Since the onset of the foreign-backed insurgency in Syria, Turkey has actively played the CIA assigned role of arming, funding and supporting the anti-Syrian terrorists.
Turkey, along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has also set up a secret base near its border with Syria to send military supplies to the insurgents.
Earlier this month, the Turkish army staged tank exercises near its border with Syria days after it reinforced its border troops with tanks, missile launchers and armored combat vehicles.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley, American author and historian from Washington, to further discuss the issue at hand.
He is joined by Middle East expert Huseyin Bagci from Ankara and Lawrence Freeman, with the Executive Intelligence Review from Baltimore, on Press TV’s News Analysis program.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Webster Griffin Tarpley let us look at some of the different ways that has backfired, perhaps you can tell us more.
Our two guests did talk about the emergence of a Kurdish entity in northern Syria that would clearly be an assist obviously to the PKK, can tell you us more and the growing number of attacks by the PKK plus Turkish Kurds, who in the meantime are being emboldened in terms of wanting autonomy?
Tarpley: We have to remember that Obama was allegedly on the telephone every week with Erdogan, urging him on, playing on his vanity, playing to his ambition.
Now, the Turkish government for the last few years wanted to become a regional hegemon. They also had ideas about pan-Turkic spheres of influence; and at the beginning this was not all bad when they tried, for example, to mediate the nuclear dispute with Iran, joining with Brazil to do that, that had some positive elements in it.
But I would say that after the fall of Egypt, after the fall of Mubarak, the Turkish government was conned into this idea of a new Ottoman empire and with a new Ottoman empire you go from ‘zero problems’ to dozens and dozens of serious problems and as you pointed out the most serious is the Kurds.
Now the PKK, who is the PKK? Well, Simon Hersh has informed us in recent years that the CIA supports the PKK; the CIA tries to use the PKK against Iran.
In recent years in France, in the Bordeaux, as it was called; Danielle Mitterrand the wife of the French President Mitterrand was a great patroness of the PKK.
Less than a year ago, Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister said that Israel would start supporting the PKK to punish Turkey for the behavior of the Turks in the ‘Mavi Marmara’ Gaza flotilla; there are also stories that NATO through Greece supports the PKK and I think that this is what Turkey would have to understand.
I wish Turkey well, I have been there I met a lot of political leaders in Turkey; they have to understand that the alliance with the US and the British is a lethal embrace, in other words, the Anglo-Americans are going to love them to death.
They will play them against Syria, in the full knowledge that the blowback from that conflict is likely to destroy modern Turkey.
So they should cease and desist, there is nothing to gain in this and everything to lose and it has a lot to do, I am afraid, with the psychology of Erdogan and Davutoglu, who have been, essentially, conned by Obama.
And naturally this question of Russia does loom very large, in 19th century there was a Russo-Turkish war every 20 years.
In recent decades there has not been a Russo-Turkish war but you are getting into a geometry where you really do not want to go.
So it would be important, I think, to see that the Syrian armed forces are succeeding against the rebels inside Syria, they are essentially quelling the rebellion and at the same time it looks like the center of gravity may well shift to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and these places where I think, some kind of revolutionary action and authentic revolutionary action is actually coming forward.
But right now the Turks have turned over their entire southern region to the CIA. The CIA is running wild, the CIA rules the hotels of Iskenderun; filling them up with al-Qaeda terrorists.
The CIA rules the Adana [Air] Base there near Incirlik; so they have essentially invited in all of these terrorist elements and the blowback would be severe.
Press TV: And Webster Griffin Tarpley, how much of a pawn is Turkey, based on the plans of which some camps say is part of the plans for creating this chaos across the entire Middle East to ignite multiple regional conflicts for this ‘New Middle East’, as they call it, by the United States and its allies and of course Turkey being one of the victims.
Tarpley:
Well, there is this document called the ‘Bernard Lewis Plan’, if you look on the Internet under the ‘Bernard Lewis plan’ you are likely to find a map, which of course to be circulated; it is carving up every existing nation in the Middle East. It wants mini states, macro states, rump states, secession, partition, subdivision, it is to destroy everybody and that is the plan for Syria but it is also the plan for Turkey.
So I would appeal to elements of the Turkish opposition to call a halt to this reckless and irresponsible politics.
Naturally, here in the United States getting rid of Obama at this point would solve nothing.
We would need to break up the CIA, break up the CIA and extirpate this disease of imperialism root and branch in all of its forms.
If you look at Romney, Romney is surrounded by Neocons, people like Bolton, [Senor], the Cagans; hard-line really aggressive Neocons all around Romney, he has successfully kept them in the background.
Most people have no idea of the warmongers and madmen that are providing Romney with foreign policy advice but if you got rid of Obama and switch to Romney, the CIA would even have an even easier time of running these things.
So I am afraid more of thoroughgoing housecleaning has to be in order, here in the United States, right?
President Kennedy said that if had got reelected he would break up the CIA, we know what happened to him then.
So that is not an easy task, but I think that would certainly be the US, American patriots could contribute to that.
