And if you believe that, there’s a lovely bridge not far from my home in Brooklyn I would like to offer you at a very reasonable price.
“Basically, the biggest problem is that 94 percent of the Turks are opposed to war,” said Morton Abramowitz, who nurtured America’s military cooperation with Turkey as a Pentagon planner during the cold war and later served as United States ambassador to Turkey.
Turkey’s new leaders, he said, “want to delay this as much as possible to reduce their political problems and give diplomacy a greater opportunity while at the same time they want to show their own people that they are making every effort to bring home the bacon.” Their rewards, he added, would be financial assistance or long-term access to Iraqi oil at a discount.
To paraphrase something someone, possibly I.F. Stone, once said, who needs conspiracy theories when the truth is on the front page?
And here’s an interesting perspective, from an Iraqi exile who doesn’t buy the “liberation of the Iraqi people” excuse for a damn minute:
The Bush administration has enlisted a number of Iraqi exiles to provide an excuse for invasion and a political cover for the control of Iraq. People like Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya have little credibility among Iraqis and they have a career interest in a US invasion. At the same time, the main forces of Kurdish nationalism, by disengaging from Iraqi politics and engaging in internecine conflict, have become highly dependent upon US protection and are not in a position to object to a US military onslaught. The US may enlist domestic and regional partners with varying degrees of pressure.