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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 10, 2019 18:10:27 GMT
the Kurds will always be around ... Just like the Armenians in the same area. Makes you wonder who they've been taking tips from. Israel or Germany? |
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Post by flatandy on Oct 10, 2019 18:19:11 GMT
These days there's quite a lot of overlap between Netanyahu's friends and Erdogan's friends. But the Turks don't need to take tips from anyone.
I don't expect full blown genocide here, but Turkey's goal has always been to prevent the creation of any Kurdish state or de-facto state which might then have a chance of legitimising claims of the Turkish Kurdish population. Currently there's something bordering on a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq, but it expanding to include Northern Syria is a disastrous idea in the minds of Turkish fascist nationalists. So I think the goal here is to massively weaken any Kurdish infrastructure, flood the region with non-Kurdish refugees to prevent the idea of it being a de facto enclave, and then allow Damascus to return to regain control.
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 10, 2019 18:37:30 GMT
These days there's quite a lot of overlap between Netanyahu's friends and Erdogan's friends. But the Turks don't need to take tips from anyone. I don't expect full blown genocide here, but Turkey's goal has always been to prevent the creation of any Kurdish state or de-facto state which might then have a chance of legitimising claims of the Turkish Kurdish population. Currently there's something bordering on a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq, but it expanding to include Northern Syria is a disastrous idea in the minds of Turkish fascist nationalists. So I think the goal here is to massively weaken any Kurdish infrastructure, flood the region with non-Kurdish refugees to prevent the idea of it being a de facto enclave, and then allow Damascus to return to regain control. Yeah, that's not a bad take IMHO, but I suspect that (like other ongoing conflicts) this is just as ancient, intractable and embedded. |
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rick49
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Post by rick49 on Oct 10, 2019 22:27:08 GMT
That's patently not true - the small US presence there, and the explicit protection guarantee from the US that the US would look after its allies, was removed earlier in the week and within a couple of days the Turks had started on their latest genocide. A guarantee, incidentally, that involved the US encouraging the Kurds to disarm... And just how were a thousand troops going to hold back the entire Turkish military? Our military is very good, but not suicidal like the Spartans at Thermopylae. Or should we have declared war on a NATO ally? |
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rick49
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Post by rick49 on Oct 10, 2019 22:30:23 GMT
I wonder if Trump's aware that he's condemning hundreds, possibly thousands of Kurdish people to rape, torture and murder. Once again, where was the lefts concern for the Kurds when the left was demanding a U.S. withdrawl from Iraq? |
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Post by flatandy on Oct 10, 2019 22:49:24 GMT
That's patently not true - the small US presence there, and the explicit protection guarantee from the US that the US would look after its allies, was removed earlier in the week and within a couple of days the Turks had started on their latest genocide. A guarantee, incidentally, that involved the US encouraging the Kurds to disarm... And just how were a thousand troops going to hold back the entire Turkish military? Our military is very good, but not suicidal like the Spartans at Thermopylae. Or should we have declared war on a NATO ally? Because if the Turks bombed the US military they know they'd be in for a world of pain. It's not that the US will explicitly defend them. It's that having the US there stops anyone attacking the region. |
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Post by whitewine on Oct 10, 2019 22:55:16 GMT
The reason the US went in to Iraq, was because someone had to pay for the 911 attack. Hence the refugee crisis since.
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voice
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Post by voice on Oct 10, 2019 23:45:00 GMT
well actually as Iraq had feck all to do with 911, its far more accurate to say Bush and Co used that as an excuse to settle scores with Saddam, consequently fecking the entire region, giving rise to IS, emboldening Iran and leading to this whole clusterfuck of a mess. Ricks revisionism aside, its not that anyone was calling for the US to get out, rather they said they shouldn't go in there in the first place, but having gone in fix what you broke before you cut an ran.
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Post by flatandy on Oct 11, 2019 0:48:38 GMT
While that's partially true, it should be noted that it's been a clusterfuck since the weakening of the brutal - but explicitly multinational - Ottoman control, leaving myriad ethnic/national groups in overlapping geographies.
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Post by flatandy on Oct 11, 2019 15:33:30 GMT
I read an interesting comment that might add to the answer to Baloo's question about what the end-game is. Apparently there are lots of non-Kurds trapped in the land between the Turkish border and Assad's army, in areas under the control mostly of a number of anti-Assad factions of various degrees of Sunni extremism. Should Assad's military successfully take this land, there could well be a massive extra inflow of refugees to Turkey, which Erdogan very much wants to avoid.
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 11, 2019 16:34:04 GMT
I read an interesting comment that might add to the answer to Baloo's question about what the end-game is. Apparently there are lots of non-Kurds trapped in the land between the Turkish border and Assad's army, in areas under the control mostly of a number of anti-Assad factions of various degrees of Sunni extremism. Should Assad's military successfully take this land, there could well be a massive extra inflow of refugees to Turkey, which Erdogan very much wants to avoid. Maybe. It doesn't look like there's much military or strategic point though. I expect the point isn't wasted on Johnnie Kebab either. |
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 11, 2019 16:38:35 GMT
While that's partially true, it should be noted that it's been a clusterfu ck since the weakening of the brutal - but explicitly multinational - Ottoman control, leaving myriad ethnic/national groups in overlapping geographies. Hmmmmm .... not sure I would characterise the Ottoman Empire as explicitly multinational. It is the de facto defining feature of an empire that it is not homogeneous. What you appear to be suggesting is that, while they were hard, at least the trains ran on time. Okay, a few million people needed to be uprooted and marched into the deserts to be annihilated, but that's the cost of doing business, eh? Maybe we should have just let those very efficient Germans just get on with it. Anything for an easy life. |
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Post by flatandy on Oct 11, 2019 18:11:25 GMT
I'm saying that the nature of Ottoman rule, which accepted that the Ottomans themselves were a small ruling elite rather than a dominant ethnicity, meant that the many subject ethnicities could and did overlap their geographies without it being an existential problem to anyone, but the removal of imperial rule left an inherent problem that has not been resolved.
And, more importantly, that the clusterfuckiness of the Middle East is not the Dick Cheney and the US's fault. They may have exacerbated existing problems, but it's a false characterisation to suggest that prior to 2001 (or, indeed, prior to 1990) everyone in the middle east (except the Israelis) were living calm, happy peaceful lives.
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 11, 2019 18:35:19 GMT
You're making the case for British imperial rule. And the extermination of European jewry. You utter, utter bastard. It's Yom Kippur this week too. You bastard.
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voice
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Post by voice on Oct 11, 2019 19:32:16 GMT
Well really the ones who took over the Ottaman empire were the ones who truly fecked up, creating new countries with a ruler in Paris or London worked about as well in the ME as it did in Africa. In many respects if the end result of all this endless conflict is a redrawing of those boundaries to reflect ethno group's then it might resolve a few of the past fuckups.
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 11, 2019 20:44:45 GMT
Well really the ones who took over the Ottaman empire were the ones who truly fecked up, creating new countries with a ruler in Paris or London worked about as well in the ME as it did in Africa. In many respects if the end result of all this endless conflict is a redrawing of those boundaries to reflect ethno group's then it might resolve a few of the past fuckups. Not really fair. The option should perhaps have been to replace the Ottomans with a benign, liberal commonwealth and let matters be decided democratically in a stable, affluent atmosphere |
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voice
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Post by voice on Oct 11, 2019 21:51:34 GMT
yeah, but given who were the ones with the rulers and permanent makers that was never gonna happen. I never quite understand those who can't see the issue with foreign powers thousands of miles away and with no knowledge of or care for the people living in Africa and ME when they used rulers to simply divide up these places. I mean can you imagine if that had been done in Europe and mess it would have caused, even naturally arrived at boarders have caused no end of conflict there, imagine how much worse it would have been if half and Germany and half of France for instance had been lumped together as a single country with the rest mixed and matched with Belgium, Italy and Spain.
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Post by perrykneeham on Oct 12, 2019 6:55:31 GMT
yeah, but given who were the ones with the rulers and permanent makers that was never gonna happen. I never quite understand those who can't see the issue with foreign powers thousands of miles away and with no knowledge of or care for the people living in Africa and ME when they used rulers to simply divide up these places. I mean can you imagine if that had been done in Europe and mess it would have caused, even naturally arrived at boarders have caused no end of conflict there, imagine how much worse it would have been if half and Germany and half of France for instance had been lumped together as a single country with the rest mixed and matched with Belgium, Italy and Spain. Well, in Belgium's case, that is largely what happened. |
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mids
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Post by mids on Oct 12, 2019 7:35:00 GMT
The Euttoman Empire.
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Post by wetkingcanute on Oct 12, 2019 8:26:37 GMT
The Hackney Empire
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