Axel Brot's analysis from 2007

[bngenoh]

Recent events in The Ukraine, have renewed my interest in Geopolitics, and in the search for high density data, I have found among other gems this series of articles from a German defense analyst and former intelligence officer. I searched but didn't find anything on the forum.

Since it is from 2007 and more than 10 pages long, I thought it more fitting to post it under history. It is a quite fascinating read that establishes a deeper context at least for me, of what has been unfolding for the last couple of years.

A few choice morsels after he or she details the political context of the EU, Germany, and France, the rise of Merkel and Sarkozy and then comes Turkey, which I think is going to be important in the future, because of where it is located among other reasons:

Refitting Turkey for its proper role

One of the most interesting policy initiatives of the new German-French tandem may appear to be a sideshow but is, in fact, emblematic of the shape of things to come: replacing the EU horizon for Turkey with one more fitting for an oriental strategic asset.

Merkel and Sarkozy are now jointly leading an EU-wide coalition dead set against making good on the decades-old promise for the integration of Turkey into the EU as soon as it is able to implement the acquis communautaire (total body of EU law). With the election of Sarkozy the "open-ended" accession negotiations have no chance of remaining open-ended and with his help Merkel will be able to outmaneuver her Social Democratic baggage while still insisting on negotiating with Turkey in good faith.

For Merkel, Sarkozy and their civilizational warriors, Turkey has no European "vocation", for cultural, Christian, and occidental reasons. Merkel promises, instead, a "special relationship" and Sarkozy proposes to sponsor a "Mediterranean community", anchored on Turkey, Israel and Morocco, as a geopolitical barrier against African immigrants, Islamic fundamentalists, and as an additional venue for Israeli ambitions.

The question, though, is how to make Turkey give up its EU aspirations and fall into line with whatever plans are made for it. And the main problem is, in fact, that Turkey's most committed Europeanists are to be found in the moderately conservative and moderately religious center-right Justice and Development (AKP) party, the first governing party after World War II which is fairly clean, rather competent economically, and tenaciously digging at the immensely corrupt and criminal "deep state": the conglomerate of politicians, military intelligence, special police squads, and their legions of cut-outs, cut-throats, and patsies, the Turkish mafia, Grey Wolves (ie, rightwing terrorists), feudal landowners, and associated business ventures. This government is trying to drain a swamp in which German intelligence was up to its knees since the days of its being tasked with chaperoning the "Trident" intelligence coordination between the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli intelligence services.

Turkey's "deep state" has been (and, to some degree, still is) the enabling environment - and with Israel, the Eastern Mediterranean hub - for the interbreeding of intelligence, the security business, terrorist groups for hire, and mafia operations. It has produced the strangest, rather frightening, but most lucrative, hybrids between black operations, subversion, targeted killings and kidnappings, and the whole panoply of the drug, protection, organ harvesting, black medical research and pharmacology, the emigration, slave labor, weapons and technology, counterfeiting, money laundering rackets. Joined to Israel's netherworld, its reach extends from the Arab countries to Africa, from Russia and the CIS to western and Central Asia, and, of course, to Europe.

[...]

In other words, the AKP government is striving to scale down the use of Turkey as a strategic platform for all sorts of mayhem, focusing instead quite successfully on regional trade and investment opportunities to maintain Turkey's economic growth - thus stabilizing a growing middle class of "black Turks". This approach, though, crimps US efforts to expand the strategic threat against Iran. Even more importantly, it limits American access to the Caucasus and Central Asia and hampers its plans for pulling the Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan into a permanent and much more extensive military relationship.

In sum: though prudent enough to have accomodated the Turkish military's usual level of cooperation with Western (US, Israeli, and German) operations against its neighbors, it still disregarded the demands of the Western grand strategy. Its policies did nothing to help in the "great game" of turning the Caucasus and Central Asia into a lever to be used against Russia and China. Neither did the Turkish government do enough for the shorter-term payoff, ie, gaining control over Central Asian oil and gas. All of this did not win the Turkish government friends in the right places. It set itself up, instead, for some variant of a regime-change operation in which the campaign against Turkey's EU aspirations will play a pivotal role.

Though the Turkish military is always good for a coup d'etat, it may be difficult to do it this time without an inopportune level of violence ("Chileanization") since the AKP won the elections resoundingly. There are other options available that might teach the forces of Turkish reform lessons about red lines and overreaching. A short walk down memory lane might illustrate what is possible.

One of the most successful - and "blackest" - of US-British "black operation" against a Western, albeit neutral, country was carried out in first half of the 1980s. In 2000, none other than Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, declassified it in an interview with Swedish TV in the context of an investigation into the affair of the "Soviet submarines".

Then Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme was a real thorn in Western flesh. Apart from his backing for the Afrincan National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he was very vocal in his criticism of the increasingly dangerous American confrontation policies towards the Soviet Union. His stance enjoyed widespread support within the Swedish population. This changed rather dramatically with the worldwide frenzy about "the Soviet aggression of neutral Sweden", when Swedish territorial waters were repeatedly "violated by Soviet submarines" and by landings of "Soviet special forces" on the Swedish coast. These "incursions" stopped with the still unresolved murder of Palme in 1986, despite two unsuccessful attempts to convict a man named Christer Pettersson for the crime.

With a pleased smirk, Weinberger confirmed that there was nothing Soviet in the violation of Swedish territorial waters (the Soviets "didn't have the capabilities"). There were, instead, routine exercises, "between the Swedish navy and the American and British navies and since they were routine, the Swedish admiral responsible saw obviously no need to inform his superiors or his subordinates about the nature of the "enemy".

It was, in fact, not quite a "regime change", but a joint US-UK operation together with the top brass of the Swedish navy and Swedish intelligence, conducted against the foreign policy of the Swedish government. Since then Sweden has been rather careful not to challenge American policies - with the exception perhaps of the very popular Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, in line to become the next prime minister. She was stabbed to death in 2003 by a mentally disturbed young immigrant.

At the time, such operations brought the world close to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviets understandably saw this as a crucial indicator that the US was preparing its allies, and battling with a powerful peace movement, for nuclear preemption against the "increasingly aggressive" and "brazen" Soviet Union.

A variant of such an operation today, though sure to have its own blowbacks, would certainly not involve that kind of risk. It would also take into account that the Turkish military and intelligence are not as monolithic as they once were: there is kind of nationalist reaction to the easy contempt with which they are taken for granted. But it would change Turkey's political horizon for good: a policy subjected to a permanent "strategy of tension", countering democratic aspirations with the power of the deep state.

Here also I am reminded of the power of the internet and that the deep state even of the US, is not as omnipotent as it would have people believe it is, and thus their implementation of such programs as these. To continue:

Gloomy old hands

There might have been room, of course, for a debate in good faith about Turkey's implementation of the EU's acquis communautaire. This is what the "open-ended" negotiating process was all about. It is being poisoned, however, by the bad faith characterizing Merkel's and Sarkozy's approach towards Turkey.

The decay of responsible diplomacy towards an ally and the rise of culturalist demagoguery is the symptom of something one might call a "proto-totalitarian transition" taking place under the guise of the "war on terror". It is led by the decay of responsibility and predictability in the conduct of American foreign policy.

Thus, for not a few senior German diplomats - those whose career took off under former chancellor Helmut Schmidt or under foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and those military planners who still remember the war scare of the first half of the 1980s - there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The American inability to secure a more stable international environment, the combination of militancy and overreaching, provide the terms of reference for the gloominess of these senior perennials. They are certainly not peace-at-any-price bleeding hearts nor closet dissidents. They have an ingrained propensity to look at the world as the stage of "them versus us". They come from families of civil servants, academics, and military officers who can well sort out the difference between the "upstairs" and "downstairs" - worlds of international politics. In other words, they are as solidly "Western" or "Atlanticist" as one could wish. And they are also the first generation of senior German bureaucrats who have been deeply comfortable with the absence of great power ambitions and with the German role as a civilian power.

[...]

They are well acquainted with the new crop of their American counterparts who prepare, control or execute American policies with brittle arrogance and with the crisis- and confrontation-prone default setting of American foreign policy formation.

For quite a few of them, however, the most worrying indication that the United States is irrevocably set on dragging the world into a nightmare of continuous and chaotic violence, is twofold: the flight or dismissal of senior, conservative professionals from the executive branch of the government and the unrestrained, strangely exhibitionist glorying of many American politicians at the ability to inflict unrestrained violence.

One might add a third one, relevant especially to diplomats who had been posted in the Middle East, or to the classicists: the wholesale looting and the destruction of 5,000 years of Mesopotamian antiquities, judged on par with the Spanish eradication of the complete written record of the Mesoamerican civilizations as well as the cultural heritage of all Indian cultures that they could lay their hands on; and one that also ranks with the British burning of 3,000 years' worth of Chinese books, historical records, and documents during the Second Opium War. This barbaric lack of respect for one of the most important heritages of mankind speaks volumes about the mindset this war has exposed.

There is the realization that institutional blocks have been disabled and with it their career premium on a healthy sense of the need to employ US power carefully - to acknowledge its executive, legal, and political limitations. But since the 1970s, patient, alliance-building ideologue-adventurers, think-tankers and journalists, have crept up through the institutions, using and being used, joining the fantasies of redemption, revenge, plunder, and control over the world, into an action program for employing American power.

The style betrays the character. Since the ambitions of these ideologues are much larger than their education, they flatter themselves into believing they are the New Romans, that they write history on a even greater scale than Titus Livius; and their vanity expects awe, not reason. But they are acting out the grand guignol version of empire whose points of reference might be Sallust, Petronius or Procopius, those who castigated or ridiculed or despaired at the corruption and the pretentions of its personnel. It is the remarkable lack of decorum, the intentional staging of bullying language, rich in threats and insults, the resentful hypocrisy, the slightly unhinged display of bad faith when diplomacy and suasion are the order of the day, that has convinced even some of the "just-a-bad-patch" hopefuls that the bad times are here to stay.

The fear beneath much of the uneasiness has to do, of course, with memories of what happens when the resentments and dreams of omnipotence of a political class are hijacked by those who promise to give them satisfaction on a historic scale.

During the Cold War, there was always a mad, though well-connected, fringe that gravitated towards American strategic policies: eg, Edward Teller with his notion of rescuing the very small, "valuable" part of humanity in the depths of mines in order to reseed the earth after nuclear war; Sidney Hook with his conviction that Western belief in the transcendent gave it the crucial nuclear-war edge over the communists who only believed in the here and now; the psychopaths within the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb who headed the agency's MKULTRA mind control program, or counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton; and the many secular and religious milleniarists in the White House, the military, in Congress, and in think-tanks, who were intent on an apocalyptic resolution to the seemingly endless uncertainties of the Cold War. But to the end, wiser heads prevailed - if only just.

It did not last. The American political class seems to have drawn all the wrong conclusions from the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its leisurely stroll towards permanent global hegemony just did not happen. Thus, frustration and the craving for revenge have become main drivers of US policies. The events of September 11 focused their common dysfunctionality, but they are not its root cause.

Here they are in order:

Part 1: _http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH08Aa01.html
Part 2: _http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH09Aa01.html
Part 3: _http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH10Aa01.html