructure.

Now that NATO clearly violates its peace-sustaining charter, there is another reason to end NATO besides the fact that NATO’s very reason for being, the threat posed by the communist Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, ended in 1991. The continued existence of NATO makes no decent sense at all. NATO now has jihadists in its midst.

But how can an organization such as NATO now is, be brought peacefully to an end? Or can  it even be done? And, if not, then why not?

Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952. How can it be expelled? And, if it cannot, then how can NATO dissolve itself? Because one thing is for sure: NATO doesn’t preserve any peace (such as to which its charter is devoted). NATO instead poses the very real danger of precipitating and waging an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, World War III.

The European nations that are being torn apart by millions of refugees that fled wars the U.S. precipitated are insane to stay within NATO, especially if Turkey remains within NATO. All European leaders who accept that situation are traitors to the nation they supposedly represent. As for America’s leaders, they have long been on the warpath.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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