— by Odysseus
We here at The Cassandra Times make it our business to tell you, our readers, what the rest of the info-tainment industry will not. We provide you with the critical facts that these purveyors of entertainment leave out. We apply our education and intelligence to analyze both the probable and the possible meanings of world events to deduce what legendary radio commentator Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story”.
The news today is very grim. At approximately 9:20 this morning, Turkey time, the Turkish air force, using American-made F-16 fighter airplanes, shot down a Russian Sukhoi fighter/bomber. Turkey claimed that the Russian Sukhoi invaded their airspace and that, supposedly, it had been warned ten times before it was shot down. ISIS is claiming that one of the two Russian pilots was shot while parachuting out of the airplane while the other pilot who survived the jump was killed by ISIS after he landed.
The pertinent facts are that the Russian Sukhoi 24 was the Russian equivalent of the American F-111 bomber, a heavy, unwieldy plane that was designed for ground attack, not air-to-air combat. The territory of Turkey over which this confrontation occurred is a vast, empty area which is not of any strategic interest that we know of.
Consider that the Turkish F-16 fighter jets did not have to shoot down the Russian Sukhoi. They could have easily flown up next to the Sukhoi and either forced it to land at a Turkish base or escorted it out of Turkish airspace. These sorts of territorial intrusions and non-violent solutions occurred countless times during the cold war between the respective air forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and their counterparts of the eastern bloc over Alaska, Canada, and around the Arctic circle airspace controlled by NATO, without incident.
In contrast, Turkey unwisely chose to shoot down a Russian airplane and to provoke Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened that there will be “serious consequences” for the shooting down of its plane, describing it as “a stab in the back by the terrorists’ accomplices” and referring to Turkey. Should Russia retaliate and go to war against Turkey, as a member nation of NATO, Turkey could invoke the NATO treaty and call upon the United States and other NATO members to join them in a war with Russia.
We at The Cassandra Times do not believe that the United States should come to the aid of Turkey if a war erupts between Turkey and Russia. Although Turkey is a NATO member, it is a fickle and untrustworthy member. In 2004, Turkey refused to follow Article Five of the NATO alliance treaty, by refusing to allow troops of the United States, another NATO ally, to pass through Turkey during the American invasion of Iraq. As described in the June 23, 2012 edition of The Cassandra Times titled “The Untold Story of the Iraq War”, Turkey prevented the transit into Iraq of the 4th Infantry Division’s Stryker Brigades at the start of the war. Had Turkey cooperated with the United States, the 4th Infantry Division would have quickly occupied the so called “Sunni Triangle”, prevented Saddam Hussein from going to ground, and overwhelmed resistance by the Iraqi forces. Instead, Turkey’s last-second betrayal substantially undermined the United States’ war effort, and, in this author’s view, was the root cause of the prolonged Iraqi insurgency, the collapse of Iraq’s ability to govern itself, and resulted in the unnecessary loss of many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
To fully understand the situation, one needs to know the unsavory background of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He is the leader of the Islamist party that took control of Turkey during the 2002 election and he became Prime Minister. It was pressure from Erdogan’s Islamist party in Turkey’s parliament that caused Turkey fail to live up to its NATO obligations during the Iraq war. Erdogan has had a lifelong devotion to Islamist politics. As early as 1974, he became active in politics as a student, and he wrote, directed, and played in the play Mskomya, which presented Freemasonry, Communism, and Judaism as evil. Later, in 1998, Erdogan led the “Fundamentalist Welfare Party” which was declared unconstitutional and shut down by the Turkish Constitutional Court because of its efforts to replace Turkey’s secular constitution with a Islamist, Sharia-based one. Recently, after Russia joined the fight against ISIS and succeeded in mounting effective attacks on ISIS, ISIS publicly declared its enmity to Russia and retaliated by blowing up a Russian civilian airliner flying out of Egypt on October 31, 2015. As the leader of a fundamentalist Islamist party and a country with an active Islamist population, Erdogan chose to strike back at Russia in solidarity with the Islamist fundamentalists of ISIS.
In light of the above factors, the question is why would the United States ever consider joining forces with Turkey and risking a devastating war with Russia? The answer is President Barack Obama. President Obama is closer to Turkey’s Erdogan than any other NATO leader. In a 2012 interview with Time Magazine’s Fareed Zakaria, President Obama named Erdogan first in his list of his top international friends.
Also, given what we know of President Obama’s personal and ideological history, which we have previously discussed in other articles in The Cassanda Times, it is not difficult to imagine that he would welcome an opportunity for conflict with the new, capitalist Russia and its white Caucasian, non-third-world leader Vladimir Putin, who acts decisively and publicly shames Obama’s fecklessness. If Turkey invokes Article Five of the NATO treaty to embroil the United States in a war with Russia, this author believes Obama would risk the destruction of the developed world. Obama could well see this crisis as a golden opportunity for Islamism or some other vengeful creed of the Third World to achieve global domination, which, in his ideologically-driven mind, would right the scales of history. It would also further his personal ambition that a conflict of this catastrophic scale could allow him to indefinitely postpone the 2016 election and indefinitely stay in power during the “emergency”, as his 1960s childhood heroes did before him like Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Indonesia’s Sukarno.
Rather than join Erdogan’s Islamist Turkey in ruinous war against a Russia that is also struggling with Islamic terror, in Chechnya and now against its airliners, the United States should, instead, distance itself from Turkey, which is a rash, dangerous, and unreliable, NATO member. In light of Erdogan’s ever-tighter embrace of fundamentalist Islam, his rejection of western values and liberties, his assumption of tyrannical powers like the Muslim sultans of old, and his active support of Islamic nations that sponsor or are affiliated with acts of terror, the United States should do so now. If not now, when?