[wtc911]

"Southern expansion was a tertiary priority at best. Simple truth of the matter, beyond speculation, is that the Turks were willing to be a MAD missile target at a time when we were not....."

Absolute nonsense. The Soviets had no southern port to the Mediteranean,which made turkey a prime target. Don't take my word for it, allow a quote from Harry Truman; "There is no doubt in my mind thatRussia intends an invasion of Turkey to sieze the Black Sea Straits to the Mediteranean." I doubt you know more about the situation circa 1947-1952 than Truman did.

"The reason for Turkey's odd positioning in WWII is similar to that of Finland -- they were stuck between Nazi Germany and the USSR, so they cut a pact with the lesser of two evils."

Your assertion might bear some truth but for the fact that three months prior to signing a mutual non aggression pact with Hitler the turks signed one with Stalin. The turks however did not fuel the Soviet war machine. It was the Nazis who got the benefits of turkish raw materiel, and turkey who benefited from all that Nazi money as their number one trading partner. Until that is turkey felt the wind shift and declared war on Germany to get favored status with the nascient UN. Oddly, they did not declare war on Russia.

But please, don't let easily verified history cloud your agenda.

[Mortimer Snavely]

The Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote up the following. Take it for what it's worth, read it fairly before condemning it. I hardly think that the Wiesenthal Center has a pro-Turkish ideological axe to grind.

Turkey's Complex Neutrality in WWII