Posted on 02/03/2010 10:58:59 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
•The rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus is only the culmination of the increasingly problematic policies pursued by the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP).
•Two factors in particular seem to have led to Turkey's shift away from Israel and toward Syria. First, Turkey no longer needed Israeli assistance to pressure the Syrian government to change its policy of providing safe-haven to the terrorist Kurdish Worker's Organization (PKK). Second, in the past seven years, once secular Turkish politics have undergone a profound Islamist transformation.
•At the same time, the dynamic between the Turkish military and the state's civilian leadership has changed. No longer does the military have the upper hand. Today, the Turkish military can do little to impact the policies of the Islamist AKP, which promote solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments.
•As Ankara's politics under the AKP have shifted and Turkey has become seemingly less committed to Europe, the state has seen its star rise in the Middle East. Syria's Assad regime likely sees its bourgeoning relations with Turkey as an opportunity to shuffle the existing architecture of regional alliances.
•Perhaps more worrisome is the prospect that Ankara may over time pursue a closer foreign policy alignment with Iran that would undermine U.S. and Israeli regional interests. Ankara's shift toward Damascus and Tehran makes it even more unlikely that Turkey will participate in "crippling sanctions" to help prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon.
(Excerpt) Read more at jcpa.org ...
“The Road to Perdition”..
There are no “crippling sanctions” that can be imposed without the eager cooperation of Russia and China short of the military sanction. Hussein’s ostentatious placing of missile defenses ìn the area is a pretty clear signal that he has finally closed off the prospect of actually taking out Iran’s nukes. He is telling the other governments in the area that when Iran attacks them we will surely shoot down some of Iran’s missiles.
Paging Mr.Mustapha Kemal, please call in, your country needs you again!
I think our military assets in Turkey (Incirlik, et als) will be removed within the next couple years. The US will explain that removal by saying it is too expensive to keep them there, but in reality it will be the islamist Turkish government that will be kicking us out.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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We have about 50-90 B-61 there in Turkey. Each with a nominal yield of 200 kilotons.
Both are heading down the same road to oblivion, when they launch their aggression against Israel.
“We have about 50-90 B-61 there in Turkey. Each with a nominal yield of 200 kilotons.”
So? We’re not going to drop them on Turkey if Turkey asks us to leave. We’ll do what we did when France booted us out in the 1960s: We’ll remove them and billet them somewhere else.
It was called information.
In other words: nuclear trivia
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