Turkey - A Study in Geo-Political Malevolence

The recent shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish air force jets has brought a great deal of media focus on the role of Turkey in the Syrian conflict. Knowledgeable observers of the four year-long civil war have been aware of Turkey’s role from the outset as a conduit for the infiltration of Syrian territory by Islamist militants who have had training camps provided for by the Turkish Army High Command.

However, a wider spectrum of the global audience to the Syrian tragedy has become more acquainted with the allegation of Turkish logistical support for and financial relations with the so-called Islamic State. The reason for the Turkish taking down of a warplane which posed no threat to its security can only be based on the premise that Turkey is worried about the success of Russian airstrikes and the gains made by the Syrian Arab Army in reclaiming territories lost to insurgent Islamist militias and sought to punish the Russians for their role in this inconvenient turn of events. Further, the conduct of the Turkish government in the immediate aftermath of the incident by calling for a meeting of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, appears to have been an attempt to draw the military alliance headed by the United States into direct opposition to the Russian Federation.

When Russian president Vladimir Putin condemned the Turkish action as a “stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists” he was not only enlightening the world about that nation’s role in the creation and sustenance of the Islamic State, he was also giving insight into the modus operandi of those operating at the helm of the Turkish state; one that has fashioned Turkey into an untrustworthy operator in international affairs - both  as a partner within a military alliance and as an ostensibly friendly neighbouring state.

The deep irony is that the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan is one which predicated its regional outlook on a much vaunted ‘Zero Problems with Neighbours’ stance. Far from this, his foreign policy demarches; seemingly a recurring series of conspiracies, attempts at entrapment, blackmail and betrayals have set Syria ablaze with death, destruction and displacement. The unruly hand of Erdogan has at specific junctures risked escalating the crisis into a full blown regional war along sectarian lines, and even more direly threatened to edge the conflict towards a confrontation between the nuclear armed powers of NATO and Russia.

The background to Turkish involvement in the Syrian crisis is one which has its roots in an historical rivalry between both nations and is nurtured by a confluence of geo-political objectives of the present leadership in Turkey with those of the nations with whom it is formally allied; that is, the United States and NATO, as well as its informal alliance with the conservative Arab monarchies that comprise the Gulf Co-operation Council. This extends to an arguably symbiotic relationship that Turkey has with the state of Israel.

Antagonisms between Turkey and Syria go back to the aftermath of the First World War when following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, both modern Turkish and Syrian states were created. Right from the outset, mutual animosities festered over the twin issues of territorial and water rights.

Despite the secular framework undergirding both states, this rivalry was maintained during the era of the Cold War with the Turks becoming full-fledged members of NATO while the Syrians maintained a close relationship with the former Soviet Union.

The relationship was not helped by Turkish cooperation with Israel, a state to which Syria remained resolutely opposed. A low point was reached in 1998 when both nations came to the verge of all out war over Syrian support for guerrillas of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist organisation.

However by the late 2000s a rapprochement between both countries had developed to the extent that Syrian President Bashar al Assad described Turkey as “Syria’s best friend.” Erdogan for his part referred to the Syrians as “brothers.”

Those sentiments, given the present circumstances, have long been buried.

Under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey has developed a foreign policy that aims to project Turkish influence within the Middle East and beyond. Regardless of the accuracies or inaccuracies attendant to descriptions of it as ‘neo-Ottoman’ in nature, it is clear that it is characterised by its assertiveness. Turkey’s initiatives consistently display a bold and ruthless approach whether the Turkish state is functioning as an intermediary, a facilitator or as a provocateur.

For instance, it was at Erdogan’s insistence in 2008 that the Syrians reluctantly began tentative talks with Israel. A few years later, Turkey served as the conduit through which Jihadis, fresh from NATO’s successful expedition in overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi, were transported to Syria to wage the present insurrection against Assad’s government.

The Turks cherish the idea of serving as the “ultimate energy bridge between east and west”, hence the proposition made to Assad prior to the conflict that he accede to a plan by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to build a natural gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey which would supply Europe with natural gas. The offer was made by Erdogan to counteract a plan to deliver Iranian gas to the same destination through a pipeline which would extend through Iraq and Syria. Assad rejected this offer.

It sits on what is reputed to be one of the world’s largest water reserves and in 2014 did not hesitate to cut off the water supply to the River Euphrates by effecting a gradual reduction in the pumping of the river. This led to a drastic fall in the water levels of the man-made Lake Assad.

More recently, Erdogan is using the plight of refugees from the war he has helped create in Syria as a bargaining chip to “re-energize” talks on Ankara joining the European Union as well as to ease visa restrictions for Turks visiting the bloc.

Seeking the fracture of the Syrian state is a clear geo-political objective of Erdogan, and Turkey’s involvement in this endeavour fits neatly in with other nations with similar aspirations.

The United States for one unveiled its ‘Greater Middle East Project’ during the administration of George Bush which proposed an overhaul of the political map of the Middle East of a kind not envisaged since the region was carved up between France and Britain, the victors of World War One.

It was a plan which was a logical expression of the Wolfowitz Doctrine which called for the untrammelled use of American military might in shaping the post-Cold War geo-political landscape.

Such thinking had been put to paper by a policy document prepared by the now defunct Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank which called on the United States to “challenge” regimes which were hostile to its “interests and values”. Among those on the list was the Syrian state.

Syria was on the list of seven countries to be taken out over a five year period according Wesley Clarke, the retired US army general who had served as supreme commander of NATO.

The balkanisation of the Middle East has always factored in the foreign policy objectives of the state of Israel. The policy plan devised by Oded Yinon in the early 1980s emphasized the vulnerability of multi-faith and multi-tribal Arab nations created by European imperial powers with Syria been assessed as “fundamentally no different from Lebanon except in the strong military regime which rules it.”

The thinking behind A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a policy document prepared in 1996 for Benjamin Netanyahu during his first tenure as Israeli prime minister was to work in concert with its allies Turkey and Jordan to “contain, destabilize and roll-back” those states posing threats to all three. The strategy as with the PNAC document specifically mentions the “weakening, controlling and even rolling back” of Syria.

While the rejection of Turkey’s natural gas pipeline proposal may likely have played a decisive factor in turning Erdogan against Assad’s Syria, the insurrection was begun under the cover of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. Recruitment and financing of Sunni Islamist insurgents came from the Sunni powers of the Gulf Co-operation Council.

Arms supplies such as a “major airlift” of “3,000 tons of weapons” from Zagreb as reported by London’s Daily Telegraph in March of 2013, found its way to Syrian rebels through Turkey.

The sectarian nature of the conflict is evident and the imposition of a Sunni-led replacement to Assad’s government is a goal shared by Erdogan. Erdogan leads what is termed the ‘soft Islamist’ Justice and Development Party which has nonetheless sought to modify the secular creed of state established by Kemal Ataturk. Erdogan’s sectarian motives are implicit in all his political manoeuvrings Assad ruefully noted during an interview he granted to a Turkish newspaper journalist in 2012.

It was for long an open secret that the Erdogan government was complicit in the rise of Islamic State. The formidable Turkish army which has dutifully kept a lid on any military threats emanating from the de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq did nothing to help crush the militias of the Islamic State when they emerged as a force following the infamous blitzkrieg in Iraq back in 2014.

And even allowing for the plausible excuse of wanting to avoid the potential complications associated with intervening in another country, Turkey deliberately failed to close its porous borders to Islamist volunteers.

Last year, Sky News Arabia reported the discovery of official exit stamps administered by Turkish border control on passports seized by Kurdish fighters indicating that foreign militants seeking to join Islamic State had entered Syria with the full knowledge of the Turkish authorities.

This open border policy so far as the insurgents were concerned extended to trading in illegal oil garnered by the Islamic State from oil wells it seized in Northern Syria. It is a lucrative trade in which members of Erdogan’s own family including his son Bilal, are intimately involved.

The bombing of these trade routes and crossing points during raids conducted by the Russian Air Force along with the more general turning of the tide gains by the Syrian Arab Army against insurgents doubtlessly influenced the decision to stage the dangerously provocative act of shooting down a Russian warplane.

The Sukhoi Su-24M tactical bomber aircraft by the reckoning of the Turkish government had traversed its borders for a period of time amounting at most to 17 seconds. The Russians denied that their plane entered Turkish airspace or that its crew had been given 10 warnings in five minutes.

Whatever the truth of this matter, Erdogan’s rank hypocrisy was clearly on display when he claimed that his country’s F-16 fighter jets “shot down the Russian plane in line with Turkey’s rules of engagement”.

Back in June of 2012 he had furiously denounced the Syrian decision to down a Turkish F-3 Phantom fighter jet for violating Syrian territory. “A short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”, adding, “Even if the plane was in their airspace for a few seconds, that is no reason to attack. It was clear that this plane was not an aggressive plane. Still it was shot down.”

When a Russian warplane had admittedly temporarily violated Turkish airspace which the Russians attributed to the Russian pilot’s evasive action after a Turkish jet had ‘locked on’ to his plane, the Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had spoke the following the words:

We’ll warn any country that violates our borders in a friendly way. Russia is our friend and neighbour. There is no tension between Turkey and Russia in this sense. The issue of Syria is not a Turkish-Russian crisis.

The downing of the Russian fighter plane appears to have been the latest in a number of incidents which the Turkish government have cynically sought to manipulate as a means of drawing the United States more directly into the conflict; this through the mechanism of invoking Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty which states that an attack on one Ally shall be considered an attack on all allies.

The willingness and even desperation of the Turks to involve the United States as an active participant mean that some observers do not rule out the Turks staging a ‘false flag’ attack, i.e. facilitating or directly participating in an act of war or a war crime and then blaming it on another party in order to discredit them and, if necessary, to justify a military response.

It is claimed by some that Islamist rebels based in Turkey had access to sarin gas prior to the Ghouta Chemical attack which opponents of the Assad government sought to blame on his forces. President Obama, reluctant to approve direct involvement by the United States, had earlier announced that the use by the Assad government of chemical weapons would constitute the crossing of a red line.

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Award winning investigative writer, claimed to have seen a classified US Defense Intelligence Agency document which referred to “chemical facilitators” based in Turkey and Saudi Arabia “were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.”

In March of 2014, a tape recording was released of a conversation said to have been between Hakan Fidan, the Head of Turkish Intelligence, Davutoglu, then the foreign minister and other high-ranking officials discussing the possibility of launching an attack on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire which is located in Syria.

Davutoglu is heard to say that “the prime minister”, meaning Erdogan, said that “in current conjecture, this attack (on the tomb) must be seen as an opportunity for us”.

To this Fidan replies, “I’ll send four men from Syria, if that’s what it takes. I’ll make up a cause of war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey; we can also prepare an attack on Suleyman Shah Tomb if necessary.”

The response from Turkey’s foreign ministry said that the tape had been “partially manipulated” and was a “wretched attack” on national security.

Such deceptions are not unknown in Turkish history. It is a nation rich with high level intrigue and manufactured violence. The Istanbul Pogrom of 1956 or Septemvriana, which saw the slaughter and displacement of ethnic Greeks, was orchestrated by the government of Adnan Menderes.

This involved getting a Turkish usher at the consulate in Thessaloniki to plant a bomb that would damage the building acknowledged as the birth home of the revered Attaturk. Although the man was arrested and made a confession, the Turkish press remained silent about this and announced that the consulate had been bombed by Greeks.

The rise of Erdogan and his ‘soft-Islamism’ which has implemented economic policies that have succeeded in increasing the level of the nation’s prosperity ostensibly offered a break with the murky past.

For decades, Turkey endured successive military regimes which were brought to power and sustained by the use of NATO’s secret army unit known as ‘Counter Guerilla’ as well as associations with fascist groups such as the ‘Grey Wolves’. It was during this period that the Derin devlet, literally meaning ‘deep state’ became an entrenched feature of its governance.

But while Erdogan’s rule has introduced reforms and seen the purge of many in the military, it has failed to do away with the negative hallmarks of the corrupt state including the country’s reputation as the conduit for the supply and distribution into Europe of Afghan originated heroin.

His handling of foreign affairs has left much to be desired even when taking into account the amorality frequent in the conduct of the relations between nations. His defiance of international law, conventions and opinion has included the creation of a buffer area with Syria resulting in the advancing of Turkish borders by eight kilometres.

Meanwhile, there is no word from his government condemning the apparent war crime committed by Turkman guerrillas in either killing a defenceless pilot parachuting to earth or lynching him on his landing.

He has attacked Kurdish militias when have taken the fight to Islamic State and even his declarations about carrying out a military operation against the Islamic State in the “near future” are treated with disbelief and merely create the suspicion that he will use any purported operation as cover to wage war against the Kurds.

Such duplicity and such hypocrisy are, of course, not the sole preserve of Erdogan. The Western powers at the helm of which is the United States insist that they are fighting a war on terror, but arm terrorists in a conflict which was planned and organised well in advance of the cover provided by the so-called Arab Spring.

The creation of the entity now termed Islamic State by covert manipulation of United States intelligence agencies is admitted by retired US General Wesley Clarke as well as by the recently retired director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Michael Flynn.

The still frequent recourse to the term ‘moderate’ rebels by US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron is baffling in the extreme given the evidence from a welter of disparate sources which confirm that the overwhelming majority of those Syrians who have taken up arms against Assad are guided by a Sunni Islamist ideology, the same ideology that fuels the foreign jihadists who have descended on Syria, many of them routed through Turkey.

It is an ideology to which Erdogan, who rejects the term ‘moderate’ or ‘soft’ Islamism as insulting Western constructs, subscribes. For all his protestations, this view may tend to offer confirmation that he is sympathetic to the tenets espoused by the Islamic State.

But it is of course conduct that speaks louder than words. His failure to close the borders with Syria, the provision of training camps, the existence of trade routes and supply lines along with evidence of constant communications between militants and Turkish officials speak of an active and sustained collaboration with the Islamist militants who seek to overthrow the secular government of Bashar al Assad.

The pages of an objectively written history will not likely be kind to Recep Erdogan’s role in fomenting and prolonging the unmitigated catastrophe that is Syrian Civil War.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2015)

Adeyinka Makinde is a London-based Law Lecturer with an interest in geo-politics.

OPINION: David Cameron and Syria – A Tale of Deception and Hypocrisy

United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron

David Cameron wanted to bomb Syria two years ago but suffered a humiliating defeat in a vote before Parliament. Let us be clear about one thing: if Cameron and others had got their way two years ago, the so-called Islamic State and a range of Jihadi groups would be in control of Syria today.

And if 'control' is too strong a word, it would be in as much chaos as Libya is today. The Libyan enterprise by NATO to overthrow Gaddafi was firmly backed by Cameron who used British Special Forces to train and guide Islamist rebels in attaining this objective.

After the chemical attack in Ghouta, a dubious event which was likely perpetrated by either Saudi or Turkish intelligence in order to provoke President Obama to make good on his ill-fated assertion about "red lines", the idea was to bomb and 'degrade' the capabilities of the Assad government which the West and its Middle East Sunni allies were keen to blame.

Now Cameron wants to bomb Islamic State insurgents.

A few British fighter jets have been part of the patently phony war waged against Islamic State for over a year by the US and its Middle East allies. The Russian effort in two months has shown this to be the case.

Need it be reminded that it was Cameron who one day was supporting the Mubarak regime and then when it was toppled, visited the newly installed junta to sell it military weapons.

But it is not only about the hypocrisy of Cameron the man and politician. It is about the hypocrisy and double-dealing of the Western powers specifically in regard to Syria and generally to the Middle East and North Africa geo-political theatre.

The turmoil in Syria was the creation of the Western powers acting in concert with Turkey and the Sunni Gulf monarchies who seek to overthrow the secular government of Bashar al Assad. This is the bottom line reason why the Islamic State and other Jihadi groups have grown so powerful.

But after the tragedy of Paris, Cameron is confident that the United Kingdom's public outrage along with the media's whipping up of the drums of war will get him the Parliamentary rubber stamp to intervene in a conflict which according to former French foreign minister, Roland Dumas, was planned and orchestrated years in advance by British officials along with other Western powers.

Cameron's motives are far from benign. They bear the vestiges of the 'humanitarian bomber' with an insidious agenda. He wants to be part of a campaign which would justify a British presence in Syria which along with French involvement would be utillised in a manner that would in the future attempt to effect the desired overthrow of Assad as well as the dismantling of the Syrian state.

The unquestioning media along with the gullible electorate are complicit in allowing leaders like Cameron to continually get away with such fundamental dishonesty.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2015)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

COMMENTARY: Rumination on Terror, the Middle East and NATO Intervention

'Blood of Terror' by Li Li Tan (2005)

Robert Kennedy said after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968: "It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it is not the end of disorder."

Terrorism did not end with an attack in the village of Bosso situated in the Republic of Niger. It did not end with the bombings in Sinai or Beirut, and it will not end with the carnage inflicted in Paris.

The terrorist has objectives ranging from the psychological to the political. And whether you consider them 'terrorists' or 'freedom fighters', their trade is death: death to the innocents. To ruminate about how humanity can for want of a better phrase 'sink so low' is to embark on an exercise in utter futility.

Granted, each historical and geographical setting provides an array of rationales for the nurturing of the terror merchant, but there is something to the argument proffered by the historian Niall Ferguson that "terrorism is the original sin of the Middle East".

The tragedy in Paris is not the first, and presumably, will not be the last time that the fight is brought to Europe because of the involvement of European powers in that part of the world.

A bomb planted in the heart of Whitehall in April of 1947 by the Stern Gang narrowly failed to explode and would have caused a level of carnage to rival that which occurred when the Irgun murdered just under a hundred people in the King David Hotel attack in Jerusalem the previous year. That outrage along with other 'successful' bombings and assassinations aimed at the British-ruled UN Mandate of Palestine sapped the will of Britain.

When the United States of America aided by its NATO allies illegally invades Iraq, then utilises the 'Salvador Option' to enable Shia militants to murder Sunni insurgents, then bombs Libya to smithereens and into lawlessness, then oversees the arming of Sunni extremist militias to overthrow the government of Syria - all at a tremendous cost to innocent human life running into the hundreds of thousands if not into the millions – it would be naive to assume that there will not be painful and tragic consequences for innocents to bear.

Today, a Muslim Jihadi whether born and bred in England or Tunisia feels that the land of Syria belongs to him by the will of Allah as much as the Zionist believes that Palestine was bequeathed to him by the God of Israel.

And the means by which each set out to achieve their ends are not constricted by conventional morality.

For Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the deceased leader of the Mujahideen Shura Council, the umbrella organisation which preceded its successor organisation, the Islamic State in Iraq, the concept of ‘Offensive Jihad’ entailed “going after the apostate unbelievers by attacking (them) in their home territory, in order to make God’s word most high and until there is no persecution.”

Six decades earlier, the Stern Gang, which was committed to taking over Eretz Yisrael by armed force proclaimed the following in an article titled “Terror” in the underground newspaper He Khazit

We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.” But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all.

To Robert Kennedy's words, the following may be soberly added:

"There is no end to fanaticism. There is no end to terror."

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2015)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in England.

COMMENTARY – Putin, Islamophobia and how Russia might have become a Muslim nation

Vladimir Putin (Pavel Sokov)

I am not a professed expert on Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, but I do get a trickle of queries from around the globe about him. A recent one centres on Putin’s attitude to Muslims.

One viral e-mail doing the rounds for some time has Putin addressing the Russian Duma on 4th February 2013 and saying the following about Muslims and other minorities living within the Russian Federation:

On February 4th 2013, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the Duma. (Russian Parliament), and gave a speech about the tensions with minorities in Russia:

“In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that’s the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how hard they yell ‘discrimination’.”

The politicians in the Duma gave Putin a standing ovation for five minutes!

There are several variations with one claiming that he referred to the “suicide” of the United States and Western European nations. However, the purported speech is to the best of my knowledge fiction.

It appears to be an adaptation of a speech that may have been given by an Australian minister of state and has undergone numerous mutations.

I have conducted a search of the Kremlin's site dedicated to the activities of the president. It provides transcripts and other records of his engagement and there is no mention of a speech to the Duma.

CLICK here: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/by-date/04.02.2013

Putin is often the subject of rancorous debate among those on the far-Right of the political spectrum as well as those considered to be ‘white nationalists’. This often centres on what the particular debater perceives to be his attitude to the Islamic world and ‘Jewish power’.

Is there a case for Putin to answer for being to the far-Right of the political spectrum, or a white nationalist?

There is evidence of links between his government and the French National Front and European Nationalist and far Right groups in Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia -although many speculate that they are actions linked to Russian measures geared towards sowing discontent against the European Union.

Also, while not officially sanctioned by Putin’s government, the first International Russian Conservative Forum, which took place in March of 2015 in St. Petersberg, attracted a host of ultra-nationalist and far Right political groups.

Additionally, there is much speculation about the precise level of influence over Putin's thinking that the Russian ultra-nationalist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin has. Dugin's views on Russia's future are seen as aggressive in tone and expansionist in design. Pan-Slavism and Russian chauvinism feature in a complex potpourri of thoughts on ideology, religion, society and geo-politics.

Putin was at the helm of what many consider to be a brutal neo-colonial war of conquest against the breakaway Republic of Chechnya; this in contrast to the defensive reactions he undertook in relation to NATO-orchestrated provocations in Georgia and Ukraine.

In his reaction to the February 2014 coup in Kiev, we can see the measured, pragmatic style of Putin whom ultra-nationalists like Dugin berate for failing to annex the whole of eastern Ukraine.

Nonetheless, while clearly a nationalist and a promoter of social conservatism in his country with a special place for the revived Russian Orthodox Church, a distinction can be made for the most part between Putin and Russian ultra-nationalists. His brand of nationalism is officially inclusive and not by default hostile to minorities including Muslims.

Those seeking to bolster the credentials of Islamophobia by insinuating some measure of antipathy on Putin’s part would be surprised to find out that Russia could conceivably have converted to Islam in the early stages of its consolidation as a nation.

The story as recounted holds that in the tenth century, Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Rus which was still a pagan state, was looking for a state religion. He sent out envoys to his neighbours fully aware that conversion to the religion of one of them would strengthen Rus’ economic and security position. After all, practising the same faith as a neighbouring state would likely confer trading opportunities as well as help in securing political and military alliances

The candidates were the Christianised Western Christian lands composed of powerful Germanic rulers, the Eastern Orthodox Greeks, the Jewish Khazarian state and the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

It effectively amounted to an adoption of religion according to the highest bidder.

The ancient chronicles record the following:

When the envoys returned they made their report which said: “We saw men worship in a temple that is called a mosque where they sit and bow and look like men possessed. But there is no happiness among them; only sorrow and a dreadful stench. And we went among the Germans and saw their ceremonies, but we beheld no glory there. But when we entered the edifices of the Greeks, we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth. For on earth, we have not beheld such splendour or beauty.  Truly, God dwells among men, for there we saw beauty we can never forget.

Thus, it was that Russia became a Christian state. Whereas, the Greeks offered Prince Vladimir bountiful gifts and  trading privileges, the ban on alcoholic consumption imposed on the Islamic faith ruled out a conversion.

“Drinking,” Vladimir declared, “is the joy of the Russians. We cannot live without this pleasure.”

The validity of the chronicle which was written at least one hundred years after the events it purports to cover is of course disputable.

But on the original point of the purported speech to the Duma, that would appear to be an urban myth. One of many that have been nourished under the auspices of Internet, and one which is of as dubious authenticity as is the recent viral meme and e-mail purportedly presenting a prophecy by Fidel Castro that a thaw in US-Cuban relations would come about when there was a Black President of the United States and a Latin American Pope.

The lesson of course is that there is no end to the means by which tendentious propaganda can shape views and perceptions of the past, the present and the future.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2015)

Adeyinka Makinde is a London-based writer.

COMMENTARY: Vladimir Putin and the Patterns of Power

Much has been reported and analysed about recent developments pertaining first to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 28^th 2015 and shortly following that, the direct military action carried out by the Russian armed forces in relation to the conflict within Syria.

Both events, it has been claimed, formally and decisively bring to an end the de facto post-Cold War state of affairs of unipolarity; that is, one which posits the United States of America as the sole geo-political superpower that has been able to exercise exclusive and unrestrained force in various parts of the world.

It is also clear that the denunciation by Putin of longstanding American foreign policy as well as the projection of Russian power within the cauldron of Middle Eastern affairs has brought into sharp focus an aggregate of issues which taken together give the Russian leader the upper-hand, not only in regard to that geared toward the pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests, but also in the realms of moral authority and legal justification.

It has left the United States reeling and presents a future laden with a mixture of threats and benefits. The threats relate to a re-ignition of a Russo-American Cold War replete with a formal drawing of global spheres of influence, the fighting of proxy wars and an ever-heightening danger of thermo-nuclear conflict.

The benefits, on the other hand, would comprehend a framework for co-operation between the United States and the nations which it presently regards as the greatest threats to its global imperium: the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China.

The masterful deconstruction Putin gave before the United Nations laid bare the failings of American foreign policy during the decades succeeding the ending of the Cold War. The Russian president correctly characterised it as one abounding in mischief, negativity and hubris – an analysis which has been bolstered by the widely favourable reaction of swathes of public opinion around the world towards Russian actions against anti-government insurrectionists in the Syrian theatre as well as the unimaginative and miserly reaction from the American government.

Events have made it clear that only a genuine and unequivocal recalibration of American foreign policy rationales which have fostered coup d’etats, ‘colour revolutions’ and wars of destabilisation will serve the purpose of moulding the world into a far less dangerous place than it is at present.

Classic formulations of theories underpinning the security systems entered into by nation states often posit those representing ‘balance of power’ alignments or by an arrangement geared towards what is termed ‘collective security’.

In the era of the Cold War which pitted the ideologically incompatible systems operated by the United States and the Soviet Union, each side established a military alliance of nations against the other.

Aided by the threat of mutually assured destruction by thermonuclear exchanges, the parity of the military machineries respectively of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact achieved what some referred to as a “balance of terror”.

While the world was far from being a docile place, the prevailing circumstances meant that neither ‘superpower’ was prone to making rash decisions so far as interfering with the sovereignty of other nations within their immediate spheres of influence.

The operation of the United Nations to which both superpowers belonged provided more than a semblance of ‘collective security’ as was seen in regard, for instance, to the behind-the-scenes work of UN officials in combination with US and Soviet diplomats and statesmen in brokering armistices and peace accords in successive Arab-Israeli conflicts.

But with the crumbling of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the onset of what Francis Fukuyama referred to as “the end of history”, the previously existing international system of checks and balances became somewhat extinct.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the succeeding chaotic transformation of Russia into a post-communist society provided those holding the levers of power in Washington with the raison d’etre to act on achieving an over-arching strategic goal; namely that of preventing the rise of another power which would challenge American dominance.

That the American system had prevailed against the challenge offered by communism also granted it the right to remould the world, if not completely in its image, in a manner nonetheless which would serve the totality of its political and economic interests.

It followed that the United States had the right to act unilaterally without cognisance of international treaty obligations or recourse to international systems of regulation while in pursuit of its aims. The ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’  thus set the tone for an era of American militarism and imperialism.

Predating the “catastrophic and catalyzing event” of the September 11 attacks in 2001 which kick started a programme of armed invasions, fomenting of colour revolutions and manoeuvres geared towards destabilization was the role played by NATO in the ultimate dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia.

The United States, the undisputed leader of NATO, steered its member states into supporting its decision to stage the illegal invasion of Iraq. There was a continuum of this ethic after the expiration of the administration led by George W. Bush. The ‘backseat’ approach favoured by the Barack Obama presidency rode roughshod over the strict letter of the law and convention by aiding Islamist rebels in overthrowing the government of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

Then, also in contravention of international law, Washington oversaw the recruitment, training and financing of armed Islamic fanatics –some of them transferred from the carnage of Libya- to another theatre of Jihadist insurrection; namely that of Syria.

The consistent practice of American policy towards governments which did not consent to do the bidding of Washington was that of promoting destabilization. This has obviously been the case in regard to its relationship with Russia since that nation began charting a very different course to that which had been followed by Boris Yeltsin.

But even prior to the ascent of Vladimir Putin to the helm of the Russian Federation, the American’s had breached an important protocol of the agreement to allow a unified Germany to join NATO. This entailed that there should be no expansion eastwards.

NATO has nonetheless continued to admit former members of the Warsaw Pact into its ranks and has been behind provocations on Russia’s borders via the fomenting of conflicts in the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine.  

These highly dangerous intrigues along with the policy of encirclement via the deployment of nuclear ‘defensive shields’ are in keeping with a vital counterpart of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, namely that espoused by Zbigniew Brzezinski, an influential political thinker whose ideas are apparently much admired by the incumbent Obama.

Obama’s policy via the successful efforts of US intelligence assets in fomenting dissent and eventually overthrowing the democratically elected president of Ukraine, are consistent with Brzezinski’s strategy of pressuring and intimidating Russia with the end of reducing it to a vassal status by balkanising it and ensuring that it does not in concert with any other nation form a Eurasian power bloc that could challenge the economic domination of America and the Western European world.

In many ways, Putin’s speech before the UN General Assembly, a brief and clear summation of the ills caused by the untrammelled exercise of American power, performed the feat of turning history on its head.

Here after all was the leader of the successor state to the “Evil Empire” giving a moral lecture to the presumed leader of the “free world”. The “Evil Empire” phrase, coined by US President Ronald Reagan had a great degree of resonance because of the obvious failings of the Soviet system in terms of its poor record in guaranteeing individual freedom. The oppressive apparatus wielded by the Soviet state towards it own citizens extended to its iron-fisted response to dissent within its satellite states.

Putin, a man often taken to task for his description in 2005 of the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geo-political catastrophe of the twentieth century” was honest enough to admit the following:

We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.

His exposition on the failure of American policy was concise and difficult to contradict. The host of disasters which have followed in the wake of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 are clear for all to see, just as is the reduction of Libya from a nation with Africa’s highest standard of living to the broken down rubble of warring militias that it is today.

The fracture of civil society and creation of chaos in those nations is being replicated manifold in the tragedy of Syria that again is authored by the United States with the connivance of its NATO allies and friends in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

As Putin put it:

Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention rashly destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.

The neoconservative idea of purportedly exporting democracy to the Middle East through the barrel of a gun or the bomb-bays of military aircraft continues, heedless of Robespierre’s warning about the fear and resentment inspired by “armed missionaries”.

The United States has cynically utilised Sunni Islamist militias adhering to the ideology espoused by al Qaeda as its ‘shock troops’; a kind of a foreign legion tasked with bringing down the secular regimes of the Arab world as well as the Shia powers not disposed to following the agenda set by Washington. This amounts an unholy alliance with groups of the sort that reportedly were at the root of the disaster of September 11, 2001.

To this Putin offered the following:

The situation is extremely dangerous. In these circumstances, it is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade.

It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you’ll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them.

I’d like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it’s a big question: who’s playing who here? The recent incident where the most “moderate” opposition group handed over their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that.

We consider that any attempts to flirt with terrorists, let alone arm them, are short-sighted and extremely dangerous.

Putin went on to plead for a re-institution of the collective security system. In other words, he called for an end to American unilateral action and a return to the co-operative basis on which the principles of the United Nations system for ensuring multi-state security is predicated.

The reason for his call for cooperation is not hard to fathom. Russia as with China has sizeable Muslim populations which can pose internal security problems if the Islamic State strain of fanaticism is allowed to spread.

An enduring Islamic State in the Levant which is subject to measures aimed at merely containing it provides a global threat to all; a threat to those Western European nations with rising Muslim populations and indeed Muslim states around the world.

The inexorable logic behind the call for collective action must be obvious to all. Putin was clear in his plea for a break with the unipolar mode by not merely calling for the revival of the UN as a valid conduit for fostering international cooperation, but also specifically for a alliance of the sort last seen with the anti-Hitler coalition of the Second World War.

Yet, the response from Washington has been largely marked by cynicism and continued hostility. On the one hand, such reaction confounds the mind of the objective bystander who cannot fathom why a common cause cannot be made against a dreaded foe such as the Islamic State. 

On the other hand it is illuminating. The conclusion drawn by the objective observer is that the reluctance to create a unified and concerted effort against the Islamic State and other similar hued forces fighting against the Assad government is that the militants are serving the geo-strategic interests of the government of the United States.

The abject failure in building a viable opposition political movement and a ‘Free Syrian Army’ are palpable when the official yield of a $500 million dollar investment is a paltry five guerrillas.

Whereas in the past, the abstract principles governing the legality of intervention and non-intervention were sufficiently blurred by the legitimacy conferred on a genuine and sizeable anti-government movement, the situation in Syria does not permit this. The anti-Assad contingents of guerrillas are largely composed of imported Jihadis.

Experts such as Professor Stephen Cohen insist that there are no credible entities which can be referred to as ‘moderate rebels’; an appellation which has been subject to much derision. Further, the Assad government has a great deal of support from the Sunni majority including that of the Grand Mufti of Syria.

It needs to be reminded that it is the Assad government which has borne the brunt of fighting Islamist fanatics, and that his secular regime presents the only hope for maintaining a Syrian state which will protect religious minorities including Christians from an ominous fate under an Islamic State.

Claims by Washington that the Assad government lacks legitimacy are not credible given that he won an election in June of 2014. The United States, of course, in 1864 underwent an election during its own civil war when the electoral votes of eleven Southern states were not counted.

Neither can Washington’s contentious claims of the deliberate use by the Syrian Army of barrel bombs against civilian targets be used to argue the case for illegitimacy. It is an accusation reeking of hypocrisy given the numerous innocents killed by United States drone warfare, bombings and other military attacks, some involving the targeting of civilians with depleted uranium munitions.

It is clear that Washington hopes that the demonization of Vladimir Putin for which much of the Western media has been complicit, will discredit his message.

Putin it seems alternately inspires dread and hope: From anti-Russian Central and Eastern Europeans eternally unforgiving of the historical domination of their homelands by Russian and Soviet empires to the White Nationalists that tout him as the ‘saviour’ of the white race. 

From the archetypal ‘liberal’ Westerner inculcated with years of anti-Putin propaganda portraying him as the quintessential practitioner of a Russian brand of oriental despotism to the Western ‘Leftie’ still besotted with Russia or, at least, enduringly sympathetic to the role Russia played in attempting to set up a Marxist utopia.

But whatever the point of view, the argument for a return to a collective security arrangement based on mutual interest is difficult to displace given that American dominance has not been exercised with benevolence. Putin has already demonstrated a high level of statesmanship in averting an American bombing campaign against Assad’s forces back in September of 2013 after the chemical attack in Ghouta.

The negotiated programme for collecting and destroying Syrian chemical stocks alleviated the need for this, much to the relief of war-weary legislators and their constituents in both the United States and Britain.

This was a noteworthy example of the benefits of multi-state co-operation of the sort which Washington has seemingly chosen to forswear. The suggestion by Putin of the formation of a Russo-American coalition against the Islamic State and other Islamist militias deserves consideration rather than contempt.

A re-orientating of the global patterns of power is long overdue. And given the state of the world after decades of effective unipolarity, it can only be for the better.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2015)

Adeyinka Makinde is a London-based law lecturer with an interest in intelligence and Security matters.

Dick Tiger’s Tenacity and the Wit of Terry Downes

Above them were a number of balconies that hung steeply, seemingly above the ring, the occupants, according to Reg Gutteridge, “practically breathing down the necks of the contestants.”

This photograph captures the brutal intensity of a small show fight in London’s East End held on May 14, 1957. The audience, compact and voluble, watched intently from the chairs adjoining the ring and the balconies that rose steeply above. It was not an uncommon sort of bout: A promising fighter testing his armour against a journeyman pugilist. One with high hopes and the other with presumed low expectations. An anointed versus a peasant.

Or so it was supposed to be.

For this was the fight which established Richard Ihetu, better known by the nom de guerre, ‘Dick Tiger’. Tiger had had a nondescript career to this point since his arrival to Britain from his native Nigeria. He had lost his first four bouts and had been in danger of losing his British Boxing Board of Control-issued licence. Terry Downes on the other hand was primed for success. He had emigrated to America where he’d taken up boxing while serving with the marines. He had even been selected to represent the United States at the Olympic Games in Melbourne only to have that scuppered on account of his still existent British nationality.

Downes lost and Tiger won. But each man would go on to become a world champion. In victory, the soft-spoken Tiger showed that a gentlemanly spirit could exist with one adept at practising a remarkably brutal trade. And Downes too had a spirit, one that was brave and determined. He was also marked by a razor-sharp wit.

Excerpt from the book Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal:

Chapter Five/”Reborn” -- Mickey Duff, an ex-fighter and now the rising matchmaker for Harry Levene promotions, had seen Tiger lose by a decision. To him, Tiger’s six wins to five losses record spelled “journeyman fighter”; convenient cannon fodder for Terry Downes, the great hope of British boxing. “I thought I had done my homework,” Duff recalled in his autobiography. “I had seen Tiger lose to a nobody in Liverpool and thought he was a perfect opponent -- one who would make a show, but wouldn’t be good enough to win.”

. . . . . . .

Later on that evening, the hall quickly filled to capacity. The demand for tickets had been so great that “hundreds” were reportedly locked outside. Inside the smallness of the venue ensured a semi-claustrophobic atmosphere as spectators, many of them sitting and standing shoulder-to-shoulder, crowded around the ring. Above them were a number of balconies that hung steeply, seemingly above the ring, the occupants, according to Reg Gutteridge, “practically breathing down the necks of the contestants.”

At the din of the opening bell, Downes sprang out of his corner throwing leather from all angles -- aiming, Tiger surmised, to secure a quick rout over what he expected to be a weight-weakened, muscle-bound duck. Tiger held his ground until Downes waded into a powerful left hook, which deposited him onto the canvas for a seven count. At this moment Tiger would later claim that he knew his man was beaten. With indecent haste, Downes scrambled up, dusting the resin from his scarlet trunks. He was still in the process of gathering his senses when the referee yelled for both men to “box on.” Outweighed by six pounds, Downes had yet to shake off the effects of the blows when in the second round another of Tiger’s left hooks sent him tumbling over. But this did not finish him off. He gathered himself again, and both men traded punches with some of Downes’ combinations ending under Tiger’s heart. The damage nevertheless had already been done, and while Tiger waited for the sounding of the seventh round, Downes’ handlers, mindful no doubt about the effects that a prolonged assault would have on their youthful charge, decided to withdraw him from the contest.

Back in his dressing room, Downes, the irrepressibly loquacious wit, bandied trademark quips in response to the questions being asked by the journalists. When one asked him whether he thought Tiger might have been too big for him, he responded, “Yeah, he did look a big middleweight to me too, when I realised I was lying down and he was standing up.” Another then asked him which opponent he would like to face next and Downes shot back a gem:

“I’d like it to be the bastard who suggested Dick Tiger.”

© Adeyinka Makinde 2005 & 2015.