generalspeaking

Inconvenient Truths

"When he makes missteps, he becomes a character. Although he may be successful in lining up some of the Democratic leadership, he will be less likely to get the Democratic nomination if he looks foolish."
Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf

"The more people know about him, the more they value that he says what he thinks."
"I think that's really put him in a good stead with foreign leaders around the world."
former Democratic Senator Ted Kaufman

"As head of state there are times when you have to have a moment where you are trying to achieve larger national ends that aren't always served by having a case of no internal monologue that tells you to shut the heck up."
Dick Wilson, Republican strategist

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan bristled furiously when he heard that Vice President Joe Biden made allusion to President Erdogan's complicity with the Islamic State jihadists, and Turkey's blind eye turned away from their presence within the country. That it happens to be the truth is obviously beside the point. It is not politically expedient to tell tales out of class.

And so, although Mr. Biden may have felt, and may still feel that it behooves people to speak the truth particularly when the truth is self-evident, he still happened to have embarrassed the administration of which he is an integral, though perhaps not completely integrated part, and had little option but to apologize to Mr. Erdogan.

Mr. Erdogan is as miserably malevolent a personality as it's possible to be. He hasn't yet fully progressed to the status of totalitarian menace, but his brand of Islamist perfidy is a nasty ideological blight on Turkey. Under the Islamist government that Mr. Erdogan heads, it's a wonder that the country is not invited to leave NATO. Its interests do not diverge with those of NATO, although at one time they aspired to, when Turkey was still a secular-governed country.


Turkey is now a staunch defender of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a terrorist-funding nation of Islamists for whom no mission is quite as important as the destruction of the State of Israel and if it takes a nuclear blast to do it, they're preparing for that eventuality even while denying that Iran has any goal but to present as a peace-loving country on the body of the international world politic. From time to time Iran cannot repress itself and dispatches its terrorist militia Hezbollah to do damage to Israel but more is yet to come.

Turkey admires and supports the terrorist entity Hamas, ruling in the Gaza Strip and effectively making life impossible for the Palestinians living there. Its administration is a miserable one, mostly because it diverts international funding geared to aiding the Palestinians toward its own goal of destroying Israel rather than building state infrastructure useful to the people it governs. But Turkey champions Hamas, along with its partner-in-Islamist values, Qatar.

So when Mr. Biden accused Turkey of permitting Islamists to cross into Syria and claimed that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia funnelled weapons along with Turkey to Syrian rebels and that the weapons came into the hands of Al Nusra, Al-Qaeda and allied extremist groups he was only stating what he was entitled to hear as part of the executive branch of an administration whose security apparatus keeps it well briefed on the activities of its 'allies'.

Blunt talk appears to be his forte.

Labels: NATO, Turkey, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 10, 2014