Wednesday, December 21, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Shades of
Sarajevo?
Monday’s assassination
of the Russian ambassador
to Turkey, Andrei Karlov,
by an off-duty Turkish police
officer, raised the spectre of
another assassination, in
1914, on Franz Josef Street
in Sarajevo.
Gavrilo Princip’s assas-
sination of the Austrian
Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
and his wife Sophie, in the
cause of Serbian nationalism,
unraveled the fragilities of an
exceedingly complex politi-
cal construct and resulted,
ultimately, in World War I.
It’s possible to look at
the present state of rela-
tions between Russia and
Turkey, Europe and Russia,
the Arabs and the Turks, the
Russians and Iran, Europe
and the Arabs, the U.S. and
everybody else, and begin to
see many of the same actors
groping around in a similarly
complex — and one might
think similarly fragile —
maneuvering for power and
influence.
What was dangerous in
1914 — and ultimately led
to some 38 million casual-
ties — is even more dan-
gerous in 2016, given the
unprecedented capacity for
killing and destruction pos-
sessed by modern nation-
states. To date, the death
toll for the war in Syria is
estimated at some 400,000
people, including the utter
destruction of Aleppo, and
according to the United
Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR), 4.8
million people have fled to
Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan,
Egypt and Iraq. An addi-
tional 6.6 million people are
internally displaced within
Syria, and some one million
have requested asylum to
Europe alone.
Given the sweeping his-
torical and modern enmities
between Turkey and Russia,
one wonders what additional
horrors could result from
the assassination of a diplo-
mat in an Ankara art gallery.
Could it provoke open war-
fare? The 2015 downing of a
Russian fighter jet by Turkey
seemed to have been papered
over, for the most part, but
how will Putin and Co.
respond to the assassination
of their ambassador by a
Turkish cop?
And what are Russia’s
interests in Syria?
Whatever they really
are — a warm water port in
the Mediterranean perhaps,
a proxy nation and expan-
sion of influence — it seems
probable they are driven by
Eurasianism, which is an
openly resurgent Russian
philosophy that rejects the
west — Europe and America
— as antithetical to the
“true” heritage of Russian
culture and tradition, and
seeks instead to exploit a nat-
ural center of Russian inter-
ests and influence in Asia.
Vladimir Putin is known
to be coached by Eurasianist
ideologists, and we can see
much of that in practical
operation today: Russian
intervention in the Ukraine,
in Georgia, in Chechnya, in
Syria, and a collective politi-
cal and military coziness
with Iran, are all offered as
evidence. (See related col-
umn, page 15.)
If Turkey and Russia do
come to open blows, would
Turkey invoke Article 5 of
the NATO treaty, which
C
provides for collective
defense when a member is
attacked?
One wonders what our
own strategic interests might
be in getting involved, and
whether we would allow
ourselves to be drawn into a
five-sided argument that has
thus far evaded any historical
solution and has every poten-
tial to devolve into another
catastrophic world war.
It is interesting to note
the statement of Archibald
Wavell, an officer who
served under British General
Allenby in the Palestine
campaign, at the conclusion
of World War I. “After ‘the
war to end war’ they seem to
have been pretty successful
in Paris at making a ‘Peace
to end Peace’.” He foresaw,
it seems, the dangerous and
continuing complexity of
arrangements whose fruits
have been ripening for so
long. The legacy of World
War I in the Middle East has
been one hundred years of
continuing crisis.
As of this writing it
appears that cooler heads are
prevailing, at least as they
are reported in the world
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media. But one wonders how
many other young Turks, to
say nothing of anti-Assad
Syrians, are harboring the
same sentiments, and now
emboldened, will attempt
similar assassinations or
even large-scale terror
attacks on Russian personnel
or entities.
And all of this without
mentioning ISIS, who have
demonstrated resilience
by retaking Palmyra, or
intractable Turkish-Kurdish
enmities, or the on-going
battle for Mosul in Iraq, or
the lingering influence and
capabilities of Iranian mili-
tias in a continuous arc from
Lebanon to Baghdad.
What is our interest in all
of this again?
So far, the President-elect
has indicated an unwilling-
ness to engage in the Syrian
conflict, which seems a wise
decision, and promises “we
are going to destroy ISIS,
believe me.” I’m not sure
what that means, maybe
nobody knows what that
means, and maybe it doesn’t
really mean anything, but
17
here’s hoping cooler heads
continue to prevail after this
morning’s horror show.
And here’s hoping that
somehow, in some way, we
can find a way to responsi-
bly develop our own consid-
erable resources to achieve
energy independence. It
seems probable that were we
able to do that, and to reac-
quire some pragmatism in
our foreign policy, dumping
this strange compunction to
“intervene” in internecine
conflicts, or to referee fam-
ily fights, we might be able
to avoid falling into the well
ourselves.
In “Age of Assassins,”
a history of political assas-
sinations, author Michael
Newton writes of Princip’s
murder of the Archduke:
“Out of the deed’s meaning-
less impulse bursts a war of a
horror that none could have
predicted. Some schoolboys
playing the role of doomed
heroes helped topple a
civilization.”
Let’s hope beyond hope
that we can, for once, learn
from history.