Турции от Комитета Древних Сил:

[Meltonian]

American Jewish community ends support of Turkish interests on Hill

By Eli Lake

In October 2000, the government of Turkey had a problem.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert had promised to bring a resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide to the floor for a vote, a move that Ankara said would be a slap in the face to a NATO ally.

The Turks called up Keith Weissman, a senior researcher from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and asked him to intervene.

Mr. Weissman said in an interview this week that AIPAC lit up the phones and managed at the last minute — with the help of the State Department — to persuade President Clinton himself to write a letter to Mr. Hastert saying a vote on the resolution would cause strategic damage to U.S. interests.

The last-minute push worked. Mr. Hastert removed the resolution from the floor, and the full Congress has yet to take up the matter to this day.

But the American Jewish community is no longer helping Turkey, after a tumultuous deterioration of ties between Israel and Turkey in the past four years. The government in Ankara last week decried a botched Israeli raid on a Turkish aid flotilla, which claimed at least nine lives, as an act of "state terror."

In some ways, the Memorial Day flotilla affair marks an end of Israel's more than 20-year strategic alliance with Turkey, and the resulting support from the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

Turkey, which has a secular constitution, was the first Muslim state to recognize Israel, in 1949. Israel has historically sought to form alliances with countries on the periphery of the Arab world such as Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia.

In 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, its army destroyed training camps affiliated with the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a terrorist organization responsible for the slayings of Turkish diplomats.

Turkey rewarded Israel's counterterrorism operations with increased intelligence ties. The intelligence relationship soon blossomed into full ambassadorial relations, and increased commercial trade and closer military cooperation. In exchange for arms sales from Israel, Turkey allowed the Israeli air force to use Anatolian airspace for training purposes.

The relationship began to sour in the early 2000s with the election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP in Turkish), which is based on elements of parties that had been banned for Islamism.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said, "It's not completely over. There are still close ties between many in Turkey and the community and there are still a lot of common interests."

But Mr. Hoenlein added, "The Turks happen to have a government that is extremist, that has chosen a path that is violative of the past relationship. It has been a steady process, not just related to the most recent incident. This began with the election of this Islamist government in 2002."

Barry Jacobs, the American Jewish Committee's former director of strategic studies in the office of government and international affairs, also noted Turkey's critical stance toward Israel's 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon to root out Hezbollah terrorists attacking the Jewish state.

"This started in 2006 when I remember one Israeli diplomat complained that Turkish support for Hezbollah had 'out-Arabed the Arabs,'" Mr. Jacobs said, adding that Turkey's unconditional support for Hamas since 2007, combined with Jewish discomfort with defending the Turks on the Armenian issue, led to a dampening of support.

"The major Jewish organizations decided in 2008 that the question of the Armenian genocide resolution was so sensitive we would no longer take public and private positions to oppose it," Mr. Jacobs said.

Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thinks the Turks made a strategic decision to break with Israel during the Gaza war. He pointed to a heated exchange in 2009 at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of a session with Israeli President Shimon Peres, telling him: "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill."

"We saw things deteriorating but it did not surface publicly until Davos," Mr. Foxman said. "Until then, the trade continued, the military continued. It did not happen till the Gaza war. My feeling is that Turkey made a geopolitical decision before, but it needed an excuse to turn so dramatically."

Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Weissman were in some ways the architects of the Jewish community's support for Turkey in Washington that began at the end of the Cold War. Both men led delegations of Jewish community leaders to Istanbul and Ankara. Mr. Weissman said AIPAC's leaders even offered training to Turkish Americans on how to establish a successful lobby.

In Congress, the Jewish organizations lobbied for an oil pipeline from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a pipeline that bypasses Turkey's rival Armenia entirely. The Jewish lobby in Washington helped protect U.S. arms sales to Turkey, on which the Greek lobby often tried to block or impose conditions.

Henri Barkey, a former State Department Turkey analyst and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said, "The most important element of the relationship with Israel for the Turks in the late 1980s was improving relations with the United States through the American Jewish community."

In the 1980s, Turkey often lost major fights in Congress to the Greek and Armenian lobbies.

"It made Turkey's strategic value to the United States more visible and understandable when supporters of Israel would go to bat for them," said Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense for policy who represented Turkey when he was out of government in the early 1990s. "All of the sudden, you not only had strong support for Turkey in elements of the executive branch, you also had then some serious debate on [Capitol Hill] in favor of Turkey as well."

Today, far from being an asset for Turkey, the American Jewish community appears to becoming a potent foe of Turkish interests in Washington.

On Tuesday for example, the Anti-Defamation League issued a press release calling on the State Department to designate the IHH, the Turkish charity that helped organize the free-Gaza flotilla as a foreign terrorist organization. In Turkey, the IHH has been praised as a group of peace activists and humanitarians.

"In terms of the Jewish community and Israel, neither one of us wants to throw it away and hope it is not over," Mr. Foxman said. "But every day there is another provocation. Every day the Turkish government goes out of its way to be insulting to Israel and another link is broken."

Morris Amitay, a former executive director of AIPAC who has also represented Turkey, was more blunt.

"If someone asked me now if I would try to protect Turkey in Congress, my response would be, 'You've got to be kidding,'" he said.

The liberal Jewish organizations J Street and Americans for Peace Now declined to comment on the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish ties in Washington.

*http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/8/jewish-community-ends-support-turkey-capitol-hill/*

[Meltonian]

Первые ласточки не заставили себя ждать.

Neo-Conservatives Lead Charge Against Turkey

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 9, 2010 (IPS) - As the right-wing leadership of the organised U.S. Jewish community defends Israel against international condemnation for its deadly seizure of a flotilla bearing humanitarian supplies for Gaza, a familiar clutch of neo-conservative hawks is going on the offensive against what they see as the flotilla's chief defender, Turkey.

Outraged by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip's Erdogan's repeated denunciations of the May 31 Israeli raid, as well as his co- sponsorship with Brazil of an agreement with Iran designed to promote renewed negotiations with the West on Tehran's nuclear programme, some neo-conservatives are even demanding that the U.S. try to expel Ankara from NATO as one among of several suggested actions aimed at punishing Erdogan's AKP (Justice and Development Party) government.

"Turkey, as a member of NATO, is privy to intelligence information having to do with terrorism and with Iran," noted the latest report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a hard-line neo-conservative group that promotes U.S.-Israeli military ties and has historically cultivated close ties to Turkey's military, as well.

"If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey's arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from the organisation," suggested the group.

Its board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.

Neo-conservative publications, notably the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, have also been firing away at the AKP government since the raid.

"Turkey now represents a major element in the global panorama of radical Islam," declared the Standard's Stephen Schwartz, while Daniel Pipes, the controversial director of the Likudist Middle East Forum (MEF), echoed JINSA's call for ousting Ankara from NATO and urged Washington to provide direct support for Turkey's opposition parties in an article published by the National Review Online.

The Journal has been running editorials and op-eds attacking Turkey on virtually a daily basis since the raid, accusing its government, among other things, of having "an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH (the Islamist group that sponsored the flotilla's flagship, the Mavi Marmara) that borders on complicity."

On Monday, it ran an op-ed by long-time hawk Victor Davis Hanson that labelled the IHH "a terrorist organisation with ties to al-Qaeda", while an earlier op-ed, by Robert Pollock, its editorial features editor, called Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, "demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East".

Meanwhile, in an op-ed published by 'The Forward', a Jewish weekly, Michael Rubin, a Perle protégé at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), accused Turkey of having "become a conduit for the smuggling of weapons to Israel's enemies", notably Lebanon's Hezbollah.

The onslaught is ironic both because of the neo- conservatives' long cultivation of Turkey and their avowed support for promoting democratic governance - of which they have singled out Turkey for special praise - in the Muslim world.

Neo-conservatives were among the most important promoters of the military alliance between Israel and Turkey that began to take shape in the late 1980s and was consolidated by the mid-1990s.

In fact, Perle and another of his protégés, former undersecretary of defence for policy, Douglas Feith, worked as paid lobbyists for Turkey during that period, in major part to persuade the powerful "Israel Lobby" on Capitol Hill to promote Ankara's interests on Capitol Hill.

In 1996, the two men participated in a task force chaired by Perle that proposed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he work with Turkey and Jordan to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power as part of an alliance designed to transform the strategic balance in the Middle East permanently in favour of Israel.

But the Turkey promoted by Perle and his fellow-neo-cons in the 1980s and '90s was one that was dominated by a secular business and political elite carefully monitored by an all- powerful military institution that mounted three coup d'etats between 1960 and 1980 and intervened a fourth time in 1997 to oust an Islamist-led government.

Despite its close links to both the U.S. and Israel, however, the Turkish military badly disappointed the neo- cons in the run-up to Washington's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Instead of insisting that the civilian government at the time grant U.S. requests to use Turkish territory as a major launching pad into northern Iraq, the armed forces decided to defer to overwhelming parliamentary and public opposition to the invasion.

"I think for whatever reason they did not play the strong leadership role on that issue that we would have expected," complained then-Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, a long-time Perle friend and colleague who, despite his lavish praise of Turkey as a model Muslim democracy, headed repeated efforts by the George W. Bush administration to persuade Turkey's national security council - where the military's voice was dominant - to effectively overrule its parliament.

Erdogan, who became prime minister just a week before the invasion and whose political and economic reforms have been widely praised in the West, at first sought good relations with Israel. As late as 2007, he arranged for Shimon Peres to become the first Israeli president to address the Turkish parliament.

By then, however, many neo-cons had become concerned about Erdogan's efforts to weaken the military's power, his warm reception of a top Hamas leader in 2005, criticism of Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah in 2006, and rapprochement with Syria.

When the military not so subtly threatened to intervene against Erdogan and the AKP in 2007, some neo-cons, notably Perle, suggested that the U.S. should not try to discourage it. Others, including the Standard's Schwartz and Pipes, encouraged it as the lesser of two evils, even as the Journal defended the AKP as "more democratic than the secularists".

Since Erdogan's furious denunciation of Israel, and Peres personally, at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) of Israel's Cast Lead operation in Gaza in Jan 2009, however, neo-cons of virtually all stripes - including those, like the Journal's editorial writers, who have praised the AKP as a democratising force - have turned against Ankara. And the flotilla incident, combined with Erdogan's perceived defence of Iran's nuclear programme, has raised their animus to new heights.

"A combination of Islamist rule, resentment at exclusion from Europe, and a neo-Ottomanist ideology that envisions Turkey as a great power in the Middle East have made Turkey a state that is often plainly hostile not only to Israel but to American aims and interests," wrote Eliot Cohen, professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a Journal op-ed Monday.