Turkey & Nixon
11/5/2001
NY Times
The Turkey Card
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Reached by cell phone in purgatory, where he is expiating his sin of
imposing wage and price controls, Richard Nixon agreed to an interview with
his former speechwriter.
Q: How do you think the war in Afghanistan is going?
Nixon: You call that a war? Light bombing of a bunch of crazies with
beards, based on a policy of Afghanization before you even get started?
That's strictly reactive and purely tactical.
Q: Would you send in a couple of divisions of American ground troops?
Nixon: No. The Bush people are employing the right tactics in their "phase
I" — suppressing terrorist operations, helping the opposition make trouble,
playing for breaks with payoffs and assassinations. What they fail to see
is the global picture. They need to develop a grand strategy.
Q: Which is —
Nixon: Know your real enemy. It's not just bin Laden and his terrorist
cells. It's the movement threatening to take over the Islamic world. Those
beards and their even more dangerous state sponsors want the Saudi and
Kuwaiti oil. That would give them the money to build or buy the nuclear and
germ weapons to eliminate the reasonable Muslims and all the Christian and
Jewish infidels.
Q: How would you stop them?
Nixon: Split 'em, the way we split the Communist monolith by playing the
China card against the Soviets. Your generation's card is Turkey, the
secular Muslim nation with the strongest army.
Q: The Turks have already volunteered a hundred commandos — you mean we
should ask for more?
Nixon: Get out of that celebrity- terrorist Afghan mindset. With the world
dazed and everything in flux, seize the moment. I'd make a deal with Ankara
right now to move across Turkey's border and annex the northern third of
Iraq. Most of it is in Kurdish hands already, in our no-flight zone — but
the land to make part of Turkey is the oil field around Kirkuk that
produces nearly half of Saddam Hussein's oil.
Q: Doesn't that mean war?
Nixon: Quick war, justified by Saddam's threat of germs and nukes and
terrorist connections. We'd provide air cover and U.N. Security Council
support in return for the Turks' setting up a friendly government in
Baghdad. The freed Iraqis would start pumping their southern oil like mad
and help us bust up OPEC for good.
Q: What's in it for the Turks?
Nixon: First, big money — northern Iraq could be good for nearly two
million barrels a day, and the European Union would fall all over itself
welcoming in the Turks. Next, Turkey would solve its internal Kurd problem
by making its slice of Iraq an autonomous region called Kurdistan.
Q: But that would mean new borders, and don't Arab states worry about
dismemberment?
Nixon: Turks are Muslims but not Arabs. When Syria was the base for
terrorist operations against Turkey, the Turks massed troops on the border
and Damascus caved, kicking the terrorist boss out of the country and he's
now in a Turkish jail. And what's the big deal about new borders? Iraq was
a 20th-century British concoction. Only 50 years ago, Israel became a
state, and soon there'll be a Palestinian state. New times, new borders.
Q: Speaking of Israel —
Nixon: Let me say this about that. I'd tell Sharon to annex the Jordan
valley, to protect Jordan, but then to hand over the rest of the West Bank
or he's down the tubes. I know you disagree, Bill, but we're going for the
grand strategic enchilada. Then I'd tell the Saudis and other rich Arabs to
build good housing and plants in Palestine or accept a million Palestinian
immigrants. With Iraq's threat neutralized and Iran coming around, the
sheiks will ante up in a hurry.
Q: But what about punishing bin Laden in Afghanistan —
Nixon: Change the flow of money and power in the Middle East and bin Laden
and his boys will fall into our hands like rotten fruit. Just use this
crisis to reshuffle the deck and break out of the trap. Leapfrog "phase I"
and there'll be no heavy allied casualties, no parades to stop the bombing,
no Taliban, no germ scares. I have to go expiate now. Call me soon about
Russia. How do you turn this damn new phone off? |
