“His presence here has never contributed to Turkish-American relations, and it never will. If we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last.” In his March 17, 2005 column, Turkish journalist Ibrahim Karagul also called U.S. Ambassador Eric S. Edelman
“the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history” and a man who
“acts more like a colonial governor than an ambassador.”It is this
same Eric S. Edelman who recently took it upon himself to overstep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and
reply personally to Senator Clinton’s letter to Gates requesting information on contingency plans for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq
with such an attack that she felt it necessary to take his reply to the press.
Back in 2003, Edelman, who had spent the previous two years in
Vice President Cheney’s office as Principal Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, developing the reasoning for invading Iraq, was
sent to Turkey, arriving shortly after Turkey had decided to not allow the U.S. to attack Iraq from the North through Turkey.
Turkey had spent decades in battle with Kurdish rebels, a party called the PKK that demanded Kurdish independence, with close to 40,000 dead. But their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, had been captured and tried in 1999, and had undergone a change of heart, apologizing for the violence and calling for peaceful solutions. Turkey did not want to be a part of the U.S. war.
With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and its support of the Kurds,
Turkey soon found itself again in battle with the PKK, whose members suddenly were re-armed with weapons made available by the U.S.Today Turkey has 140,000 troops at the border of Northern Iraq and has the United States’ commitment to help fight the PKK, backed up by
Lockheed Martin contracts for more weaponry for Turkey.
And
Edelman and the other Neocons state these wars will not end soon. It is just as they want it. After all, Edelman, like Scooter Libby, was one
of the very special group of Neocons who were commissioned in 1992 by then Defense Secretary Cheney to write the infamous Defense Planning Guidance with Paul Wolfowitz and (now U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) Zalmay Khalilzad. This document proclaimed a
change in U.S. foreign policy, moving away from containment and towards preemptive strike of potential rivals for world power.
It was a response to Bush 1's retreat from regime change in Iraq, and while Clinton was President, the group of intellectual warriors reappeared as the
Project for the New American Century in 1997, complete with a periodical,
The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, and think tanks,
The American Enterprise Institute and
The Heritage Foundation.
Meanwhile,
Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest manufacturer of weapons, provides sizeable incomes for its investors and friends, whose political theories conveniently require wars without end, rearming and rearming. And so there are men like Edelman who thrive by stirring things up.
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