NATO boss praises Turkish war in Syria

Stoltenberg and Erdogan, AFP photo

Today, Dutch NOS TV reports that the boss of the NATO military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, is visiting Turkey to meet President Erdogan.

Stoltenberg praised the Turkish military invasion of Syria; which is in theory against ISIS, but in practice against the Syrian Kurds and their allies, the only effective opponents of ISIS. Stoltenberg claimed that was supposedly self-defence by the Turkish government.

Stoltenberg did not mention the Turkish regime’s killing of civilians in Turkey itself, in Iraq or in Syria. He did not mention the attacks on teachers, attacks on journalists, or other human rights violations in Turkey.

We should not be really surprised about this. When NATO was founded in 1949, one of its founder members was the fascist Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, which waged bloody colonial wars in Africa with NATO support and which taught children to do the fascist salute. In 1967 Greek colonels violently overthrew democracy in a coup according to NATO plan Prometheus. Their dictatorship banned strikes, labour unions, long hair on men, mini-skirts, the peace symbol, the Beatles, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Aeschylus, Socrates, Eugene Ionesco, Sartre, Chekhov, Mark Twain, Samuel Beckett, free press, new mathematics and the letter Z.

The colonels’ dictatorship was welcome to stay on as member of supposedly pro-democracy NATO. As welcome as Erdogan, voted as #1 in a ‘Dictator of the Year’ poll, is now.

Amid growing fears of a region-wide war in the Middle East and a mounting crisis in the European Union (EU), Turkish-NATO relations are under deep strain after an incident at a computer-assisted exercise of NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre, in Norway. Turkish officers found Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan listed as an “enemy collaborator,” and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, on the “hostile leader list” for the exercise: here.

The threat of the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria erupting into a far wider war has increased sharply in the wake of a series of Turkish air strikes against Syrian Kurdish militia forces that are aligned with Washington: here.

JEREMY CORBYN said yesterday that no more British troops should be sent to the Baltic states and urged that the Nato members’ eastern borders with Russia be demilitarised to reduce tensions: here.