“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
That quote was from the movie The Hunt for Red October. The recently deceased Fred Thompson, playing the American admiral commanding an aircraft carrier battle group, is looking out on the deck of his ship where a fighter plane has just crashed and burned. The American F-14 had bumped into a Russian bomber over the North Atlantic during a time of heightened tensions.
That was fiction, filmed in 1989 and set in the early 1980s.
This morning, while eating my toast, I saw a Russian fighter-bomber, very much like the F-14, go down in flames on the TV news. Turkey had just shot down a Russian plane at the Turkish/Syrian border after supposedly giving it several warnings not to intrude on Turkish airspace.
This was fact, filmed in 2015 and set today.
Turkey, our formal ally, has apparently called for a meeting of NATO this afternoon. If they invoked Article 5 of the NATO charter, we would be at war before this newspaper hit the presses. Article 5 stipulates an attack on one in Europe or North America is an attack on all NATO members. It has been invoked only once, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It’s why Canada found itself deployed to Afghanistan until 2014.
Events in Syria are getting out of control, and one might wonder if we will be lucky to live through it.
Consider in the space of a few short weeks, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew to Russia. Shortly thereafter, Russia deployed its largest military presence beyond its immediate borders in a generation and started bombing. ISIS, in return, snuck a bomb on a Russian airliner full of Russian tourists. Then ISIS attacked Paris in spectacular fashion, and Beirut in what was a footnote in Western media coverage. Russia amped up its bombing campaign to include bombers that were designed to hit us, here in North America. France, another NATO ally, declared war on ISIS, but, to this point, has not invoked Article 5. Within days, France deployed its own aircraft carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean to reinforce its already-deployed forces in the theatre.
Then Turkey shot down a Russian plane.
It’s hard to keep track of who is currently bombing in Syria right now. The list includes Canada (currently), Russia (recently), France (increasingly), United States (continually), Jordan (very angrily, after one of its pilots was burned alive), Turkey (selectively, against Kurds), Australia (really?), Saudi Arabia (menacingly), Bahrain and United Arab Emirates (I’ve run out of things ending in “ly”). Across the border in Iraq, bombs have been dropped by Denmark, the Netherlands and United Kingdom. Iran might even be involved, too. Up to this point, everyone has been of a like mind and only shooting at people on the ground, and not each other, but that ended today.
Seeing the nations of the world gather in battle is unnerving, because there is no real common enemy. Most are targeting ISIS, but some are hitting the Kurds, others (Russia) going after anti-Assad forces. No wonder Europe is now being overrun by refugees. About the only country in the area not involved in bombing is Israel, but they get their pot shots in as needed.
Russian president Vladimir Putin raised a valid point about ISIS, namely, who is buying their oil? Is it the same countries that are currently bombing it? It has to be, because every country surrounding ISIS-held territory is bombing it.
Now Putin is calling the shooting down of his aircraft a “stab in the back.”
This is not good. What most people forget is the hottest days of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, were not just about Russian missiles in Cuba. The Russians were placing missiles in Cuba because America had already placed Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, aimed at Moscow. The resolution of the Cuban missile crisis involved the quiet withdrawal of those missiles in Turkey.
If all of this isn’t enough to give you the willies, remember this gathering of warring nations is not that far from this little place called Megiddo, also known as Armageddon. It’s just a hop, skip and cruise missile launch away from the current area of operations.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
