BY ERGUN BABAHAN
SABAH- In 1502, Portuguese mapmaker Alberto Cantino was executed in Lisbon. His crime was preparing a very detailed and accurate map of the Indian Ocean. At that time, the punishment for this crime was death, because Cantino's action resulted in waterways which up to then had only been known to Portuguese sailors being opened to its rivals, and so broke his nation's trade monopoly. The map was later lost, and only found 400 years later hanging on the wall of a restaurant in Madeira. Back then knowledge translated into both power and money, and now too. Turkey was able to carry out a pinpoint-accuracy operation with 50 planes against Kandil thanks to US intelligence and it opening up Iraqi airspace (which is under its control).
After leaving Syria in the late `90s, terrorist PKK head Abdullah Ocalan went to a strange city in Russia. Not Turkey, but the US found out where he was, just as it had on his earlier travels. Maybe the US administration was already eyeing invading Iraq and didn't want a Marxist Kurdish group, and an enemy of then local Iraqi Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani (now Iraqi president), in the way. No matter the reason, the intelligence came from the US, just like in Turkey's latest anti-PKK operation, because the US is a superpower which can listen to telephone conversations worldwide, read all emails and constantly watch every region by satellite. Now it believes that the PKK's being so much in the way in northern Iraq iis harming the local administration and so has started to provide intelligence from the region to Turkey. In other words, this intelligence isn't being shared out of the goodness of Washington's heart. Everything has been weighed and calculated. But in any case, the success of this operation can't be downplayed either. Not every country can carry out a huge operation with 50 warplanes in the middle of the night. Yes, Turkey has the power to do it, but it doesn't have the intelligence, which comes from foreign sources. When Turkey can detect threats to itself using its own satellites, it will inevitably become an influential regional power.