OCALAN'S CAPTURE
U.S.-ISRAELI-TURKISH ALLIANCE GROWS
MER - Washington - 2/16/99: It's clearly a payoff to the Turks for their growing
alliance with Israel against the Arabs and for continuing to allow the Americans to base
U.S. forces in their country. Until last year Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan had been
protected by Syria. Under growing military threat from Turkey, Syria decided to tell
Ocalan it was time for him to depart. In recent months Ocalan has been traveling from one
asylum to another in a journey that has taken him from Italy to Russia and finally to
Kenya from which he was somehow delivered to Turkey. While the full details of Ocalan's
capture are not known, the likelihood of substantial CIA and Mossad involvement making
this possible is all but a sure thing. The U.S.-Israeli-Turkish alliance, previously
dubbed "The Ankara Pact" here in MER, continues to stratgegically transform
today's Middle East while the weak, divided, and confused Arab "client regimes"
hardly are able to tread water and keep themselves afloat. Indeed, the U.S. and Israel
have strenuously worked to bring Turkey into a closer alliance in order to further
dominate the area some still call "the Arab world". The following appeared in
MER last year regarding this very important turn in the history of the Middle East: ARAB
& MUSLIM WORLDS REMAIN TERRIBLY WEAK, DIVIDED, CONFUSED
"The strengthening of strategic ties with Turkey is Israel's most important
diplomatic achievement in the five years that have passed since the Oslo agreement."
MA'ARIV Newspaper Editorial, Tel Aviv 9/8 MER - Washington - 9/9/98: The Arab and Muslim
worlds are so weak, so divided, so confused, so co-opted that right under their noses the
U.S., NATO, Israel, and Turkey have put together the unnamed "Ankara Pact" --
and yet it's strategic and military largely against them!
A few days ago the Turkish Prime Minister, Mesut Yilmaz, made anofficial State visit to
Israel, cementing the military alliance that has developed with Israel since the collapse
of the Soviet Empire and the more direction American occupation of the Gulf region in the
1990s.
It was just a few months ago MER editorialized about the great strategic importance of
this latest American-Israeli move to control the Middle East as follows:
NEW U.S./TURKEY/ISRAEL ALLIANCE CIRCUMVENTS AND BOTTLES UP THE ARABS
MER - WASHINGTON - 7/26/98:
Probably the greatest strategic move in the Clinton post-Cold War years is what could
be called "The Ankara Pact" -- an alliance between the U.S., Turkey, and Israel
that essentially circumvents and bottles up the Arab countries. Once again, the Arabs are
caught unprepared, weak, and unable to assert themselves.
And this time by an alliance between their former occupier, today'smodern-day Ottomans,
their new enemy, the little but powerful state ofIsrael, and the modern-day empire which
keeps the weak and corruptArab client regimes in power preventing the rise of Arab
nationalism.
"Turkey is slowly reasserting its historic role in the region by stepping up calls
for the creation of regional multinational peacekeeping forces... Over the past two years
Turkey has forged a security partnership with Israel.
Analysts say the two countries, both pro-Western and non-Arab, andgenerally mistrusted
in the Middle East, share a deep concern aboutterrorism and Islamic extremism.
Under the partnership, Israel has won lucrative contracts to upgradeTurkish F-4 Phantom
and F-5 fighters and is eyeing more Turkishcontracts as the Turkish military embarks on a
modernization program.
Another agreement allows Israeli pilots to train in Turkey... Turkey long has hesitated
to exert itself as a regional power, mindful of stirring up enmity among its former
Ottoman subjects in the Balkans or Middle East, or with historic rivals Greece and
Russia."
This way of presenting things, as done recently in the Washington Post(7/16/98), hardly
gives the full scope of what is taking place. A major strategic transformation of the
region is actually taking place, the Arabs once again undermined and surrounded, outgunned
and outmanuevered.
In a sense the U.S. is replacing its former strong-man Iran in the region with a
potentially stronger and strategically even more important Turkey. And Israel is using the
opportunity to create a new military alliance that essentially threatens the Arab
heartland countries, as well as the new Iran, at a time when they are more politically
divided than ever and growing militarily weaker because of the backwardness of their
political and economic institutions coupled with needs of the "client regimes"
not to opppose their American protectors.
It's the return of the Ottomans and the further decline of the Arabs, with the major
addition of Israel in the strategic equation. Kicked out at the beginning of the Century
-- when the Western colonial powers carved up the region for themselves at the "Peace
to end all Peace" post-war conference in Paris in 1918 -- now at the end of the
century, Arab oil no longer what it was then, the Ottomans are being brought into the
equation as the oil fields north of the Arab lands are now prized.
In another sense the Arabs may now have missed their moment inhistory. Rarely has a
major civilization so rich in crucial resources played its strategic and economic cards
more badly then have the Arabscollectively.
Indeed, that was the main reason the West put in place the "clientregimes" --
the Husseins, al-Sauds, al-Sabahs, the Shah of old, as well as the panoply of narrowly
based military regimes -- in the first place. And that grand strategy which goes back to
the days of Lawrence of Arabia and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has worked
brilliantly -- for the West and Israel that is. The big loosers of course have been the
people of the Middle East now divided from each other more than ever and who languish
under systems of still growing oppression, both political and economic. The biggest losers
of all...the Palestinians.
