Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

You mean because he got shot and that why he for the time being has the American sympathy, well that will not last long as he sure will do something that will offend the American people.

Maybe the would-be assassin was Mark David Chapman ITTL...

That comment sounds like something a certain radio show host with the name HS would say (Howard Stern)...

Anyway, James G, waiting for more of this good story...

(78)

August 1982:

Saddam was back. To be honest, he had never really gone away. International attention shone upon him and his actions once again and Iraqi’s leader didn’t shy away from it. He was eager to get back in Moscow’s good books. They had turned on him and he had sworn revenge… yet was secretly frightened that they should really turn on him. He wanted to please them, to do something so favour would be shown again from Moscow. Nonetheless, Saddam’s own survival and his own ambitions remained paramount throughout. It had been a difficult couple of months for Saddam with economic troubles biting hard due to the sanctions on Iraqi oil from the West. There was a lot of smuggling going on and Iraq was making some money, just nothing like it had been before. Saddam needed a fix to that issue though he been distracted by the actions of Israel. The Zionists had attacked Iraq! They sent their fighter-bombers, gifted to them by the Americans, to blast apart his nuclear reactor. Osirak was left a ruin. The French had long gone – they had stopped supplying him with arms too – and the Israeli F-16s smashed apart his reactor. Saddam had raged at them and threatened Israel with a ‘sea of fire’. There had been an attempt by one of his ministers, a fussy little man, to suggest to others in the Iraqi government that maybe Saddam’s time was up. The Iraqi health minister had been dealt with, brutally. His conspiracy had spread though and needed violent suppression to keep everyone else in line. Finished with that matter, and still looking to Moscow for a nod of appreciation plus to Israel for vengeance, Saddam turned northwards. The Arabisation campaign against Iraqi minorities – Kurds, Assyrians, Yezidis and others – had been stalled by problems in Iran, the Kuwaiti invasion and domestic issues. It was now back on. Saddam unleased his security forces against them, paramilitary units loyal to his regime. The Iraqi Army was kept back from direct fighting and when the People’s Army got into trouble, the army used their artillery and rocket launchers from afar. The Iraqi Air Force fielded Soviet-supplied MiG-23s and Sukhoi-22s (Saddam only had a few Mirage F-1s in service before the French arms embargo hit) and these were used as well against dug-in rebels. Iraq was for all Iraqis, all Iraqis united under Saddam’s guided rule. Those who wished to be separate within the country would face his wrath. There was small and selective use of chemical weapons as well: Saddam used them as a terror weapon against some of the most stubborn resistance to Arabisation.

Iraq’s minorities fled if they were able. They went into the mountains high-up in northern Iraq but also across the borders. Communist Iran turned them back better than Assad-led Syria could with the latter border being more leaky than the former. Then there was the Turkish border, over which most of the refugees escaping Saddam’s war on them fled to. Turkey was as unwelcoming to them as Iran and Syria were. These people, especially the Kurds, weren’t wanted in Turkey. They came though, fleeing what they believed was certain death if they stayed. Those Kurds arrived in Kurdish areas of the Turkish state and right into the middle of a long-simmering ethnic problem in southeastern Turkey. Some of those Kurds from Iraq joined with Turkish Kurds – according to the government in Ankara, there were no Kurds, only Turks – in fighting against the Turkish government. In terms of scale, it was nothing like it was back over the border in Iraq. Still, at a local level, the fighting was brutal. Turkish Kurds used the Iraqi Kurds as cannon-fodder where possible to soak up government bullets and give them some breathing space. They also sent some Iraqi Kurds to Istanbul using the underground network throughout the country to move them that far. Such men met up with a cut-out in Turkey’s biggest city and were given guns. A mini-bus drove them to a marketplace and then drove off. A horrible little massacre occurred. As can be imagined, Turkey was furious. There was a civilian government in Ankara, one put in-place by the military (which had previously taken power in a coup only to hand that back over to placate the West). Those civilians were the right sort for the Turkish Armed Forces to accept as leaders of the country and who understood that if they went wrong, the military would remove them. When Iraqi refugees came over the border – Iraqi’s, not Kurds because Kurds don’t exist! –, the government had ordered the border closed. After the massacre of innocent civilians in Istanbul, the government cracked down hard nationwide, especially in the country’s southeast where Kurdish rebels were taught a lesson they wouldn’t forget for some time. Their actions got a thumbs-up from the military. There were still more Iraqi refugees coming over the border though, driven onwards by Saddam’s actions. Turkey’s generals were briefed by Israeli contacts – the two countries shared much intelligence and had secret military ties too – that Saddam was doing this on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Israelis said they had Saddam doing this to destabilise Turkey. That wasn’t true: Saddam was doing on its own and the Soviets weren’t involved, just later to benefit from it. Regardless, the Turkish generals believed this faulty intelligence. It made sense to them. It played into the narrative of what else the Soviets were up to.

Turkey was in the same position as West Germany was. The country was on the frontlines in the Cold War, with the Soviet Army pushed right up against Turkey’s borders. The Soviets were actually almost surrounding them too with their own border plus the Black Sea being neighbours then Bulgaria, Iran, Iraq & Syria all Soviet allies and sharing land borders with Turkey. Soviet military exercises in Bulgaria, the Black Sea and Iran concerned Turkey. Then there was Greece. The Greeks had withdrawn from NATO by activating Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty. At first, Turkey had celebrated. Greece – the foremost enemy of Turkey, even beyond the Russians / Soviets – had shot itself in the foot turning its back on its allies in the manner that it did. But then the Turkish generals started to look again at the map. Many of them got it into their heads that Greece would align itself with the Soviet Union: Greece and Russia were historic allies. That made sense if you were a xenophobic, militaristic nationalist: in other words, most of the Turkish General Staff. Greece as a Soviet ally meant Soviet naval access to Souda Bay naval base in Crete and then Soviet troops & aircraft on Cyprus too. Turkey would truly be surrounded! The Soviets were doing none of this, but the Turkish generals were convinced that they could see the future. A Soviet oil deal struck with Greece was the first sign, the first positive proof of the coming Athens-Moscow axis. Turkey’s real rulers were certain of this. They linked it to their Armenian terrorist issue as well. For many years now, Turkish diplomats and officials had been murdered abroad while bombings had occurred of Turkish interests. These had happened throughout Western Europe and into the United States as well. The attacks, by two main groups, were carried out by the Armenian Diaspora spread globally. Where was Armenia though? That’s correct, inside the Soviet Union and on Turkey’s frontier. Those terrorists claimed that they were independent of Soviet control and had nothing to do with Soviet Armenia. To the Turkish generals, that was a lie. Of course the KGB had an influence with the terrorists… even if the terrorists didn’t always know it. Further attacks took place throughout 1982 including one the day after the massacre in Istanbul where the Turkish ambassador and his wife in the Netherlands were both shot and killed. The Dutch, a fellow NATO ally, were fast to act and caught the gunman. He would be tried and jailed, the Dutch said. Turkey wanted him brought back to Turkey to be tried in Turkish courts and given the death penalty. The Netherlands wouldn’t do that and, to be honest, due to past experience with Western European governments on similar matters, this time the Turks didn’t push that effort really hard despite saying in public they were. What they did was have the prime minister and foreign minister – both given the military stamp of approval – go to the Americans. Like West Germany, Turkey formally approached the United States seeking help and support against their woes. The aim was to convince Kennedy of the Soviet threat to their country. Turkey considered itself in a good position as a strong and firm ally. Moreover, recent Turkish good relations with Israel – one country which always had Kennedy’s cast iron support – were made use of in the approach too. Those generals who were making the decisions for Turkey’s secure future believed, like Chancellor Schmidt from West Germany did, that Kennedy was reasonable and naturally see their point of view once it was carefully explained to him. The fools.

Do they see a Red Greece.

Wait so Greece is red and it did not take a civil war like last time to do it.

Nothing like good old paranoia (and of course, bloen up suspicions) to cause a whole lot of trouble.