Turkey to Remove Iran From Enemies Watchlist | Middle East | English

Turkey to Remove Iran From Enemies Watchlist | Middle East | English

If I could, I'd sit down with President Obama and discuss the Middle East situation in detail.  Granted, I'm no Juan Cole, but I'm well read and have a keen instinct in this area. 

To understand our Middle East foreign policy, one must embrace madness as, surely, it is unabashed lunacy to predicate our nation's foreign policy on New Testament Christian mythology, which is what our nation has done faithfully since 1948 in its unstinting support of the state of Israel.  Let us be perfectly clear here: The Israelis are Arabs too.  Says so in the Old Testament in Genesis, the 1st book of Moses as found in the Torah, amen.  It may even say it in the Koran if I bothered to look (I've tried, I really have, to read the Koran but most English translations read like a King James Bible which makes my head hurt.  Ah if only Stephen Mitchell would translate it!).  The point is, this is what is called an ole fashion family feud.  Both sides come from the same blood, but neither side embraces it.  In short, our Christian based foreign policy has us choosing sides in a de facto civil war.  This ain't Yanks and Rebs it's Arabs and Jews born of the same fathers, from the same stock, each claiming that the Original Dad (God) loves them best.  Think of Israel as a lost tribe of Arabia and think of us as Germans choosing sides in the Spanish Civil War.

That is harsh and critical of my country's government, but truth is truth no matter how many lies you embrace to hide it.

Getting the US out of that mess is a priority.  Israel needs to stand down, make it's nuclear program public and cease and desist all acts of espionage against this nation before I would even use the term "ally" unless, in addition to fundamentalist Christian mythology foreign policy, we also believe in "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" a good, sound foreign policy rule. 

I suppose one might counter the policy is more "keep your friends close and your enemies closer", but given our botched Iranian policy, that's an utter fallacy.  Ah, Iran!  The very nation that 2 mere years ago all the intelligence professionals said was still at least 15-20 years from even remotely being able to produce a nuclear weapon.  Remember?  It was on the TV and in the papers for close to a week.  Nah, why would you recall that when, since then, the war hawks have been squawking about how imminently dangerous Iran is.  Keep in mind that our erstwhile buddy Israel is 1) actively lobbying our elected representatives to invade Iran while 2) actively planning to attack Iran, possibly within the next year.  In essence, the Hatfields are asking the American government to intervene and help kill the McCoys.

The problem is that by choosing sides, the US seems like an aggressive juggernaut bent on conquering Middle East countries with rich oil supplies to all the world, save her European allies who also want in on the spoils of war.  Capitalism is a real hoot isn't it?  But by choosing sides we have set up a dangerous divide.  Russia and China are active allies of Iran, so is most of the Middle East and parts of Africa.  It gets strange when you toss in fundamentalist Christian mythology.  These fundamentalists see Russia and China as the End Times Gog and Magog as revealed in Ezekial.  It's like a bad self fulfilling prophecy.  Fundamentalist Christian ethos defines our foreign policy and has found itself a situation that closely enough resembles their prophecies to act with brazen over-confidence.  This situation is the fulfillment of the Christian hope that Jesus finally returns in time to save them all while the rest of us suffer in hellish agony until the last battle.  Complete horse manure but they believe it as firmly as I believe it's daytime and the sun is bright.

Now Turkey turns against the West after decades of trying to garner acceptance as a European NATO nation.  Turkey could have been a bridge between our consumerist, decadent Western way of life to the entire repressed, anal Middle East.  Instead the "great" nations of the West spurned Turkey at every turn.  Lately, Israel and Turkey has had some bad international incidents and when Turkey looked to the United States for support, we came back with condemning them for the Armenian genocides of a century or so ago.  Today, Turkey rejoins Asia Minor, it's experiment in embracing the West a failure because of the West's insensitivity.  Today, Turkey joins a growing list of nations who are beginning to see all the US assertions against Iran as propaganda, the very same propaganda used on the American people to justify George Bush's illegal invasion of a sovereign nation (and a regieme we put into power to boot).  Same story only dressed in Iranian clothing.

As we further lose credibility with all the world save white folks, we are painting ourselves into a corner, a corner forced upon the American people by the criminal George Bush and this so called "post 9/11 world" which is his eternal legacy to the American people and the whole thrice damned world.