Exclusive: Turkey appears to have deliberately shot down a
Russian warplane as a provocation designed to escalate tensions between NATO and
Russia, a ploy that seems to have sucked in President Obama as he tries to look
tough against Russia to appease his neocon critics, writes Robert Parry.
(Update: Russia says one airman saved.)
By Robert Parry
President Barack Obama – always sensitive to neocon criticism that he’s
“weak” – continues to edge the world closer to a nuclear confrontation with
Russia as he talks tough and tolerates more provocations against Moscow, now
including Turkey’s intentional shoot-down of a Russian warplane along the
Turkish-Syrian border.
Rather than rebuke Turkey, a NATO member, for its reckless behavior – or
express sympathy to the Russians – Obama instead
asserted
that “Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its
airspace.”
It was another one of Obama’s breathtaking moments of hypocrisy, since he has
repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of various countries, including in
Syria where he has authorized bombing without the government’s permission and
has armed rebels fighting to overthrow Syria’s secular regime.
Obama’s comment on Turkey’s right to shoot down planes — made during a joint
press conference with French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday — was
jarring, too, because there was no suggestion that even if the SU-24 jetfighter
had strayed briefly into Turkish territory, which the Russians deny, that it was
threatening Turkish targets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin angrily called the Turkish attack a “stab in
the back delivered by the accomplices of terrorists.” He warned of “serious
consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.”
Further provoking the Russians, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels then killed the
Russian pilot riddling his body with bullets as he and the navigator parachuted
from the doomed plane and were floating toward the ground. (Update: On
Wednesday, the Russian defense minister said the navigator was alive and was
rescued by Syrian and Russian special forces.)
Another Russian soldier was killed when a U.S.-supplied TOW missile brought
down a Russian helicopter on a search-and-rescue mission, according to
reports.
But Obama, during the news conference, seemed more interested in
demonstrating his disdain for Putin, referring to him at one point by his last
name only, without the usual use of a courtesy title, and demeaning the size of
Putin’s coalition in helping Syria battle the jihadist rebels.
“We’ve got a coalition of 65 countries who have been active in pushing back
against ISIL for quite some time,” Obama said, citing the involvement of
countries around the world. “Russia right now is a coalition of two, Iran and
Russia, supporting [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad.”
However, there have been doubts about the seriousness of Obama’s coalition,
which includes Sunni countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have been
covertly supporting some of the jihadist elements, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra
Front and its ally, Ahrar al-Sham.
Syrian rebels, including jihadists fighting with Ahrar al-Sham, have received
hundreds of U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles, apparently through Sunni regional
powers with what I’ve been told was Obama’s direct approval. The jihadists have
celebrated their use of TOWs to kill tank crews of the Syrian army. Yet Obama
talks about every country’s right to defend its territory.
Obama and the U.S. mainstream media also have pretended that the only
terrorists that need to be fought in Syria are those belonging to the Islamic
State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh), but Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its
ally, Ahrar al-Sham, which was founded in part by Al Qaeda veterans, make up the
bulk of the Turkish-and-Saudi-backed Army of Conquest which was gaining ground –
with the help of those American TOW missiles – until Russia intervened with air
power at the request of Syrian President Assad in late September.
The SU-24 Shoot-down
As for the circumstances surrounding the Turkish shoot-down of the Russian
SU-24, Turkey claimed to have radioed ten warnings over five minutes to the
Russian pilots but without getting a response. However, the New York Times
reported
that a diplomat who attended a NATO meeting in which Turkey laid out its account
said “the Russian SU-24 plane was over the Hatay region of Turkey for about 17
seconds when it was struck.”
How those two contradictory time frames matched up was not explained.
However, if the 17-second time frame is correct, it appears that Turkey intended
to shoot down a Russian plane – whether over its territory or not – to send a
message that it would not permit Russia to continue attacking Turkish-backed
rebels in Syria.
After shooting down the plane, Turkey sought an emergency NATO meeting to
support its attack. Though some NATO members reportedly consider Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a loose cannon, NATO Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg declared that the allies “stand in solidarity with Turkey.”
Further increasing the prospect of a dangerous escalation, NATO has been
conducting large-scale military exercises near the Russian border in response to
the Ukraine crisis.
Erdogan’s government also appears to have dabbled in dangerous provocations
before, including the alleged role of Turkish intelligence in helping jihadist
rebels stage a lethal sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, with
the goal of blaming Assad’s military and tricking Obama into launching punitive
airstrikes that would have helped clear the way for a jihadist victory.
Obama only pulled back at the last minute amid doubts among U.S. intelligence
analysts about who was responsible for the sarin attack. Later
evidence
pointed to a jihadist provocation with possible Turkish assistance, but
the Obama administration has never formally retracted its allegations blaming
Assad’s forces.
One motive for Erdogan to go along with the sarin “false flag” attack in 2013
would have been that his two-year campaign to overthrow the Assad government was
sputtering, a situation similar to today with the Russian military intervention
hammering jihadist positions and putting the Syrian army back on the
offensive.
By shooting down a Russian plane and then rushing to NATO with demands for
retaliation against Russia, Erdogan is arguably playing a similar game, trying
to push the United States and European countries into a direct confrontation
with Russia while also sabotaging Syrian peace talks in Vienna – all the better
to advance his goal of violently ousting Assad from power.
The Neocon Agenda
Escalating tensions with Russia also plays into the hands of America’s
neoconservatives who have viewed past cooperation between Putin and Obama as a
threat to the neocon agenda of “regime change,” which began in Iraq in 2003 and
was supposed to continue into Syria and Iran with the goal of removing
governments deemed hostile to Israel.
After the sarin gas attack in 2013, the prospect for the U.S. bombing Syria
and paving the way for Assad’s military defeat looked bright, but Putin and
Obama cooperated to defuse the sarin gas crisis. The two teamed up again to
advance negotiations to constrain Iran’s nuclear program – an impediment to
neocon hopes for bombing Iran, too.
However, in late 2013 and early 2014, that promising Putin-Obama
collaboration was
blasted
apart in Ukraine with American neocons playing key roles, including
National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, Sen. John McCain and
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland.
The neocons targeted the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych,
recognizing how sensitive Ukraine was to Russia. The Feb. 22, 2014 coup, which
was spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme Ukrainian nationalists,
established a fiercely anti-Russian regime in Kiev and provoked what quickly
took on the look of a new Cold War.
When the heavily ethnic Russian population of Crimea, which had voted
overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, reacted to the coup by voting 96 percent to leave
Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the neocon-dominated U.S. mainstream media pronounced
the referendum a “sham” and the secession a Russian “invasion.” Cold War
hysteria followed.
However, in the nearly two years since the Ukraine coup, it has become
increasingly clear that the new regime in Kiev is not the shining light that the
neocons and the mainstream media pretended it was. It appears to be as corrupt
as the old one, if not more so. Plus, living standards of average Ukrainians
have plunged.
The recent flooding of Europe with Syrian refugees over the summer and this
month’s Paris terror attacks by Islamic State jihadists also have forced
European officials to take events in Syria more seriously, prompting a growing
interest in a renewed cooperation with Russia’s Putin.
That did not sit well with ultranationalist Ukrainians angered at the reduced
interest in the Ukraine crisis. These activists have forced their dispute with
Russia back into the newspapers by destroying power lines supplying electricity
to Crimea, throwing much of the peninsula into darkness. Their goal seems to be
to ratchet up tensions again between Russia and the West.
Now, Turkey’s shoot-down of the SU-24 and the deliberate murder of the two
Russian pilots have driven another wedge between NATO countries and Russia,
especially if President Obama and other NATO leaders continue taking Turkey’s
side in the incident.
But the larger question – indeed the existential question – is whether Obama
will continue bowing to neocon demands for tough talk against Putin even if
doing so risks pushing tensions to a level that could spill over into a nuclear
confrontation.
~ Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Courage to Resist salutes these four recent service members – with 20-years
of drone warfare experience between them – for their courage to resist our
nation's endless drone warfare.
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