Obama and Putin Agree That Turkish Dictator Erdogan Must Go

by Webster G. Tarpley

Erdogan Not Immune to Coup d’Etat; Obama’s Blunt Interview with The Atlantic Containing Sharp Critique of Erdogan, Saudis, Cameron, Sarkozy, Hollande, Valls, Viewed in Middle East As Threat to Expose Connivance with ISIS Terrorists by Saudis, Turks, and Anglo-French; Obama’s View of Putin More Positive; Hillary Clinton Exposed Once Again As Incorrigible Warmonger; Obama’s Supreme Court Nomination Not Astute; GOP Faces Breakup Whether or Not Trump Gets to 1,237 Convention Delegates; Trump Faces More Protests at March 21 AIPAC Meeting in Washington; Trump in Tradition of Albert Gallatin, Calhoun, Huey Long, George Wallace – Figures Who Sought to Turn Back the Clock; Parallels to August 1991 Soviet GKChP

PARTNERS | WASHINGTON D. C. (ÉTATS-UNIS) | 28 MARCH 2016


Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Today’s broadcast features a report from Thierry Meyssan in Damascus, Syria, which can be summarized as follows:

The press of Europe and the United States is attempting to spread the idea that the withdrawal of part of the contingent of Russian military aircraft which had been assigned to bombing terrorist targets in Syria somehow came as a surprise, including to the Assad government in Damascus. In reality, there was no surprise whatsoever. It had been assumed that the Russian bombing campaign against the Syrian terrorist rebels was scheduled to end in the first week of January, at about the time of the Orthodox Christmas. At that time, President Assad visited Moscow and it was decided to extend the bombing campaign until mid March. This plan was confirmed for the Syrian government by the Russian Foreign Ministry as of March 1. Russian troops inside Syria were well aware of their departure date. Large Antonov military transports were used to move some equipment back to Russia, and flight plans for these aircraft were given four days in advance to the competent authorities. This is confirmed by Defense News, which quotes the Jordanian chief of staff saying that he was informed by Moscow and by the Syrian government. So there was no precipitate withdrawal, but rather a carefully planned and executed redeployment.

Especially important is the agreement reached by Presidents Obama and Putin about two or three weeks ago that the continued tenure of Turkish President Erdogan is intolerable, and that he should be removed from office before he can start a wider war. Russian and US weapons are currently flowing into Turkey for the purpose of speeding the departure of the dictator. Contacts are also being made with the Turkish political parties, the top generals of the Turkish military, and others to help bring down the dictator. The Turkish nationalists are turning against Erdogan. The PKK will also mobilize. Erdogan’s presidency is illegitimate because his most recent election victory was carried out with massive vote fraud.

Fighting inside Turkey on the level of a civil war is expected to begin during April. The beginning of the end for Erdogan will transform the entire Middle East situation.

Most of the larger cities in Syria will soon be free of terrorist rebels. This is likely to include Aleppo, Palmyra, and Idlib. ISIS/Daesh will only be able to maintain their presence in Raqqa in far northeast Syria, as well as in some parts of Iraq. It is expected that heavy fighting inside Turkey will tend to disrupt the logistics pipeline for the terrorist rebels inside Syria.

This hard line of Moscow and Washington towards Erdogan contrasts most sharply with the policy of the European Union (including Britain and France), which is offering tribute of €3 billion per year to Erdogan over the foreseeable future to get the Turkish president to house more Syrian refugees and to prevent them from crossing into Greece. Naturally, since Erdogan functions as the de facto commander of ISIS/Daesh, he could at any time order the total cessation of combat operations, and remove the main factor which is impelling civilians to flee from the terrorists in the combat zones. But he prefers to cash in, obtaining concessions like visa-free travel for Turks in the EU.

Obama’s interview to the Atlantic Monthly is remarkable since it reads like the memoirs of a president who has already left office, and thus feels free to frankly speak his mind. His comments about King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Sarkozy, Cameron, and Erdogan are devastating. The message seems to be that these figures are being told to cooperate, or else they will be exposed for their machinations of recent years, and thus destabilized.

Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia, who sometimes acts as a spokesman for the Royal family, has issued a weak defense (see below) claiming that the Saudis do not support terrorism, and are loyal allies.

Obama has been quoted as saying that the Saudi royals are the worst in the world. The situation is complicated by the distinct possibility that the Saudis have obtained nuclear weapons from Pakistan.

Obama’s Atlantic interview portrays Hillary Clinton as a relentless warmonger – Democratic primary voters should take note. The Washington think tanks and experts are frequently bought and paid for by the Sunni Arab states.

Here are some excerpts from Obama’s interview, which appears in Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine: The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2016:

Over the past year, John Kerry has visited the White House regularly to ask Obama to violate Syria’s sovereignty. On several occasions, Kerry has asked Obama to launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to “send a message” to the regime. The goal, Kerry has said, is not to overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate peace….Obama has steadfastly resisted Kerry’s requests, and seems to have grown impatient with his lobbying. In recent National Security Council meetings, Obama’s strategy was occasionally referred to as the “Tom Sawyer approach.” Obama’s view was that if Putin wanted to expend his regime’s resources by painting the fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him. By late winter, though, when it appeared that Russia was making advances in its campaign to solidify Assad’s rule, the White House began discussing ways to deepen support for the rebels, though the president’s ambivalence about more-extensive engagement remained.

Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Obama’s reticence frustrated [Samantha] Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and?‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’?” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.).

‘Friday, August 30, 2013[:] ….While the Pentagon and the White House’s national-security apparatuses were still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued vociferously for action.”

[Samantha] Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped. …Biden, who ordinarily shared Obama’s worries about American overreach, argued passionately that “big nations don’t bluff.”

[Cameron of the UK and Saudi Ambassador Jubeir demanded an attack. But Germany’s Merkel was opposed and refused to take part. When the British House of Commons also refused to go along, Obama paused.]

Obama also shared with McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of the stand-down. “By not intervening early, we have created a monster,” Valls told me. “We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today.” The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who was already upset with Obama for “abandoning” Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, fumed to American visitors that the U.S. was led by an “untrustworthy” president. The king of Jordan, Abdullah II—already dismayed by what he saw as Obama’s illogical desire to distance the U.S. from its traditional Sunni Arab allies and create a new alliance with Iran, Assad’s Shia sponsor—complained privately, “I think I believe in American power more than Obama does.” The Saudis, too, were infuriated. They had never trusted Obama—he had, long before he became president, referred to them as a “so-called ally” of the U.S. “Iran is the new great power of the Middle East, and the U.S. is the old,” Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, told his superiors in Riyadh.

Amid the confusion, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.” I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends. By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.” [Leon Panetta was another hawk.]

He described a relationship with Putin that doesn’t quite conform to common perceptions. I had been under the impression that Obama viewed Putin as nasty, brutish, and short. But, Obama told me, Putin is not particularly nasty. “The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks.” Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to think. “He’s constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely stupid. He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

Here is Prince Turki’s attempted defense of the Kingdom:

‘A top Saudi Arabian intelligence chief said on Monday that President Barack Obama failed to appreciate all that the kingdom has done to stabilize the Middle East, fight terrorism and support American priorities, hitting back after the president called Middle Eastern governments “free riders” on US initiatives. “You accuse us of fomenting sectarian strife in Syria, Yemen and Iraq,” Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi prince and former ambassador to the United States and Britain, wrote in an open letter published Monday in the English-language Arab News. “You add insult to injury by telling us to share our world with Iran, a country that you describe as a supporter of terrorism.” Al-Faisal’s letter was a response to comments Obama made in a much-discussed interview with The Atlantic magazine in which Obama referred to the Saudis and other allies as “free riders” who push the United States to act but contribute little themselves. Obama has long been cooler toward the Saudis and other Arab allies than his predecessor, but his willingness to forcefully criticize them stunned many in Washington’s foreign policy establishment.’

See:
“Russia and Victory” by Thierry Meyssan on Voltaire Network, for more details.
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine: The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world,”Atlantic Monthly, emphasis added.
“We are not ‘free riders’”: Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal to Barack Obama.

Webster G. Tarpley