Enemies of Enemies — To Become Friends?

“Military aircraft that conducted air strikes against ISIS military targets in western Iraq are believed to have been from Syria’s air force, a U.S. official told ABC News.

“There have [also] been reports of Iranian troops intervening on behalf of the beleaguered Iraqi government.

ABC

Young Turks All A Twitter

The new self-appointed strongman of Turkey, Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is finding out how hard it is to swat the pesky tweets of his citizens.

It is a sign of the difficulty of banning Twitter in the age of Twitter that within hours of the Turkish government’s attempt to block the social media site, President Abdullah Gul was one of thousands of Turks who protested the ban — using Twitter.

“Shutting down social media platforms cannot be approved,” Mr. Gul posted on Twitter on Friday, adding that “it is not technically possible to fully block access to globally active platforms like Twitter, anyway.”

… At the Buster Internet cafe in Istanbul, a student, Engin Alturk, said the prohibition had only encouraged people to post more messages. “We lived without YouTube for a year; we know all the tricks to get around this,” he added. “Erdogan must think us stupid.”

NY Times: Arsu & Bilefsky

The New Pottery Barn Rule: You Break it, You Move On

Contrary to Colin Powell’s much quoted warning “You Break it, You Own It,” the policy and military elites of the United States who broke Iraq have just moved on in their always comfortable lives.  This week is the 11th anniversary of the Bush-Cheney invasion.  Last year, 2013, some 8,000 Iraqi’s died in the continuing sectarian violence triggered by that invasion.

Here are some reminders.

Greg Mitchell at The Nation:

As we approach the eleventh anniversary of the US attack on Iraq this week, we may face a bit more media coverage of that tragic conflict than usual. How much of it will focus on the media misconduct that helped make the war possible (and then continue for so long)? It’s certainly not something the media like to dwell on.

For now, let’s relive just some of the good, the bad and the ugly in war coverage from the run-up to the invasion through the five years of controversy that followed. In updating the first e-book version of my book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq, which features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, I was surprised to come across once-prominent quotes and incidents that had faded a bit, even for me. Here is a list of fifteen episodes, in roughly chronological order.

1) In late March 2003, the day before the US invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”

2) After the fall of Baghdad in April, Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, said, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.”

3) The same day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neocons now.”

4) Thomas Friedman, who had called this a “legitimate war of choice,” now wrote at The New York Times, “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war…. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons.”

read all

Katrina vanden Heuvel at the Nation looks back at the warnings and predictions of some who opposed the invasion:

This Monday marks the eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq—a solemn punctuation mark to the steadily increasing violence that has gripped that country over the past two years. Sectarian violence claimed more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013 alone, and this year’s toll has already surpassed 2,000. Iraq today is a broken and failing state: the war that many would prefer to believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with Iraqis continuing to suffer, as much as ever, the fallout from this country’s callous lies and avoidable mistakes. Despite Colin Powell’s sanctimonious “Pottery Barn rule,” John Feffer wrote on his Foreign Policy in Focus blog at TheNation.com last month, the United States has made no effort to “own up to our responsibility for breaking the country.”

read all

Rachel Maddow put together a substantial investigation about the pre-planning to take over Iraq’s oil fields, much before the 9/11 attacks.  This is the first part of it, which you can find at MSNBC

Turkey: The Corruption Hounds of the Internet

“In Turkey as elsewhere in the Middle East, the explosion of Internet-based media outlets has surpassed the ability of the government to control information completely. When Nazli Ilicak, a longtime journalist here, lost her job recently at the pro-government newspaper Sabah after emerging as a strong voice against the government’s handling of the corruption inquiry, she said she would simply keep up her criticism on Twitter and on independent websites.
“I have 500,000 followers,” she said in a recent television appearance. “That’s more than Sabah’s circulation.”

http://nyti.ms/1aazgml

Corruption Rumble In Turkey

The saga of indictments and arrests for high level corruption in and around the Turkish ruling coterie took several new turns yesterday.

Police chiefs in 15 cities and the deputy head of the country’s police force were removed by Prime Minister Erdogan on Wednesday, after some 350 Turkish police officers in Ankara were reassigned to different positions on Tuesday.

Police chiefs in Turkey’s leading cities, including Ankara, the capital; Adana, a southern town by the Syrian border; and Diyarbakir, the hub of the Kurdish heartland, were summoned to the headquarters of the police to be reassigned.

In Turkey’s largest Aegean city, Izmir, police officers were reshuffled on Tuesday, almost immediately after they had detained 25 suspects, including pro-government businessmen, on corruption allegations over the construction and management of the city harbor, the private Dogan news agency reported.

NY Times

In Ankara, draft legislation is being drawn up to increase executive appointment powers, and thus control, of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors — from which the corruption investigations have emanated.

Analysts said the proposed legislation would undercut the judicial independence set out in a constitutional change supported by Mr. Erdogan’s government in a referendum in 2010.

“With this legislation, the government is launching an operation of revenge against the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors,” Hikmet Sami Turk, a former minister of justice, said in an interview. “The prime minister has regarded the graft probe as a judicial coup against his government, so now, with this legislation, his government launches a countercoup against the judiciary.”

In addition a law is being drafted to tighten up oversight and monitoring of Internet traffic — clearly aimed at protesters’ ability to exchange ideas and to mobilize.

“If the draft Bill No 5651 is implemented, the life will harder for internet users in Turkey. Censures on citizen journalism, scientific research and social media will be a routine,” he said.

He also added that new institutions will allows authorities to implement censures in skyrocket speed.

“Due to censure, service providers will enhance their auto-censure mechanisms and alternative methods like DNS change will no longer work,” he added.

Several area experts weigh in on whether the current Erdogan moves are dangerous for the region.

Iraq War Dead Rising

Iraq multigraph.php

Iraq Body count reports that in DECEMBER TOTAL: 983 civilians were killed.

9,475 KILLED THIS YEAR

the highest since 2008, according to IBC

To underline the rising swirl, “Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened on Thursday to seize control of Falluja and Ramadi, two of the most important cities in Iraq, setting fire to police stations, freeing prisoners from jail and occupying mosques, as the government rushed troop reinforcements to the areas.

The violence in Ramadi and Falluja had implications beyond Anbar’s borders, as the Sunni militants fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists in Syria — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

That fighting, and a deadly bombing in Beirut on Thursday, provided the latest evidence that the Syrian civil war was breeding bloodshed and sectarian violence around the region, destabilizing Lebanon and Iraq while fueling a resurgence of radical Islamist fighters.”

NY Times

Turkey: The Religious RIght Fracturing

Until recently, the great cliché about Turkey was that its primary political fault line lay between secularists and the religious right. But the tremors that have shaken Mr. Erdogan’s government are emanating from a fault line within the religious right itself.

The government is treating the crisis as nothing short of a coup by those jealous of its success. This is nonsense.

The opposition it faces has emerged because of the A.K.P’s own lack of respect for the rule of law and a cynical disregard for public accountability. It can no longer hide behind conspiracy theories and bluster.

Read all by Andrew Finkel, author of “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

Turkish Government Self Deranging

three top ministers whose sons have been implicated in a wide ranging corruption scandal abruptly resigned, only hours after greeting Prime Minister Erdogan at the airport.  One of them, on his way out the door, said Mr. Erdogan should step down as well…

It’s still hard to make out the parties involved in this, or the long – game any of them is trying to play.  The allegations of corruption, and arrests, are coming from ministries not under the Prime Minister’s control, some say at the initiative of functionaries who are acolytes of a US based Turkish religious leader, Fethullah Gulen, who once supported Erdo9an.

Erdogan is calling his old pal a “foreign influence,” and leader of a “criminal gang.”  Germany, as a long time ally of Turkey, will be very interested in the outcome, not to mention NATO of which Turkey has been a member for decades.

Read more at NY Times, and at Bianet, Turkey (English)

Turmoil Re-Escalates in Turkey

On Sunday a 22 year old man in the ancient city of Antioch, now called Antakya, in southern Turkey where it dips below the east-west border with Syria, was killed by a tear gas canister to the head.  Ahmet Atakan had joined a demonstration against highway construction and calling for remembrance and justice for a 14 year old boy, still in  coma from a tear gas hit to the head in the June, Gezi Park demonstrations when he died.  Protesters have now added his name to the growing grievances against the government, particularly its heavy-handed police response to outpouring of feeling against the growing authoritarianism and the turn to religion of the regime.

Turkey sept 2013

Although the June demonstrations, triggered by an government urban redevelopment plan for the popular public park in Istanbul, had simmered down after a pull back of police and a promise not to develop there, the underlying seismic forces were still in play.  In Antakya the mixture is even more explosive as a substantial number of Alevis, a sect of Shiism, itself the largest minority in Sunni dominated Turkey, live there.  Atakan’s family is Alevi, which not only is a minority within a minority in a country recently encouraging the majority religion, it also has affinities with the Alawites of Syria — at the center of the Assad war against non-Alawites.  Turkey, in the form of Prime Minster Erdogan, has been a prime mover in taking on Assad.  The demonstrations, at least in the Antakya area, have merged the anti-Erdogan , anti-authoritarian feelings of young Turkish liberals with anti-Erdogan, anti-intervention, fellow-feeling with Assad’s base.

The result of increased frustration, increased police violence, a serious dose of sectarian religious fervor have turned the demonstrations more violent, with hurled stones, burning barricades, more tear gas and strip searches of young protesters.  At least 8 journalists have been reported injured.

Turkey sept 2013 b

To add to the turmoil, several Turkish F-16 fighter planes scrambled from a base near Antakya after a massive explosion across the border in Syria set the region on edge.

More at The Washington Post

 

Iran and US Talking?

Wouldn’t this be amazing?

“Signaling a possible thaw in long-frozen relations, the Obama administration and the new leadership in Iran are communicating about Syria and are moving behind the scenes toward direct talks that both governments hope can ease the escalating confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear program.

“President Barack Obama reportedly reached out to Iran’s relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, through an exchange of letters in recent weeks. The pragmatist cleric is scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 24, and after years of the United States cold-shouldering his ultraconservative predecessor, U.S. officials say it’s possible they will meet with Rouhani on the sidelines.

“Beyond that, U.S. and Iranian officials are tentatively laying the groundwork for potential face-to-face talks between the two governments, the first in the rancorous 34 years since radical students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and founded the Islamic theocracy. Diplomatic relations have been broken ever since. …

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/13/202033/us-iran-edging-toward-direct-talks.html#storylink=cpy