The Neo-Ottoman Empire

This article describes US policy to encircle Europe through Islam Fundamentalism. The main problem for US is a Secular Turkey which it will try to replace with an Islamic Republic Turkey modelled on Iran.

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Islamic Fundamentalism Made in USA
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The Neo-Ottoman Empire

By Joseph E. Fallon

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

April, 2006

Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization.

Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign policy pursued by the United States under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Like a contagion, U.S. foreign policy, beginning with the Clinton presidency but culminating in George W. Bush and his neoconservative administration, sought to infect the rest of the world with nothing less than absolute and permanent nihilism. Neocon ideologue Michael Ledeen spells it out plainly:

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Over the past half-century, as the vitality of Christianity and the nation-state waned in Catholic and Protestant Europe, Eastern Europe, with the fall of communism, saw a revitalization. Having triumphed over the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union, Orthodox Christianity has the potential to rescue the rest of Europe.

Christianity and national identity, in general, and their rebirth in Eastern Europe, in particular, represent an obstacle to Washington’s drive for "benevolent global hegemony" and a threat to its ideological legitimacy. Like Carthage, Europe must be "destroyed" if the United States is to advance her "historic mission."

By encouraging the European Union to admit Turkey, a nation of Muslims, into its ranks, U.S. foreign policy denies the reality that Europe is historically Christian. In a 1999 trip to Turkey, President Clinton announced:

"The United States is not a member of the European Union but I have constantly urged European integration to move further and faster, and that includes Turkey. There are still those who see Europe in narrower terms. Their Europe might stop at this mountain range or that body of water or, worse yet, where people start to worship God in a different way. But there is a growing and encouraging consensus that understands Europe as an idea as much as a place.'

In a 2004 trip to Turkey, President George W. Bush declared that "Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a passing myth of history."

In supporting E.U. membership for Turkey, Washington emphasizes Turkey’s history of secularism. That secularism is weak, however. The Turkish military, the source of the country’s secularism, has staged a coup once every ten years to overthrow elected Islamic governments and repeatedly purges its own ranks of suspected Islamic fundamentalists and sympathizers. A secularism that can only be maintained at the point of the bayonet will eventually crumble.

Turkey has a population of 70 million (only Germany and Russia have larger populations); 50 percent live below the international standards of poverty; 27 percent are younger than 15; and the combined unemployment-underemployment rate exceeds 16 percent.

Since the European Union allows the free and unlimited movement of peoples among member states, the admission of Turkey would be a disaster for Europe. Millions of Turks, including Islamic extremists who would use Turkey as a conduit, could then move freely into any of the 25 European member-states. Under E.U. law, Europeans would be unable to stop this invasion of their homelands.

Already, the Turkish military has returned to the Balkans, if only with a symbolic presence, for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In 1994, as a result of pressure from the Clinton administration, the United Nations agreed to deploy 1,500 Turkish troops in Bosnia despite objections from Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia. Turkish troops have also been deployed to Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia.

Most revealing was the justification officially given by the "secular" government of Turkey for its interventions. Appealing to both irredentism and Islamic fundamentalism, it declared: "Turkey is [the] spiritual and cultural inheritor of the Ottoman Empire which had ruled the region for centuries." This neo-Ottoman-ism was institutionalized in the Southeastern European Cooperation Process, the Multinational Peace Force Southeastern Europe, the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, and the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative.

U.S. foreign policy seeks to deny the legitimacy of European nation-states. Gen. Wesley Clark, former commander of NATO, declared that "There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."

Paraphrasing Marxist theory on the withering away of the state, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott decreed (in a speech delivered in 1999) that

The old Westphalian system of nation-states—each sovereign exercising supreme, absolute, and permanent national authority—is giving way to a new system in which nations feel secure enough in their identities and in their neighborhoods to make a virtue out of porous borders and intertwined economies and cultures.

Our foreign policy also acts to undermine European nation-states by creating a series of Muslim states in the Balkans, the "Green Highway" linking Turkey to the heart of Europe. This has the further advantage of crippling Orthodox Christianity, an ideological threat to U.S. "benevolent global hegemony," by devastating and fragmenting the Balkans, an historic homeland of Orthodoxy, through wars, sanctions, and military occupation.

It started with Bosnia. Although Christian Croats and Serbs constitute 51 percent of the population of Bosnia, their right to national self-determination—for their areas to secede from Bosnia as Bosnia had seceded from Yugoslavia—was vehemently opposed by the Clinton administration. The U.S. government entered into de facto alliances with Islamic jihadists, Iran, Afghan mujahideen, and Lebanese Hezbollah to arm Bosnian Muslims, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo, to preserve a united and Muslim-dominated Bosnia in the heart of the Balkans.

Next was Kosovo. Here, Washington reversed its position on political legitimacy: In Bosnia, it was multiethnic statehood; in Kosovo, it became national self-determination. The Clinton administration, in alliance with the KLA, an Albanian paramilitary listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, engineered a war in Kosovo as well as the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs and the destruction of their homes, churches, convents, and monasteries.

The stage was set for Macedonia. Replicating their successful war in Kosovo, the U.S. government and the KLA won Albanian "autonomy" in Western Macedonia. Next on the list for "liberation" are southern Montenegro, southern Serbia, and northwestern Greece.

It does not end there. Turkey, asserting its neo-Ottoman prerogative, claims to be the protector of Turkish minorities in Bulgaria and Greece and, by implication, to have a right to intercede on their behalf. In pursuit of empire, Washington embraces neo-Ottomanism as it seeks to impose an Islamic ascendancy over parts of the Balkans.

Empires are expensive and ephemeral. It is madness to acquire them. Yet that is the objective of U.S. foreign policy. It is madness to punish allies and reward enemies, for that imperils our national security. Our foreign policy validates Euripides: "Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad."

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the April 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order,

© 1992, 2004. Pluto Press Ltd. Pages 171-174.

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President Carter named the Bilderberg group's George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special WhiteHouse Iran task force under the National Security Council's Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie from the CIA was one of the lead 'case officers' in the new CIA-led coup against the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier.

Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis,then on assignment at Princeton University in the United States. Lewis's scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines.

Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an 'Arc of Crisis,' which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.

The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American, Brzezinski, taking public 'credit' for getting rid of the 'corrupt' Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.

During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah's government and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British 'offer' which demanded exclusive rights to Iran's future oil output, while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. With their dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end, Iran appeared on the verge of independence in its oil sales policy for the first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere. In its lead editorial that September, Iran's Kayhan International stated:

In retrospect, the 25-year partnership with the [British Petroleum] consortium and the 50-year relationship with British Petroleum which preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for Iran =80¦ Looking to the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should plan to handle all operations by itself.

London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the Shah's regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels per day. This imposed dramatic revenue pressures on Iran, which provided the context inwhich religious discontent against the Shah could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British and U.S. intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers at this critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production.

As Iran's domestic economic troubles grew, American 'security' advisers to the Shah's Savak secret police implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the Carter administration cynically began protesting abusesof 'human rights' under the Shah.

British Petroleum reportedly began to organize capital flight out of Iran, through its strong influence in Iran's financial and banking community. The British Broadcasting Corporation's Persian-language broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC 'correspondents' sent into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria against the Shah. The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran during this time. The British government-owned broadcasting organization refused to give the Shah's government an equal chance to reply. Repeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result. Anglo-American intelligence was committed to toppling the Shah.

The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been flown into Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his repressive theocratic state to replace the Shah's government.

Reflecting on his downfall months later, shortly before his death, the Shah noted from exile,

I did not know it then - perhaps I did not want to know - but it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is what the human rights advocates in the State Department wanted =80¦ What was I to make of the Administration's sudden decision to call former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an adviser on Iran? =80¦ Ball was among those Americans who wanted to abandon me and ultimately my country._[1]_ (http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html#_ftn1) [1]

With the fall of the Shah and the coming to power of the fanatical Khomeini adherents in Iran, chaos was unleashed. By May 1979, the new Khomeini regime had singled out the country's nuclear power development plans and announced cancellation of the entire program for French and German nuclear reactor construction.

Iran's oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in the critical daysof January 1979 was also cut by some 2 million barrels per day. To add to the pressures on world oil supply, British Petroleum declared force majeure and cancelled major contracts for oil supply. Prices on the Rotterdam spot market, heavily influenced by BP and Royal Cutch Shell as the largest oil traders, soared in early 1979 as a result. The second oil shock of the 1970s was fully under way.

Indications are that the actual planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup in London and within the senior ranks of the U.S. liberal establishment decided to keep President Carter largely ignorant of the policy and its ultimate objectives. The ensuing energy crisis in the United States was a major factor in bringing about Carter's defeat a year later.

There was never a real shortage in the world supply of petroleum. Existing Saudi and Kuwaiti production capacities could at any time have met the 5-6 million barrels per day temporary shortfall, as a U.S. congressional investigation by the General Accounting Office months later confirmed.

Unusually low reserve stocks of oil held by the Seven Sisters oil multinationals contributed to creating a devastating world oil price shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per barrel in 1978 towards the astronomical heights of $40 per barrel for some grades of crude on the spot market. Long gasoline lines across America contributed to a general sense of panic, and Carter energy secretary and former CIA director, James R.

Schlesinger, did not help calm matters when he told Congress and the mediain February 1979 that the Iranian oil shortfall was 'prospectively more serious' than the 1973 Arab oil embargo._[2]_ (http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html#_ftn2) [2]

The Carter administration's Trilateral Commission foreign policy further ensured that any European effort from Germany and France to develop more cooperative trade, economic and diplomatic relations with their Soviet neighbor, under the umbrella of détente and various Soviet-west European energy agreements, was also thrown into disarray.

Carter's security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, implemented their 'Arc of Crisis' policy, spreading the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout the perimeter around the Soviet Union.

Throughout the Islamic perimeter from Pakistan to Iran, U.S. initiatives created instability or worse."

-- William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, © 1992, 2004. Pluto Press Ltd. Pages 171-174.

_[1]_ (http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html#_ftnref1) [1] In 1978, the Iranian Ettelaat published an article accusing Khomeini of being a British agent. The clerics organized violent demonstrations in response, which led to the flight of the Shah months later. See U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies, Iran. The Coming of the Revolution. December 1987. The role of BBC Persian broadcasts in the ousting of the Shah is detailed in Hossein Shahidi. 'BBC Persian Service 60 years on.' The Iranian. September 24, 2001.

The BBC was so much identified with Khomeini that it won the name 'Ayatollah BBC.'

_[2]_ (http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html#_ftnref2) [2] Comptroller General of the United States. 'Iranian Oil Cutoff: Reduced Petroleum Supplies and Inadequate U.S. Government Response.' Report to Congress by General Accounting Office. 1979.