Israel could have engineered the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks as a plot to corner Turkey on both domestic and foreign policy, according to a senior ruling party official.That a whopping 3%.
“One has to look at which countries are pleased with these. Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents,” Hüseyin Çelik, deputy leader of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the party’s spokesperson, told reporters at a press conference Wednesday.
Following initial reaction to the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, which have revealed diplomatic secrets about Turkey, Azerbaijan, its Middle Eastern neighbors, Turkish officials have started to suspect that “the main cause of these leaks was to weaken the Turkish government.”
WikiLeaks has released approximately 250,000 documents of confidential U.S. diplomatic correspondence to newspapers around the world. Around 8,000 of those documents are from the U.S. Embassy to Ankara.
Yasin Doğan, a columnist for the pro-government Yeni Şafak newspaper, also named the Israeli lobby in the U.S. as the source of the cable leaks.One problem with megalomaniacs is that they think that everything revolves around them.
According to observers, government officials believe the cables leaked through WikiLeaks were selected as part of a comprehensive plan to corner Turkey both in terms of domestic and international politics.
On foreign policy, the release of cables indicating that many Arab countries were in fact in favor of a military attack on Iran to scuttle Tehran’s ambitions to develop nuclear weapons were seen as moves to show that Turkey was alone in defending Iran in the region.
“This situation posits Turkey as the only advocate of Iran not only in Europe but also in the Middle East,” Murat Yetkin, Ankara representative of the daily Radikal, wrote in his column Wednesday.
Yetkin added his observation that Ankara has evaluated the cables as a psychological campaign to push Turkey to take a cooler stance on Iran.
Furthermore, the release of remarks by Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev on Turkey and other remarks that Balkan countries were extremely uncomfortable with Davutoğlu’s frequently heard rhetoric on neo-Ottonamism were also evaluated as moves to weaken Turkish influence in its near abroad.
(h/t Vandoren)