Triangle Trade By: Mark W Adams

Tuesday: 27 Iraqis Killed, 143 Wounded

Ara's recent post on the Armenian Genocide Resolution and the media drone of concerns about offending the Turks reminded me of a song from the musical, 1776!

Then, it was the movement of Molasses to Rum to Slaves that drove the despicable commerce no one wanted to talk about in polite company -- but provided that polite society with all their creature comforts.

Today, much has changed, yet a little talked about triangle trade remains. Poppies to Drugs to Weapons.

And Turkey is right in the middle of it all.


Our foray into genocide, the near obliteration of the Native American population, was just getting started in the late 18th century, but was nearly complete before we dropped the slave trade. And don't kid yourself. We didn't suddenly grow a collective conscience in 1865. The industrialization of the country made slavery an outmoded business model. It was no longer as profitable as mechanization, nor could it weaponize itself as efficiently as the result of the Civil War makes clear.

And we stopped killing Crow and Blackfeet and their brethren around that time because there weren't enough of them left on the land we wanted to cause us too many more problems. The best defense against African and Native Americans from any effective insurgency back then was the ease of telling the "good guys" from the darker skinned later-day "terrorists." Old white men with guns have been the most dangerous people on the planet for quite some time.

The Ivory Coast and slaves have been dropped from the dance heard in 1776! U.S. made guns and other weapons are now packed into crates and sent out to sea instead. Caribbean sugar plantations don't supply the raw materials for this lucrative trade, and although the South American cocaine providers would like a piece of the real action, it's Afghan poppies that rule.

Turkey is where it all comes together. Where the guns are bought and sold on the black market, and where the poppies become heroin and shipped out in exchange for the hard currency needed to supply the arms salesmen, laundering the cash in the process.

There are folks that see this pattern, noting that Valerie Plame's old front company for her non-proliferation work, Brewster Jennings, was smack-dab in the middle of this. There's more than a lot of speculation that burning her, along with her group, was no accident and had little to do with her husband's work running down rumors of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. Throw in some shady trade in nuclear weaponry, and the world suddenly looks like a much darker place. We aren't the shining light for anything when views through that lens.

So why the apoplexy over a declaration of the obvious, that an official policy of eliminating the Armenian race was carried out by Turkey, and resulted in the extermination of 1.5 Million souls? Does the prospect of the collapsing black underbelly of their wealth, funneling heroin and arms through the Bosphorus Straits, shake the money-lenders of the Carlyle Group? Or worse, does a more belligerent Turkish stance towards us threaten to expose just how involved our government and major financial and industrial institutions are in this nefarious business.

Is it a coincidence that after 9/11, but before we invaded Iraq, George Bush Sr. led a delegation of Carlyle group investors, pros at blurring the lines between private industry and government policy, on a junket to Turkey. They negotiated a deal with with one of Turkey's largest conglomerates dealing in energy, telecommunications and . . . defense. Go figure.

Interesting aside, Shrub Junior once was on the board at a Carlyle company that provided meals to airplane passengers. True to form, it never made a profit. (Where did they get this idiot.)

Carlyle has become our nation's 11th biggest defense contractor. Nothing of note there except who their primary customers are -- Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Yes, that Turkey, the jumping off point for most of Europe's heroin, 90% of what gets into Great Britain originates there as opium and isn't consumed there is either shipped on or converted into heroin for further distribution.

Are the Bushes and their cronies drug dealers? Of course not. Nevertheless, they own the same share of complicit guilt New England rum importers did when the never-talked-about slave/mollases/rum triangle-trade made polite society possible for the sons and daughters of the American Revolution.