With each passing day, the crisis over the shooting down of a US-built Turkish F-4 Phantom aircraft is assuming the importance of a Pearl Harbor moment in the slow-motion run-up to war between the NATO coalition and Syria.
The midnight oil is burning in Ankara this weekend as the hawks of the Turkish High Command and the civilian government wrestle with the contested accounts of how the jet came to be shot down on June 22nd while supposedly engaged on a purely non-combat surveillance mission close to or over sovereign Syrian airspace.
The Syrians at first rushed in with claims that they intercepted one of the fastest jets yet designed, with a top speed of Mach 2.2 and incredible maneuverability, by means of ground-based anti-aircraft fire. Having stuck to this preposterous claim for days, President Bashar al-Assad now says he is “sorry” his commanders downed the jet.
In fact, they had no more chance of hitting the supersonic fighter with short-range ack-ack guns than a Syrian marksman armed with a bow and arrow.The US has admitted that it knows exactly who shot down the jet and with what kind of weapon. Given that the skies of the entire Middle East are under constant scrutiny in the approach to war with Syria and Iran, this is scarcely surprising. In fact it would be seriously remiss if the Pentagon could not identify the culprit within minutes or even seconds of the shooting.However, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the State Department, the White House and NATO are not going to name the unnameable.There can be little doubt, under these circumstances, that Israel is the chief suspect and that Israel is in turn secretly renewing old alliances with the Turkish High Command.
The High Command says there was no missile. Period. Since Turkey also has exceptionally capable surveillance of the skies in her own back yard, it has to be a given that she too knows the identity of the culprit, or at least the High Command does, if not the government, from which the military are politically estranged.Reading between the lines of statements from Air Force Command, it appears the jet was attacked by a device that exploded with such force close to the airframe of the Phantom jet, that it was instantly blown out of the sky.Note this is not a description of an air-to-air missile, but rather, a cannon equipped to fire high explosives. This creates an air burst close to the intended target, either on the ground or in the air.Essentially, in aviation terms it is an air-to-air-fired bomb which can be combined with armor piercing shells. Such a weapon conveniently leaves no tell-tale radar track when used against aircraft.
I have not been able to discover if a weapon of that type is in service, but if something like it was used against the Turkish Phantom, then a new page has been turned in the history of aerial combat.When High Command sources are asked to confirm whether the plane was shot down by a missile, they continue to repeat robotically that there is no evidence whatsoever of a missile from images which are in their possession.Presumably these are the air-to-base transmissions from the doomed Phantom up to its last moments, plus of course radar images.The black boxes may also have been recovered from the sea where the remains of the plane rest almost a kilometer below the surface. The bodies of the two pilots have already been recovered and laid to rest.There is no rational explanation for this incident except a blatant Pearl Harbor ruse to force the pace of war with Syria.The under-sea explorer vessel Nautilus was sent out from her mooring in Bodrum, on Turkey’s Aegean coast (although she is officially based in Yalikavak), to explore the remains of the wrecked with her high-density cameras.Nautilus, which is owned and operated by an independent scientific trust, is equipped with state of the art remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), the perfect devices to prowl around the submarine wreck of the Phantom jet.However problems with the vessel’s under-sea cameras are said to be the reason for her return to port, which of course allows for the speculation to gradually lose impact in the media. Quite clearly, it is the hope of the US and NATO that we shall be left with yet another mysterious unsolved whodunit as short-term memory takes hold.In good time, when the speculation has petered out, the wreckage will be hauled to the surface and the whole story filed away under unsolved crashes.Western intervention in Syria, bar some miracle, is now inevitable. The Flight of the Phantom is one of the most important steps towards that war, since it was clearly intended to jump start hostilities. The party that would most benefit from a fast-track knock-out of Syria, as the first course of a wider conflict to take in Iran, is of course the present warrior administration of Israel.It is rare indeed for the US to effectively scold her main client state in the region. That is what the silence from the US Administration and the Phantom affair is all about.
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