By Richard Cottrell

Contributing writer for End the Lie

NATO’s willingness to include Israel in a war convoy designed to isolate Iran has brought Turkey to the point of seriously re-thinking her membership in the organization. Ankara used the Article 5 solidarity clause to veto the move – only to be ignored.

This is the first veto exercised in the 60 year history of the NATO alliance. But it was clearly more important from perspective of NATO planners to continue the surreptitious expansion of the ‘alliance for peace’ to embrace Israel.

Turkey’s relations with Israel have been in the deep freeze since Israeli commandos attacked a Turkish sponsored Gaza humanitarian relief flotilla in 2010, killing nine Turkish citizens. Diplomatic relations are effectively shut down. Military co-operation is suspended by the Turkish side, much to the fury of the United States.

I have been saying for almost two years that Turkey’s full membership in the NATO alliance should no longer be taken for granted.

She has regularly adopted a pick and choose attitude to NATO war games, notably the unprovoked attack on Libya last year. She has courted disfavor by interfering in Iraq.

She is out of line with US policy in Egypt and along for the ride in Syria only so long as it suits her. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regular feting of the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has more than infuriated Washington. It is seen as an intentional challenge to America’s self-promoted paramount position in the Middle East.

Such provocations in the past have caused the US to intervene directly in Turkish politics, in 1961 and 1989, when US-backed soldiers overthrew legally elected governments. In 1961 the premier Adnan Menderes and two colleagues were lynched in a military jail. The 1980 putsch was followed by a wave of mass detentions. Thousands perished in detention camps.

The veto crisis is, on the surface at least, the cause of a potential rupture, raising the prospect of an embarrassing resignation of an alliance member. Remember, Turkey boasts a powerful, well-armed military, second only to the US force in Europe, so her loss would be considerable.

But I believe the causes of the crisis run much deeper. And certainly the affair bears all the indications of Erdoğan seeking an excuse to make something close to a unilateral declaration of independence.

For the last five years, Erdogan’s soft Islamic AK (Justice and Development) party has been using its overwhelming control of political life in Turkey to trawl the depths of the secret state, in search of plotters seeking to over-throw his government. This is the story of Ergenekon, the successor to NATO’s Gladio secret army that was behind the 1961 and 1980 coups.

It is an open secret in Turkey – and the waves of arrests seems to confirm it – that the US and the military top brass want to bring Erdoğan’s government down because it is considered ‘too Islamic.’ For sure in the past no Turkish leader dared arrest a former chief of the Turkish Pentagon – as Erdoğan did a few weeks back – and throw him into jail on charges amounting to high treason.

So the latest Israeli affair has the clear signs of a crisis waiting to happen. It is impossible for Turkey to co-exist with Israel as a full or even a ghost member of the alliance.

So, she has two options:

One is to simply announce a walk out and resume full independence in military matters.

The second is to adopt the same line of approach followed by the French president General Charles de Gaulle back in the 1960’s, when he too fell out with NATO – and more specifically, the United States.

The issue at that time was de Gaulle’s decision to go ahead with a nuclear striking force independent of the NATO camp. Relations degenerated to such an extent that de Gaulle evicted NATO from its headquarters near Paris, withdrew from the NATO naval battle fleets and then ordered all foreign troops off French soil.

Finally de Gaulle then withdrew France from the NATO operational command, the so-called ‘empty chair’ policy. Technically, France was still a NATO power, in effect with no more than observer status, yet still a fully paid up member.

I suspect that this is the route that Erdoğan – a man with a good eye for history, as befits a descendent of an old Ottoman dynasty – will most likely adopt.  However, I must give a warning.

The NATO supremo during much of the French crisis was General Lyman Lemnitzer. He was fired by John Kennedy as the Pentagon chief of staff because the president suspected (on strong grounds, it may be said) that he was promoting a military putsch.

So the much decorated general was packed off to Europe to run NATO, sentenced to quarantine so to speak.  Lemnitzer was now the arch plotter in a string of attempts, working through the NATO secret armies generally known as Gladio, to assassinate the annoyingly independent and stubborn Frenchman.

My advice to Erdoğan is to watch his back. If he too adopts the ‘empty chair’ approach then he will make himself fair game as an elimination target.

As I explain in my book on Gladio, this is the self-same ‘eliminate chosen persons’ tactic discovered in a secret manual written on behalf of Gladio by the French super-terrorist, Yves Guérin-Sérac, some forty years ago.

Harkening back to General Lemnitzer, a final word of warning. I state in my new book on NATO that probably the most mendacious soldier in the contemporary history of the US military never forgave Kennedy for the humiliating dismissal before he could finish up his second due term as Pentagon chief of staff.

So, whilst supposedly well-occupied in distant Europe, he plotted his revenge on John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was duly rewarded in Dallas on Friday November 22^nd, 1963.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is coming in February of 2012 from Progressive Press. It is available for pre-order on Amazon in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

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