"Ankara stood with Washington" ... just like a dope pusher stood with a drug addict ! (full version)

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Oct 21, 2012 at 10:17

For some reason the comment I had sent appeared incomplete. It ran roughly as follows :

Dr. Pipes wrote :

" During the Cold War, Ankara stood with Washington as a member of NATO even as Damascus served as Moscow's Cuba of the Middle East, an arch-reliable client state. " "

How often do we hear such laudatory phrases? Good old Kemalist Turkey was America's "staunch ally", "a great friend", "a bulwark against communism" etc. etc. It's all this nasty Erdogan the Islamist that has spoilt all of that idyll ! If only one could return to the old good days ! ...

For those who tend to be rather amused than shocked by crass contrast between official wonderlands and ugly historical realities swept under the rug, I suggest two quotes from quite official US documents from 1969. They show best how Turkey in fact "stood" with Washington in those bygone days, i.e. just like the title of this comment suggests.

On September 18th, 1969 Daniel P. Moynihan , Assistant to President Nixon, wrote in a memorandum to John Mitchell , the then Attorney General :

"... if the United States moves with energy and determination we could cripple the heroin traffic in the course of twelve to twenty-four months..

My analysis rests on two points, which I take to be so elemental that we have not grasped their importance.

Point one. Heroin is grown in Turkey.

Something like 80-85% of the heroin entering the United States originates as opium in Anatolia, and is processed into morphine in Turkey. This is not only the major source of heroin, but apparently one of the few possible sources for the high grade drug. Ergo: stop the growing of opium in Turkey.

Point two. Heroin is manufactured in France.

The Turkish morphine is apparently processed in small clandestine laboratories in the Marseilles area and transshipped to the United States".

11 days later , on September 29th, 1969 Henry Kissinger himself noted in a memorandum to Secretary of State Rogers and Attorney General Mitchell mentioned earlier :

" The President is convinced that the problem of narcotics addiction in the U.S. has reached proportions constituting a threat to our national stability. Most narcotics are grown and processed in foreign countries and smuggled into the U.S.; this is particularly true of heroin. Under these circumstances, the President considers that any country facilitating, or in any way contributing to, international traffic in heroin is committing an act inimical to the United States...It would appear that the chief offenders in each category are Turkey and France, respectively..."".. ... ..."

So - leaving France aside - here we are : a US president who considers narcotics "a threat to our national stability" and sees any country involved in drug trafficking in the US as "committing an act inimical to the US" and at the same time Turkey supplying 80-85% of heroin consumed in the US ! And we are to believe the official hagiography of great old US-Turkish relations? Give me a break !

And one more contrast. There seems to be much less schizophrenia and perfidy in the Syrian-Soviet relations than in the Turkish-American ones. To the best of my knowledge unlike Turkey Syria was not posing "a threat to national stabilty" of the USSR in the eyes of any CPSU Secretary General as Turkey for the US implicitly did in the words of the president himself. In exchange for Soviet assistance Syria didn't pay back by flooding the Soviet Union with its heroin as Turkey acting under the cloak of friendship and alliance did with the US.

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