The first Muslim country American President Barack Obama will visit is not Indonesia, as everyone had previously thought, but Turkey.
Indonesia will be disappointed, but just look at Turkey’s special status: It is a secular Muslim country, bordering both Europe and Asia, and also a NATO member and striving to join European Union. It is not difficult to see why Mr. Obama decided against Indonesia, the country where he spent his childhood, and instead chose Turkey for his first presidential visit to an Islamic country.
When Hillary announced Mr. Obama’s plans to visit Turkey, she also explained that America wishes to seek Turkey’s help to resolve the issue with Iran. Turkey agreed almost immediately to be the middleman between America and Iran.
Obama has consistently showed good will towards Iran since he took office and has expressed his openness to having direct dialogue with Iran. However, Iran has yet to react positively to this. The key factor in Iran’s coldness in this situation is America’s relationship with Israel, which worries Iran.
America values the importance of Turkey’s strategic location, having also taken advantage of it in the past to attack Iraq with Turkey’s aid. Moreover, Turkey is not only close to Iran, but it also maintains a good relationship with Israel, and has facilitated indirect dialogue between Israel and Syria. Now America wants Turkey’s help to bridge communication between the Muslim and Christian nations, linking the United States and Iran together.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once revealed unintentionally that during Bush’s administration, Iran’s president sent Bush a message through the prime minister, conveying the intention to resolve the hostility between the U.S. and Iran. At the time, Bush was suspicious about Iran, so no further action was taken. But now things have changed; America and Iran are just waiting for the right mediator.
The fact that America first sought help from Russia and is now turning to Turkey shows that Obama’s administration is very eager to solve this knotty problem with Iran in order to facilitate their plans in the Middle East. Whether America and Iran are able to reconcile will shape the future of Middle East.
america’s plans for the middle east is 40 years of oil reserves in iraq.
we are leaving 50 thousand troops there to protect our oil which we have paid dearly for in treasure.
few will undersand my words very few.
if mc cain has won president he would have went after the iran oil.
obama is not so greedy. without cheap and available oil we in america become a third rate country.
iraq now becomes a colony of the united states. we have 700 bases around the world we are not about to leave iraq to iran. there are over 60 bases being planned for iraq.
we dont keep all those iraqi gov officials in the protected green zone for nothing. we pay them well to sell out their countries resources to the highest bidder.
It also turns out that the Pentagon now has a plan that may involve using one of Iran’s ports as a secure supply route for Afghanistan!
Hahahaha! I cannot wait to see how they are going to sell that to the American public after demonizing Iran for 8 years!!! (or more depending how you look at what we have done to them for 50 years)
Yep, turns out the Taliban has been very successful at disrupting the current supply route and the alternative route they were counting on (one of the “stans” has just said “Heck no!” to a proposed base. I guess they value their Russian relationship over ours.
I wonder how the Khyber Pass problems are affecting the pipelines that we “paid” so dearly for in Afghanistan?
PS This whole “empire” thing does not seem to be going so well at the moment. I do find it a lot more interesting than all of the crappy TV shows.
afgan will be obama’s vietnam.
the afgan’s have the mountains and safe havens to protect them like the vietnamese had the jungles.
they sent the russians packing and will send us packing.
but not until we spend a trillion dollars there.
europe is beginning to see a no win situation there.
it will take americans much longer to see. ie dont want another vietnam like loss. ego thing.
we americans did not learn from vietnam maybe we will learn from afgan. dont count on it look how long it took europe to learn.