WarSclerotic

Abdullah Gul

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan‘s relentless drive to lead Turkey to superpower status in the Middle East for the second time in two centuries has brought him to the threshold of a threefold historic dilemma, DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports.
1. To achieve this status, he must lead a group of nations which defer to Ankara. So where to start? Should he try and whip the Arab nations of Egypt, Syria and the Palestinians into line behind Turkey, or go for the extremist Iran, Syria, the Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza?
Both would be ranged against the United States and intrinsically anti-Israel. In either case, they would be introduced to the world at first as economic associations.
2. Erdogan has set his face finally to jettisoning Turkey’s diplomatic ties with Israel, but has still to fix a date. The cutoff of bilateral ties has begun and promises to be comprehensive, casting aside economic, shipping, economic, tourist relations and ditching the last remnants of the military cooperation built up in decades of friendship. Wednesday, Ankara announced 16 bilateral agreements had been shelved. Turkish President Abdullah Gul disclosed that a plan for further sanctions was in the works and would be implemented in stages.
(More about this in HOT POINTS of June 17 below)
Diplomatic severance appears to have been left to the last stage, depending on which Muslim bloc Ankara decides to promote.

Campaign against Israel as key to sway over Muslim world

Many circles in Ankara, including military leaders, are strongly opposed to the rupture of ties with Israel which have brought benefits to Turkey in many fields, but DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Ankara confirm that Erdogan’s mind is made up. Judging from his past behavior, opposition does not put him off and he will make good on his decisions even if he has to go it alone – especially with regard to Israel. He sees his antagonism towards the Jewish state as the key to sway over the Muslim community of nations.
3. Theoretically, there is, of course, a third way. For years, the Turkish prime minister has coveted the role of bridge between the various Middle Eastern peoples, such as Arab and Iranian, as well as East and West, Europe and the United States, Christendom and Islam. This task he sees as conferring great influence and high prestige.
Our Mideast sources call option No.3 “theoretical” for, despite Erdogan’s efforts, the role of mediator and bridge builder has mostly eluded him and, according to their information, he is impatient to move on from talk to decisions.
Ankara discounts Turkey’s membership of NATO as a factor in judging the first two options. For the third, it might be marginally beneficial.

Wheeling and dealing for Cairo’s auspices

Erdogan’s secret envoys have spent the past week in Egypt trying to talk its leaders round into convening an early Turkish-Arab summit with the promise of a broad and glittering attendance that would include Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and all the Palestinian leaders – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, his bitter rival Hamas political secretary Khaled Meshal and Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Abdullah Salah.
The minor Arab rulers would be swept up in their train.
Erdogan’s messengers offer Cairo three arguments:

A. In the current international climate of condemnation for Israel, the pro-Turkish, pro-Arab elements in the Obama administration and Europe will prevail over the pro-Israeli lobbies and persuade Washington and Brussels to welcome a vibrant new Middle East entity dedicated to opposing Israel.
B. “We and the Arabs are a hundred times more important than Israel,” the Turks explain “and the US and Europe will be forced to deal with us on our terms.”
C. Assad’s participation in this summit, to which Iran will not be invited, will mark the first crack in the Damascus-Tehran alliance, thus restoring Egypt to its proper position in the region and at the head of diplomacy for resolving the Palestinian question.
The fourth argument was unspoken but well understood, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Middle East sources. Turkey does not want to see Iran attain a nuclear bomb any more than Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. But since nothing is happening to stop the Islamic Republic’s inexorable drive toward this objective, Erdogan maintains that the Arab-Sunni Muslim world’s best defense against a nuclear-armed Iran would be a strong Arab alliance led by Turkey and Egypt.

Checking the options in Damascus

While one group of Erdogan’s envoys lobbies Egyptian leaders, a second is busy in Damascus.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources, this second group is charged with exploring with Assad and the Lebanese Hizballah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah – and through them with Tehran – the chances of establishing a Turkish-Arab-Iranian lineup as an alternative to the Turkish-Egyptian-led formation.
There, too, a theatrical summit is under discussion. It would bring Turkish, Arab, Iranian and Palestinian leaders together in the Syrian capital.
Should the Damascus track beat out the Cairo option, our Middle East analysts conclude, it would bring Erdogan back to the Iranian-Syrian fold. Since the flotilla incident of May 31, the Turkish prime minister and his spokesman have made great play of Iran’s ineffectiveness on the Palestinian front compared with Ankara’s activism. There was a suggestion that relations of rivalry were developing between Ankara and Tehran.
Before then, the Syrian ruler gained prominence by leading a Third World front against the American initiative for tough UN sanctions against Iran.
The two alternative postures indicate that the Turkish prime minister is at a critical crossroads. Whichever course he chooses, their most striking common factor is the zero value he attaches to the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel as players in his schemes. Ankara, Cairo, Damascus and Tehran are putting their heads together as though the United States counts for very little in the region and Israel for even less.
(Separate articles in this issue discuss the impact of Obama’s muscle-flexing moves in the region and Israeli leaders’ heedlessness of happenings in its neighborhood).

USS Harry S Truman

For five days, from Sunday June 6 through Thursday June 10, the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group carried out naval and aerial war exercises with live ammunition from a spot 50 miles off Israel’s southwestern coast – not far from where Israeli naval commandos raided the Turkish MV Mavi Marmara on May 31 precipitating a clash which dropped the Middle East into a new crisis.
The Truman‘s sixty F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter bombers took off day and night to bomb targets set up by the Israeli Air Force at its firing range on the Nevatim Base-28, one of Israel’s three principal air force bases, which is located in the Negev desert southeast of Be’er Sheva.
The exercise had 16 American F-16 fighter jets taking off from bases in Germany and Romania, landing at Israeli Air Force facilities, refueling and taking off against with Israeli Air Force combat squadrons. Together, they practiced long-range bombing missions over the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, drilling air-to-air combat along the way.
Both Washington and Jerusalem withheld public exposure of this US-Israeli aerial exercise, which was dubbed Juniper Stallion 2010, because it was a lot closer to the real thing than previous joint war games in the Juniper series. In fact, on instructions from President Barack Obama, all US missile interceptors in the Middle East were on full war alert, including the batteries on US Sixth Fleet vessels on the Mediterranean and the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

The Truman stands by for rising naval-military crisis curve

Israel’s missile shield was also on war alert.
The two anti-missile missile systems jointly drilled their ability to repel Iranian, Syrian, and Hizballah missile attacks on US Middle East targets and on Israel.
On Wednesday, June 16, debkafile‘s military and Washington sources reported exclusively that the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, which was supposed to depart the Mediterranean after the exercise and head out to the Persian Gulf, was ordered to remain in the Mediterranean for now. Intelligence had reached Washington of an expected high curve in naval and military tensions involving Turkey, Iran and possibly Hizballah, against Israel over the Gaza blockade.
Fueling the tensions are Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan‘s preparations to launch a fresh wave of flotillas for Gaza with Iranian participation and subject Israel to broad sanctions and a worldwide boycott campaign. Ankara is suspending bilateral cooperation with Israel in all fields.
On Wednesday, June 16, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued a grim warning. He said Israel could no longer treat the next convoys for Gaza as humanitarian aid operations because they were sent with hostile intent by Israel’s enemies.
A few hours after Lieberman’s comment, Tehran issued a blanket threat against Israel – and implicitly the United States: Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said that if Israel or any other party interfered with the Iranian ships destined for Gaza, Tehran would retaliate militarily against unspecified shipping in the Mediterranean and in the Persian Gulf.

Gulf rulers omit US from their defenses against a nuclear-armed Iran

Most strikingly, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Middle East analysts note, the joint US-Israel show of military might produced none of its desired effects: It failed to stem the rocketing military tensions besetting the region since the Israel-Turkish clash on May 31 over Ankara’s Gaza-bound flotilla; nor did it restrain Turkey’s headlong drive for domination or ease the political volatility set up by this drive (as outlined in the second article in this issue: Turkey Aims to Displace US in Middle East: Works on New Bloc Segregated from America’s Influence).
America’s waning military fortunes in Afghanistan and powerlessness to halt Iran’s nuclear program are taking a heavy toll on its influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.
This was evident from a new working paper presented to five oil emirates (excepting only Oman) by former Kuwaiti National Security Adviser and ex-lawmaker Abdullah Ali Nafisi.
The Persian Gulf states will not be able to withstand the Iranian nuclear threat and Iranian political pressure, he writes, if they continue to operate as six separate states, each with its own small army.
The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) has lost its effectiveness and is not capable of dealing with the Iranian threat, says Al Nafisi. Therefore, the very survival of the GCC states can only be assured if the six independent countries integrate into a single political entity, making the Saudi city of Medina its capital.
The Gulf States would have to merge their armies, says the Kuwait strategist. Only a single large army that controls everything that goes on in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf would be able to deter Iran.
The most prominent feature of this working paper is its omission of the United States, as though its traditional role of protector of the emirates in times of danger is forgotten, its military might ignored as a non-factor.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in the Persian Gulf stress the Kuwaiti writer would not have released his paper without the nod of royal circles close to King Abdullah.
It was therefore not surprising to hear approving echoes in Riyadh this week, a cautious yet clear Saudi response to the latest Turkish and Iranian Middle East initiatives. As we went to press, our sources report that President Obama has urgently invited the Saudi king for talks. His visit to Washington has been scheduled for June 28.