EDITORIAL

The history of Greek-Turkish relations since 1974 is a succession of “adjustments” which, somehow, always point to one main strategic objective: the ditching of international treaties that nag Ankara (e.g. the Lausanne Treaty and the international convention on the Law of the Sea) and the formulation of a bilateral “good neighborly relations” regime which, unsurprisingly, observes and promotes Turkey’s “legitimate rights” in the Archipelago to the detriment of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Turkey’s “good neighbor and partner,” Greece.

George Papandreou may have been elevated to the darling of bankers, international loan sharks, EU “circles,” and “concerned friends of Greece” for his merciless wrecker’s job on Greek society but, domestically, he continues to sink in the quicksand called “IMF/EU memorandum,” a sinking that even the government-influenced mass media have a hard time concealing from the public.

An ancient Greek saying warned early on that ouden krypton ypo ton ilion (‘Nothing can be hidden under the sun). That Greece’s impending financial implosion was a common subject of discussion among top EU officials for quite some time before the Papandreou regime imposed the odious IMF/EU-engineered memorandum on the Greek people, a fact revealed on October 8 by the Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker, would have been impossible to conceal forever.

The Greek prime minister, George Papandreou the 2nd, was again making his international rounds these last few days, leaving behind the unsavory realities of a country in her death throes, balancing precipitously one step short from no heartbeat, as she is being demolished by a combined IMF/EU recipe of economic death in installments, so that European banks can extract as much cash as they can from her rapidly draining carcass.

The Papandreou government went through a cabinet reshuffle in the early morning hours of September 7 after the usual, nonsense “news”-packed gestation period which, this time around, lasted over four months. In an unprecedented move, a government spokesman announced this “structural” reshuffle shortly before 2 a.m., leading some to comment that Papandreou’s policies and maneuvering are best suited for the hours of darkness, traditionally the time most favored by authoritarian regimes to carry out purges and arrests.

In a televised message to the Nation on August 31, President Obama declared an end to the war in Iraq highlighted by the exit from that country of the last of large US combat formations.

An estimated 50,000 US troops still remain in Saddam Hussein’s former domain, but the White House has made clear these American soldiers are “in-country” to help as advisers only and join Iraqi forces in the rare battlefield engagement under specific guidelines, and then if.