And Now, Ahmadinejad Goes to Istanbul

Yes, on Monday Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plans to touch down in Turkey.  Seems like the Turkish and Iranian governments just can’t get enough of each other these days. This visit follows the Turkish-led furor of the past week over the Gaza Flotilla, complete with its terror-linked Turkish “peace activists,” dispatched with the blessings of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a setup for a showdown meant to vilify Israel, no matter how it played out. That followed the sham uranium-swap deal in which the President Lula of Brazil and Erdogan & team of Turkey popped up arm-in-arm with Ahmadinejad in Tehran on May 17th, announcing a bargain that would effectively buy more time for the Iranian nuclear program, without doing anything to stop Tehran’s bomb projects.

And now, Ahmadinejad goes to Istanbul. The ostensible reason for his trip is a three-day summit of the CICA, or Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia. What?! You’ve never heard of it? THE CICA is a forum first proposed to the United Nations in 1992, by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. It has 20 member states, including Israel, Iran, Russia, China, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. And its summit these next three days has all the makings of yet another round of beating up on Israel, while serving to further distract attention from the approaching June 12 anniversary of last year’s rigged presidential election in Iran, and the ensuing protests and Iranian government crackdown, with its bloody shootings, beatings, arrests, torture and deaths.

At this CICA summit, Kazakhstan will be handing off the presidency of the forum to Turkey — providing Erdogan with yet another platform to grandstand as a rising power-broker of that multipolar world which President Barack Obama is seeking for us all. Reuters reports that though Syria is not a member, Syria’s dictator (a.k.a. President) Bashar Assad “is attending as a guest.” A Turkish pro-government newspaper, Today’s Zaman, reports on its English-language online edition that “the agenda of the meeting in Turkey is expected to cover discussions over nuclear weapons.”

Anyone care to bet that this discussion of nuclear weapons  – a la United Nations Nonproliferation Treaty Review — will somehow manage to detour around the nuclear bomb projects of Iran’s terror-based tyranny, and instead focus on disarming democratic Israel?

According to Reuters, Israel is sending a consular official to the CICA summit. Sounds like body armor would hardly be enough.

The CICA shindig — Ahmadinejad, Assad, Erdogan et al – will be followed by, or, as Reuters puts it, “the diplomatic momentum will continue” with, a meeting in Istanbul on Wednesday of Arab League foreign ministers, coming to take part in the Turkish-Arab Cooperation forum.

This is the New Order now taking shape in the places where Obama has been at such pains to apologize for and ratchet down American leadership. Anyone feeling safer now?