And you guys sneered at ErdoÄanâs dreams of the Ottoman Empire, and Boltonâs idea of redrawing maps to bring all the Sunni areas under one government.
Still do. Turkey might invade a portion of the north of Syria and crush the Kurds. Theyâre not going to re-establish the Ottoman Empire - or even absorb Syria.
Funny thing. The CBS ânewsâ this evening, did not say a word about any Turkish buildup along the border. They reran a piece from a day or two ago, about âthe Assad narco stateâ, and a potato chip factory that had supposedly been turned into a drug lab under Assadâs auspices.
Who is going to tell ErdoÄan ânoâ? The group the US and UK call âterroristsâ? And once the Turks have overrun the Kurdish part of Syria, and any more they fell like taking, who will stop them invading the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, where all that lovely oil is? Baghdad canât say ânoâ. Northern Iraq is a âsemi-autonomous regionâ, because Baghdad canât enforce itâs rule there now.
What else did the Saudiâs ante up all that money for wise investment by the first son-in-law of TN&FG? Hmmm?
Syria is the heartland of the Sunni Arab civil population, and they have just been through a very long period under external rule, now have organized experienced men in arms, and truly detest the idea of another external potentate.
Money and arms from Saudiâs and others (Israel very possible on the âdown lowâ) would make Erdogan indulgance of Imperial Ottoman nostalgia very very costly. Could happen, but I do think Edorgan has enough trouble at home and enough satisfaction abroad for now.
If weâre truly talking about resurrecting the Ottoman Empire, even at its last and smallest gasp, it included most of Iraq, Syria, virtually all of Lebanon and Palestine (current Israel and the Palestinian territories) and great swaths of Saudi Arabia.
So, âWho is going to tell ErdoÄan ânoâ?â All of those sovereign nations, not just Syria.
NATO, for one. Erdogan can probably move in there and attack all the Kurds under the guise of fighting terrorist/restoring order. But if he tries to modified the boundaries of his country to include part of what is now Syria, he runs the real risk of getting tossed out of NATO - which is utterly committed to the Westphalian model.
Thereâs also the same forces that said ânoâ to US control of Afghanistan and Iraq. Not the same people, of course, but the same impulse. Syrians are not going to want to be conquered, and have a lot of ways to make it very painful for the conquering nation if one tries.
And as pointed out above, Syria =/= âthe Ottoman Empire.â Lots of other sovereign nations would also have to be taken out - including the militarily powerful (and nuclear armed) Israel and the very economically powerful Saudi Arabia.
Turkey has occupied a big slice of Cyprus since the 70s. Turkey now occupies a small slice of Iraq.
Remember 43 blustering âwe donât need a permission slipâ?
âNobody knows who the other side is, but I do. You know it is Turkey, OK? Turkey is the one behind it,â he said. âAnd those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and thatâs OK.â
âI think Turkey is very smart. [Erdogan] is a very smart guy, heâs very tough,â Trump said, âbut Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost.â
Itâs not the 1970âs any more, and Turkey hasnât annexed or absorbed the small slice of Iraq. The international community generally has a much dimmer view of countries acquiring territory from their neighbors through military means any more, and the past instances where that happened (like Cyprus, definitely like Israel/Palestine) have caused nothing but problems. So Turkey would face a wall of international opprobrium if they tried to adjust their borders to absorb any material part of what is now another country.
Sure. But Turkey isnât the U.S., and the U.S. didnât try to absorb Iraq as a new part of the sovereign territory of the U.S.
Turkey may very well invade Syria to crush the Kurds and dominate what happens in the north of Syria. But theyâre not going to absorb a part of Syria and add it to their borders like some expanding empire of old.
I expect Syria will follow in Libyan footsteps and become a breeding ground of terrorists. The new terrorists will be created by those who bombed them in the destruction of the Assad regime:US, Israel, & Turkey.
Ending Assad has not transformed Syria. It will remain a problem area.
It was late 2013 and the Syrian army had just fired rockets filled with poisonous gas at the town of Harasta, the latest in a series of such attacks on the rebel-held Ghouta regionâŚIt was not the only chemical attack on the Ghouta region that year.
There had been warnings from Barack Obama, the then US president, that the deployment of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would cross âa red line for usâ and trigger a Western military response.
But Bashar al-Assad, Syriaâs fallen president, called the Westâs bluff, launching a series of nerve-agent attacks across Ghouta, the worst of which, a sarin strike, killed more than 1,000 people on Aug 21 2013 in the deadliest night of the countryâs 13-year civil war.
Yet, in what would become the defining foreign policy moment of the Obama presidency, the United States and its main ally Britain shied away from military action.
Saddam gassed Iraqis too. The US didnât care, because Saddamâs regime was useful for killing Iranians. An Iraqi warplane his a US Navy warship with an Exocet missile. No problem. Because Iraq was useful for killing Iranians.
laff break
One of the pump seal companyâs big jobs in the late 70s was a chemical complex near Basrah, Iraq. When Saddam decided to take advantage of the upheaval in Iran, Basrah was pretty much on the front line. One day, the pump seal companyâs rep who had called on the GC for the plant in Basrah, called me up. I say âhey Frank, SODIC called. The Iranians bombed the daylights out of the plant in Basrah. They want you to go over there and work up a replacement parts listâ. Poor Frank about lost it.
Different USian regime. Different priorities. iirc, the price of oil, before the invasion, was about $18/barrel. Talking heads on bubblevision went on and on about, once the Iraqi regime was knocked off, US oil companies would go in, develop the daylights out of the Iraqi reserves, flood the market with oil, and the price would drop. Of course, the exact opposite happened.
Pursuant to that new objective, all evidence that Saddam had gotten rid of all his WMDs was dismissed. The US demanded Saddam bring out his WMDs, which, of course, he could not, as everything had been destroyed, as he said. The UN sent teams in to search for the WMDs. They found nothing. #43 told the UN teams to get out of the country, as he was going to attack. After the war, search teams looked and looked, and found nothing. But, curiously, Fox Noise viewers thought all of the US claims had been validated, WMDs were found.