Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our names, been saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Check it out, guys.
On the line, I've got Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy and Focus again.
Lucky for me and you guys, too.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
And you?
I'm doing great.
You know, I like it when you write stuff.
So let's talk about this great piece that you wrote about Turkey.
Well, thank you for saying it's a great piece.
That's a good place to start.
You know, when you look at the Middle East, there have been since the third or fourth millennium B.C., there have been three power centers in the Middle East.
Turkey is one, or Anatolia, and Persia, and Egypt.
This is a crisis in the country that's the largest economy in the Middle East.
It's the most populous country in the Middle East.
It's really the most developed, you think of it as a modern country in terms of industry and that kind of thing.
And of course, it's the member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It's got the second largest army in NATO after the United States.
So things that happen in Turkey are significant.
Well, and it's the rump of the old Ottoman Empire that ruled the whole area.
And they're not Arabs, and that's important, too.
They're Turks and they're Kurds, but they're still dominant in this area that is population-wise dominated by Arabs, right?
Sure.
And of course, as you pointed out, all of that was at one point owned by the Ottoman Empire.
So we're talking about Egypt, except for Iran.
But we're talking about Egypt, we're talking about Saudi Arabia, we're talking about the Gulf and everything else.
And all of Iran.
Yeah.
So anything that happens there is big stuff.
And something really interesting happened.
A couple of years ago, the president, Erdogan, of Turkey, shifted the system, the political system, from a parliamentary system to a strong executive system, similar to the United States and France.
And they had this big campaign around it, and he got just over 50% of the Turks to agree to it.
And it looks like there was a lot of ballot stuffing that went on.
So it's a somewhat questionable vote as to whether or not Turks really did vote to give him all of these powers.
He has used those powers.
More than 10,000 people are in prison.
More than 100,000 people have been fired from their jobs.
He has pretty much crushed any alternative journalism.
I see he just threw six journalists from really a mildly critical newspaper into jail.
And they're looking at five-year, six-year, seven-year sentences, etc.
So he's really become sort of one-man rule.
And the elections that just happened are local elections.
They're not for the parliament.
They're not for the presidency or anything.
They're mainly mayors of cities, governors of provinces, things like that.
And Erdogan just sort of pulled the stops out for these elections.
And he said that Turkey's life is on the line.
We're facing terrorism and Kurdish terrorism.
It sounded like the height of what happened in this country during the Cold War.
The problem was that that's not what's bothering the average Turk.
What's bothering the average Turk is that the economy is in real serious problem.
It's in a recession.
Unemployment rate is 14% nationwide.
Among particularly young people, and particularly young people who are well-educated, it's up around 17-18%, as high as 21%.
And the lira, the Turkish currency, is falling in value to the dollar.
Turkey has borrowed a lot of money in dollars, and so they're trying to pay back these loans with a deflated currency.
And so it's costing them more to do that.
And besides all of those things going on, Turkey's occupying parts of northern Syria.
There are 2-plus million Syrian refugees in Turkey at this point.
What people were really concerned about was not the Kurds and terrorism.
What people were really concerned about is they were concerned about unemployment.
They were concerned about prices for foodstuffs.
And they were concerned about the immigrants, from the point of view that they feel kind of like we're in dire straits economically.
What are we doing in northern Syria?
Bleeding out billions of dollars to occupy northern Syria.
So what happened was that what made this election so interesting is that normally what you had is this split between Erdogan's party, the Justice and Development Party, and he has an ally, a really right-wing, extreme right-wing organization that used to be called the Gray Wolves.
And they assassinated students and trade unionists and communists and Kurds and everything during the 1980s and the 1990s.
And they formed the National Development Party.
They formed an electoral alliance.
And they got just about the same number of votes as they got in the presidential election.
Not the same number of votes, the same percentage of votes, because the number of voters went down a little bit.
The opposition is the party that is sort of the secular Kurds.
The CHP and their center-left, slightly center-left kind of thing.
It's the Republican People's Party.
And they were allied with a right-wing party called the Good Party.
And they turned in about the same percentage of votes as they got in the last election, except that the CHP candidates won all of the major cities, all of the big cities of Turkey.
What happened?
Well, what happened was that the Kurds, particularly led by the People's Democratic Party, the HDP, didn't run any candidates.
And their leaders, who were all in prison, members of parliament who were in prison, urged the Kurds and people on the left to vote for the secular Republican candidate against Erdogan's candidates.
Well, the difference in votes is exactly that.
Istanbul is about 11% Kurdish.
And if you want the difference between the last vote in the presidential election and the fact that Erdogan lost the vote a couple of weeks ago, the difference is the Kurds all voted for the secular Republicans.
They did this in cities all over the country.
And so I've kind of called my column a revenge of the Kurds, because what they did was they provided the balance that shifted control of the cities out of Erdogan's control into the secular Republicans' control.
And it also indicates the enormous strength of the HDP, of this Kurdish party, in spite of the fact that its entire leadership is in jail and its rank-and-file has been fired from their jobs and harassed by the police and everything.
They still were able to turn out people to vote.
It took a great deal of sophistication and I think a strong stomach for the Kurds to do that, because the secular Republicans, the CHP, didn't say anything about Erdogan going after the Kurds and beating them up, and they voted with Erdogan to criminalize, to remove immunity from Kurdish parliamentarians and throw 16 members of parliament in jail.
But still, they went out and they voted this way.
And the important thing here is we're not just talking about the political setbacks, but cities in Turkey are the economic engines of the country.
And so Erdogan has successfully used those engines to keep his party well-padded with money.
A lot of corruption, a lot of cronyism.
He hands out these construction contracts to build the biggest airport in the world, all this kinds of stuff.
And then they kick back, the construction companies kick back the money to his party, the Justice and Development Party, and it allows them to build this sort of electoral juggernaut.
Well, they've just had their juggler vein cut.
And that's why he's so crazy.
And they're pushing right now for a re-vote in Istanbul.
But his party is split on this.
He's pushing very hard, Erdogan is pushing very hard for a re-vote.
Large parts of his party don't want a re-vote.
They think they're going to win it.
They're going to lose worse.
And also I think— And not a recount, a re-vote, you're saying.
Yeah, a re-vote, not a recount.
They've already done the recount.
The recount is these 20,000 votes ahead or something.
I mean, it's not, you know, there's no way, there isn't any way that you can count it that he could win.
They'd have to run the whole election again in Istanbul.
And, you know, this is a guy who's— Erdogan is someone who is not shy about using good old-fashioned thuggery and ballot stuffing.
Good reason to think, though, that the opposition will be even more motivated to turn out for this one if he's trying to cancel the results of the last one, essentially.
Yeah, I think that the people that are in his party that are saying it's a bad idea, I think they're right.
Because it doesn't change— On the face of it, it makes sense.
He still—I mean, Scott, this guy has enormous powers.
You know, he can appoint judges.
He can dismiss city councils.
He can—I mean, he's much more powerful in terms of executive power than Donald Trump.
It's more like the French president, Macron.
You know, they always say the French president is actually a democratic king.
And that's very much what Erdogan is.
But he is—he's got a terrible temper.
And he's mad.
And he—I think he's a little like Trump in this sense.
He's really lost his cool.
And he's pressing to have this rerun.
And his party is now split.
He may—his candidate may get fewer votes next time around.
But it is very dangerous nevertheless, because he could— you know, they could stuff the ballot boxes.
What happened this last time was that for the first time, the alternative candidate, the CHP candidate, the secular Republicans, they turned out tens of thousands of volunteers to sit at all of the voting places.
And then when the votes were collected and put in boxes, they stayed with the boxes every moment so there would be no chance of anybody doing any, you know, shenanigans.
And I think that's what did it.
They didn't do that in the last election, and they lost the last election.
But it's very split.
I mean, Scott, you've got a country that's really about— it's just about 50-50 right down the middle.
And you point out in here—I like this just for the ironic part of it— that, you know, what were these Kurds all doing as this marginal vote, marginal in the important sense of it, vote in these cities?
Oh, they were refugees from previous persecution and war by the Turkic— Exactly.
There used to be an old phrase.
It doesn't apply anymore.
That the Kurds only have one friend, the mountains.
The Kurds were overwhelmingly rural mountain people.
And the Turks chased them out of the mountains into the Turkish cities.
That's right.
They chased them out.
They're now one of the most urban sections of the population.
And so now, you know, this is really the chickens coming home to roost.
You know, this is being hoisted on one's own petard.
You drove the Kurds out.
The Kurds escalating the drug war in Mexico and chasing all the Mexicans into the United States and screaming about that.
Exactly.
Or, you know, pushing the free trade stuff so that you wiped out all of the small corn growers in southern Mexico that had no choice but to come look in the United States looking for work.
I mean, this is really a classic situation.
And it's not clear what he's going to do.
I mean, the thing is, it's hard to bet on what Erdogan is going to do.
He has shown himself in the past to be very flexible.
For instance, he was the person who declared peace with the Kurds back in 2009.
He had a pretty good reputation there at first.
You call him two different Erdogans, the political Erdogan and the autocrat Erdogan.
Exactly.
And he made peace with the Kurds.
The Kurds turned around and voted for the AKP as a result of that, for his Justice and Development Party.
He allowed the Kurds to use Kurdish language on the radio, to use the Kurdish language in schools, to have a lot of trappings of the Kurdish newspapers, to have a lot of trappings of at least pretty robust sovereignty for the Turkish areas.
And that's why this was such a double-cross, because what happened was he expected the Kurds to continue to vote for the AKP.
But when this new Democratic Party, this left Democratic Party, came out, it was organized in 2011, the People's Democratic Party.
In 2015, they broke the magic barrier.
You have to get 10% of the vote in order to get into the parliament.
And they scored 15% or 13% of the vote, 13 or 14% of the vote.
And they got 81 deputies elected.
And Erdogan was denied a majority.
Erdogan's party was still the biggest, but it was sort of like the conservatives in Britain.
They're the biggest party in the parliament, but they don't have a majority.
So what he did was he then turned around and went to war on the Kurds.
And the Kurds have not forgiven him.
They now think that he's completely untrustworthy, and that if it's in his interest to restart a war against the Kurds, he will.
So he's really shot himself in the foot.
And making peace with the Kurds, I don't know.
His alliance with this right-wing nationalist party, these Gray Wolves, these people are crazy on the Kurdish question.
Well, and aren't the Gray Wolves the secular nationalists who were liable to overthrow him in a Turkish-style military coup?
Well, they probably would like to do that.
But they are, right?
They're Kamalists.
No, they're not Kamalists.
No, they're Islamists.
The CHP are the Kamalists, the secular, the kind of middle of the road.
They're vaguely social democratic.
Those are the ones that won the elections in all the major cities.
What do you mean the Gray Wolf guys?
The Gray Wolf guys are very different.
The Gray Wolf guys are a very small part of them, about 10% of the vote.
They're called the National Movement Party.
They got about 10% of the vote.
And they really, they call them the Gray Wolves because during the 80s, they were a militia.
Oh, they were a death squad.
They weren't a militia.
They were just a death squad.
And they went around and they killed Kurds and trade unionists and communists and all sorts of stuff.
I mean, they were just thugs of the worst thing.
That's Erdogan's major alliance.
Now, they're not going to break bread with the Kurds.
They're crazy on the Kurds.
But Erdogan has made them his allies.
And he needs them because without them, he doesn't have a majority in the parliament.
So he's painted himself into a corner, Scott.
Well, maybe he can just attack the Syrian Kurds to take the pressure off.
Well, he is going to do – yeah, but here's a problem there too.
There are two problems with the Syrian Kurds.
One, the Russians have said, we don't want you to attack the Syrian Kurds.
Now, I'm not saying that the Turks are particularly afraid of the Russians.
I mean, I don't think they want to get in a fight with the Russians.
But I don't think that's the real issue there.
I think the real issue is that the Iranians and the Americans are saying, you can't attack the Syrian Kurds.
Well, he doesn't want to attack the Americans.
He's being anti-American right now.
And are the Americans – wait, pardon me.
Are the Americans being very clear to Erdogan about that?
Yeah, they are.
But who knows, Scott?
They're being clear now.
Next week, who knows?
I mean, the Kurds in Syria – Phil Turali said years ago, he goes, I don't know, man.
At the end of the day, Kurds got oil.
Turks don't.
Just because we've been allies with them for 50 years.
Yeah.
And the other thing about the Kurds is that the Kurds don't trust the Americans.
And they have no particular reason to trust the Iranians.
They've always had a close relationship with the Russians, because the Kurdish Workers' Party has always had a close relation with the old Soviet Union.
So there's always been a kind of relationship between the Russians and the Kurds.
So the Russians have been telling the Kurds, you need to cut a deal with Assad.
And you ask him for autonomy, and you ask him for a certain percentage of the oil revenues in your area, and you guys can cut a deal.
And that's what the Kurds are doing.
They've already opened conversations with the Assad regime.
And the Russians and the Iranians would like that.
And very frankly, Assad owes his current position to the fact that the Russians and the Iranians pulled his chestnuts out of the fire.
Right.
So this, Scott, this is a really incredible situation.
And here, I don't know how Erwin is going to extract himself from this.
He keeps talking about he's going to go after the Kurds.
No, I mean, wait, wait, wait.
I mean, you just said it's the perfect solution.
Right, is what you just said.
It is, but it's already questionable.
The Kurds strike a deal with Assad, or Assad, I don't know how you pronounce it.
You're throwing me off here.
Kurds cut a deal with him.
The Syrian Arab Army has at least nominal boots on the ground in that area, and then that becomes Erdogan's excuse to back down.
Okay, as long as they are back within the Syrian state and not trying to be their own independent armed state, then he'll settle for that.
Which I think the Kurds have been happy to settle for all along, even during the war.
They never attacked Assad or drove his men out.
No, no, no.
Right?
They tried to declare independence for a little while.
That's what would get Erdogan off the hook.
The problem is you don't know what Erdogan is going to do.
You know, there's a part of it which I really feel like I'm looking at tea leaves.
I think that's the most rational and logical thing to do.
It would extract the Turks from northern Syria.
I saw a figure that they've spent something like $40 billion in the occupation of northern Syria.
And the Turkish economy is in a recession.
So they're talking to the International Monetary Fund about the possibility of a bailout.
So they're in trouble economically, and they can't afford to continue to do this.
But boy, he's a stubborn guy, Scott.
Erdogan is a stubborn guy.
And I don't know if he's going to do that.
But I think you're right.
That's the logical thing to do.
And if I had to lay a bet, I think that's what I would probably bet on happening.
But, you know, it's— Wait a minute.
So now how far are they along on those talks?
Because I think the Kurds went to Damascus, you know, in the literal and figurative sense, and said, we're doing this back a few months ago, right?
So is that still not—Erdogan hasn't said yet whether that's good enough for him?
He hasn't yet.
You know, because—now, of course, the reason is, the reason why he hasn't said that, is because the election campaign was run on the Kurds are coming, the Kurds are coming, the Kurds are coming.
So he's now caught with the Kurds are coming, there are major enemies, oh no, we'll cut a deal with them, they're okay.
He has to make that shift.
And he can make it.
He has made it in the past.
Will he make it this time?
I don't know, Scott.
That's why they call it Byzantine.
Yeah.
Well, and again, you have domestic politics and all this weird public choice theory, political incentives and things that have nothing to do with real national security policy for Turkey or America or anybody.
You have all these people doing things contrary to their own state's interest.
Yeah.
I mean, like the entire Syria war, for example, which America and Turkey and Israel and Saudi all participated in for years there.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it has, of course, made everything worse.
And in the case of Turkey, you know, they've got now two to three million refugees.
Well, wait, talk about the Idlib province for a second there, because this is sort of a ceasefire situation where you've got the Syrian Arab Army on one side, the Turks on the other, and al-Qaeda in the middle.
And so what's going to happen there?
Well, now, this is the rub.
The Russians have told the Syrians, hold off.
Don't launch an attack into the province, because you're going to come in contact with the Turks if you do.
Russians have also told the Turks, you cannot stay here.
We have a unified state.
We want one state.
You have to accept the unified state.
The Turks says, yes, we accept the unified state.
But they haven't done anything at this point.
So everybody, it's sort of hanging fire.
At a certain point, I think the Syrians are going to make an effort to go in there.
Is, would, in that point, would Turkey go to war against Syria?
It would be very unpopular in Turkey.
The Syrian war is very unpopular in Turkey.
Well, it kind of has been all along, but they did it anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, he gets mileage on the Kurds.
You can always appeal to nationalism and anti-Kurdism and get a reaction from the Turks, but not on the question of Syria.
And people have been opposed to the Syrian war all the way along, and they have a lot of reason to be opposed with all those refugees.
But you're right.
That's the point.
You've got this situation now which is just hanging fire.
At this point, the Russians are keeping the Syrians in check, but they're also telling Turkey that the clock is ticking, and they're going to have to get their troops out of Syria because the Russians and everyone in the region wants a unified state, Syrian state.
Even some of the Gulf capitals are leaning in that direction, Kuwait, Oman.
The real hawks in the Gulf Cooperation Council are the Saudi Arabians, the United Arab Emirates.
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Well, has anybody said what's supposed to happen to all the El Nosfer guys in Idlib province?
That at some point they're going to carpet bomb them or something?
Or they're going to send them all home or what?
You know, I think that's one of the reasons why it doesn't get solved, Scott, because people don't know what to do with those people.
I mean, the question of home, home doesn't want them.
The last thing you want to do.
Oh, sure.
Let's bring five thousand, you know, Al-Qaeda Islamic State, you know, trained people back to our country.
I don't think so.
Well, I don't know, man.
You know, Sarkozy and Cameron and Obama said these guys are moderates.
It's fine.
Oh, yeah, they're moderates.
Yeah, they sure are moderates.
For suicide bombers, they're moderates.
We just recently found out what kind of moderates they are.
All right, wait, say one last thing real quick here about S-400 Russian missiles and F-35 American jets and what that's all about.
Well, what happened was that when the, when NATO wouldn't come in and back up the Turks to try, the Turks were trying to get NATO to come in and shove the Russians out of Syria.
And NATO said, no, we don't think we're going to go do that.
And so, you know, the Turks shot down a Russian airplane and things like that.
And so when they shot down a Russian airplane, the Russians bought in the S-400 system, which is their most sophisticated anti-aircraft, anti-missile system.
At that point, the Turks made a jump, and Erdogan said, okay, we'll be friends.
We'll buy the S-400 system for $2.5 billion.
Well, NATO went through the roof because they said, what are you talking about?
You're going to put the most sophisticated Russian anti-aircraft system in the country of a NATO member, and we have NATO airplanes, including American airplanes, including F-35s, that use Turkish airfields.
They're going to be able to eavesdrop on all of our technology.
And so they said, no, you can't put the S-400 in there, and if you do, you can't have the F-35, even though the Turks have actually invested money in the F-35.
Now, between the two of us, Scott, that's a win-win situation.
The F-35 is a total lemon.
Oh, you mean my pilots won't be falling out of the sky to their deaths?
That sounds like a good deal.
It is just outrageous.
This thing is a complete lemon.
It doesn't perform anywhere, anyhow.
I mean, the Marines did their big thing on it, this big service thing, and checked it out.
And the conclusion they came to, and I'll have to paraphrase a little bit, was basically they said, well, the plane will do well if, when it encounters the enemy, it flees and hopes that its support system shows up.
In other words, if it sees the enemy, it runs for its life in the hope that its buddies show up to bail its ass out of trouble.
And this is the most expensive weapon system in American history, $1.5 trillion.
And one just fell out of the sky two weeks ago, a Japanese one.
Yeah, and they have no idea why.
And then on the day that they debuted it in combat, they blew up some probably innocent civilians in Afghanistan.
And they tried to make a big deal about it for about an hour and a half until another one fell right out of the sky in, I think, North Carolina.
And they decided, let's just not talk about the F-35 anymore today, guys.
And the F-35 that the Japanese lost, and they lost the pilot, too.
The F-35, before that plane went down, there were seven F-35s that they had to abort their flight mission because of problems with electronics, problems with overheating, you know.
Anyway, wait, we're off on a tangent.
Go back to Turkey real quick and finish at that point because I've got to go.
Sorry.
Well, what happened is that we've said that they can't have the F-35 if they do this.
And so, I don't know.
There are Turks saying, well, get the Russian equivalent thereof.
But in any case, it's up in the air.
We'll just see what happens.
Man, very interesting stuff.
Listen, I've got to tell you, I really appreciate it.
And this is a great article, everybody.
I highly recommend it.
You learn so many things in it.
Revenge of the Kurds.
Erdogan's missteps are piling up.
It's at foreignpolicyandfocus, and therefore, at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Halinan.
Thanks very much.
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to ask you about Diego Garcia.
Maybe we'll have to catch up about that next time.
We can do that some other time.
It's going to be there forever.
Thanks for phoning me, Scott.
All right.
Good times, man.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
Con Halinan.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com, slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
