Cheap tactics, murdered truths

Eleven years have passed since the US attack and occupation that held Saddam responsible for the September 11 attacks and, when it could not find the evidence needed to support that responsibility, targeted his overthrow on the grounds that he possessed weapons of mass destruction.

It later emerged, as a scandal, that the Bush administration had fabricated the evidence in order to start this war, but what was done was done. While the war, with all its consequences, continues to hold Iraq in its grip, the first thing it affected and destroyed was the truth.

At the outset the war was linked to the September 11 attacks and justified on that basis, but even though there was not a single finding linking Saddam to those attacks, the US was de facto accepted as having the right to do almost anything on this pretext. The grievance created by the September 11 attacks gave the US the right to distort the facts as it pleased, too.

The punishment the US meted out to the wrong party as retaliation for its own grievance began to serve up, on golden platters, opportunities that al-Qaeda, the party that was supposed to be the real addressee of that punishment, had been seeking in the heavens. After 9 years, the US war machine, which had set out to destroy al-Qaeda, was forced to withdraw having turned the whole of Iraq into a place where al-Qaeda could run wild as it wished.

Let us give credit where it is due: not only to al-Qaeda, but also its official administration, through Maliki. If you like, you can dwell on the irony of it all: after 11 years, Iraq has reached the point of being shared out between two arch-enemies of the US, al-Qaeda and Iran, whom nobody had ever mentioned before.

In that war too, the US administration, trying to persuade everyone what a dangerous neighbor Saddam was, tried to drag Turkey into the war alongside itself. Thank God that Turkey's democratic process was functioning and the common sense and good judgment of society proved decisive, so Turkey stayed out of that war, which had begun by slaughtering the truth.

Those who today suddenly place ISIS at the top of the list of enemies are traveling the same road. They are sending us the invitation to join the war through the PKK's street terror. Through street terror, they are sending us the message that Turkey must mobilize against ISIS.

Since the carrier of the message is the message itself, it is obvious that this war to which we are being invited holds no benefit whatsoever for Turkey. This war promises Turkey nothing but a trap. In the form in which we are being invited to it, this war serves no purpose other than sowing insurmountable walls, irreparable resentments and enmities between Turkey and the peoples of the region.

They say shamelessly that Turkey supports ISIS. This is a cheap tactic aimed at forcing Turkey into a position of having to prove itself, in order to provoke it against ISIS. Egged on in this way, Turkey will plunge into the affair via Kobani to show that it has no tie to ISIS.

These people know very well what they are doing. They also know, of course, what ISIS is, and what their own intentions are. So our words are of course not for them, but for those who may be confused by this cheap tactic. Let us remind them that ISIS was not born, nurtured and brought to its present state in Turkey, but in Iraq, which for 11 years has been governed by the coalition led especially by America and Britain, or by the governments and military forces that coalition set up and oversaw.

Among the weapons used today by the organization called ISIS there is not a single Turkish bullet, but there are plenty of American, British, French and Chinese weapons. Those who try to link Turkey with ISIS must first answer for this.

From the very beginning, there have been plenty of claims, offered as evidence of Turkey's support for ISIS, that some ISIS militants were treated in Turkish hospitals. Yet those who voice these claims should be ashamed of themselves before they cite this as a ground for accusation. Looking at the religion, sex or record of a patient or wounded person who comes to a hospital is, above all, an inhuman attitude. The Hippocratic oath requires doctors not to look at whom they are treating.

We do not know how many ISIS militants have passed through Turkey's hospitals for treatment, but we now know for certain that hundreds of PKK or PYD militants have, and this is not a crime to be defended but an ordinary ethic of treatment that is a source of pride.

A world in which those who make this accusation exist is, in truth, a shameful world.