A new wave of anti-American pop culture.

Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described "peacekeeper of God," is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the trailer and its human cargo. "I was making sure they could breathe," he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called the film "pure fiction." But when Turkey's speaker of parliament, Bulent Arinc, attended a premiere of the movie in Ankara, he said it was "a great film that will go down in history." When asked whether the movie meshed well with reality, Arinc told Anatolia, the state news agency: "Yes, exactly."

Naysayers and diplomats can say that Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is just one film, but it's also part of a larger pop-culture trend that has taken root ever since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, a hugely unpopular war in Turkey, which borders Iraq. All last year Turkish bookstores were hard-pressed to keep the best-selling novel Metal Storm on shelves. The novel, written like one of Tom Clancy's international potboilers, depicts a U.S. invasion of Turkey in March 2007. Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are characters, although the U.S. president is a nameless, nap-loving warmonger who defers most of his decision-making to fellow members of Skull and Bones. In the book, whose title is America's name for its invasion, the U.S. military swiftly bombs then overtakes Ankara and Istanbul (the U.S. president, who is also deeply evangelical, aims to restore Istanbul to its Christian Byzantine glory). It's like a nightmare version of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Americans' motive is Uncle Sam's lust for the country's rich borax supply (Turkey is home to 60 percent of the world's borax, a mineral used in weapons, radiation shields, and space technology). In the second phase of its invasion, Operation Sèvres (named after the World War I treaty in which the West gutted the Ottoman Empire), the United States creates a Kurdish state and lets longtime Turkish enemies Greece and Armenia ravage what's left of the country. A lone Turkish secret agent counters by stealing a nuclear weapon and vaporizing Washington. First published in December 2004, the book has surpassed 150,000 copies sold—unheard of in Turkey. "This novel is not just another conspiracy theory; it's a possibility theory," Orkun Uçar, one of the book's authors, told Al Jazeera.

This wave of anti-American Turkish pop culture is so widespread that it has been the sole topic of its own Senate foreign relations committee hearing; Turkey is, after all, a key NATO ally. But if the senators aren't interested in reading Metal Storm, watching Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, or listening to the Turkish rock group Duman (sample lyrics: "What kind of excuse is this? You're after oil again") here's a simpler explanation of what's going on in Turkey: It's not all that dissimilar to what's going on in the United States. Anti-Turkish pop-culture references turn up in, for example, episodes of 24, which started last season with a Turkish national kidnapping the secretary of defense

Are you kidding? The movie is racist (Busey), 24 was made AFTER this racist polemic, and the movie is of the exact same anti american viciousness as anything the salafi kilers DREAM of making.

Turkey needs to figure out if it wants american allies, and wants to be a part of NATO.