Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Turkey's arm twisting must finally be working

After months of delay, Turkey's Cabinet approved a long-standing U.S. request to have increased access to a strategic air base for flying into Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Cabinet’s decision was another step toward improving relations with Washington that were strained when Turkey refused to allow U.S. troops to stage an invasion of Iraq from Turkish territory in March 2003.

  Aljazeera International article

Or maybe it wasn't an arm-twisting. Maybe it was a bribe.

Iraq, Afghanistan. Iran and Syria as well.

For future reference:
Tuesday's addendum to the Duelfer report concludes that there not only were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that the rumors put around by the Bush administration and by Fox Cable News that the WMD was sent to Syria are unsubstantiated. (By this point in the story, we may take that to mean flatly "false," or perhaps "lies.") I never thought the Syria story made any sense. You can't truck off thousands of tons of chemical weapons to Syria without being observed (we do have satellites that take a pretty good picture). And the Iraqi nuclear program was dismantled by the UN inspectors from 1991. There's no evidence of a biological weapons program after about 1995. So what exactly was transported to Syria? It was just a pretext put about by the crowd that wants American boys to die fighting in Syria for some vague geopolitical or economic goal (or just to give Ariel Sharon the elbow room to annex ever more Arab territory).

  Juan Cole post

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