Posts in "Turkey"

By Roy Antoun at 9:07AM

Jun 1, 2010

How Did You Not See This Coming?

In lieu of the latest news coming from Israel, Foreign Policy Magazine's Daniel Drezner used colloquial profanity to describe Israel's behavior on board a vessel just outside the Gaza Strip. Mr. Drezner wrote,

Sure, you can argue that the people on the ships weren't exactly Christ-like in their embrace of nonviolence. That said, it should be possible to gain control of an unruly ship without, you know, killing more than ten people...

However, what Drezner and many other pundits failed to recognize this following clip:

Report: Death off the Coast of Gaza

This morning reports came in of an Israeli raid on a Gazan aid convoy flotilla. According to CNN, the raid left 9 dead and approximately 20 wounded. There were six flotillas and all were boarded by Israeli forces with only one boat giving resistance, the Mavi Mamara. The majority of the dead are said to be Turkish. According to the Israeli police, 16 activists have been to jail and approximately 700 are to be deported.

The Israeli Defense Forces claimed the soldier's lives were in danger citing violence with the use of "severe physical violence, including live fire, weapons, knives and clubs." Here is the Israeli version of the incident.

White House spokesman Bill Burton commented saying that the US "deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy." More should come from the White House and it should be interesting to see how they handle the situation given that many see the Jerusalem & Washington relationship strained of late.

Mom, the government's being Paranoid again. Make it stop.

The New York Times recently reported that Iran proposed a new deal with Brazil and Turkey in which the rogue state would “ship half of its nuclear fuel to Turkey.”

What’s the United States’s response? More sanctions. The Times continues to report that “rejecting the new deal, however, could make President Obama appear to be blocking a potential compromise.” And blocking a potential compromise he is indeed. The United States has been prodding a stick at an angry pit bull for half a century and seems to believe that doing so will make the pit bull (Iran) calm down and accept U.S. terms. What President Obama, his predecessors, and current State Department staff refuse to do, however, is put themselves in Iranian shoes.

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly states that he is willing to negotiate and talk with the United States, perhaps the United States should be willing to negotiate and talk with the same country it has harassed for fifty years all because of an oil dispute in the 1950s. It’s as if the U.S. is doing whatever it can to prolong conflict and delay peace.

War: Avoided!

There is a breaking new development in the Iran debacle:

In a move that will likely drive a stake into the heart of the near-term prospects for the US-backed “crippling sanctions” against Iran, Turkey and Brazil have managed to come up with a compromise deal that provides everything the Western nations claimed to have wanted from the third-party enrichment deal in the first place.

Whether or not the US and other western allies decides to tone down their rhetoric on another round of sanctions on Iran is still up in the air. Hopefully Turkey will help to put out the warmongering flame with their key "intermediary" position:

Turkey on the other hand is an incredibly inconvenient intermediary for the war party, because they are simultaneously a key US-NATO ally in good standing and have trustworthy relations with Iran. Turkey would be obligated to return Iran’s uranium if the West fails to provide the fuel rods, and could likely be trusted to do so.
As Iran has now accepted the deal, President Obama will struggle to back out of it without doing serious damage both to his international reputation and to US-Turkey relations.

As for now, it looks like war will be avoided. However, there is still the recent shipment of bunker busters to the strategic base on Diego Garcia that has many worried.

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