Doomsday clock must be ticking a bit closer to midnight

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Putin is making another move, it seems. In yet another shrewd play for power, he has decided to ally with the Kurds, in a step that undermines both US and Turkish policy in the region. The Kurds have already made progress into new territory, taking a town just north of Aleppo, which provides a gate for new incursions into Syria. The siege was won with help from Russia.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is getting directly involved in the conflict as well, sending special units to Turkey to... I don't know... aid Erdogan and his pals from Daesh? Of course that is not what they would claim if you ask them. But it doesn't make sense that they would have a beef with the Kurds, either. And they definitely would not fight Daesh.

Turkey has kept shelling Kurdish positions, trying to undermine Russia's new ally (while Russia keeps shelling Turkey's allies). In the meantime, the US remains passive in all this, only joining France in its calls for Turkey to cease the fire, and respect the Munich agreement. Erdogan does not seem likely to heed the call, though. It is just that too much is at stake for him at this point.

If Russia manages to snatch the Kurdish friendship out of US hands, Putin is going to get a very strong position, now that he has managed to fortify Assad's regime. This explains why Turkey got involved so heavily, and now Saudi Arabia is going in as well.

We have yet to see how Iran is going to react to all this - after all, Assad is their biggest proxy in what they have long planned to be a crescent connecting their oil fields with the Mediterranean, potentially providing a gateway to the European energy markets, and simultaneously thwarting the Turkey/Saudi geopolitical plans.

Curiously, Israel remains silent for the time being. And thank goodness.

Some Armageddon tinfoil-hat crackpots have frequently predicted that WW3 would start in the Levant. I do not want to sound too alarmist, but from what we are seeing, things seem to be playing into their narrative a bit too neatly right now.

Comments

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I still believe we could have nice things. If we could just, you know, calm down, sit at the table, have a drink, and...

Hey? People? Where are you going? Peeooopleee??

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Unless ISIL gets a handful of nukes, I'm not seeing how this could be an Armageddon.

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

Let's check something here. So we've got two blocs (roughly):

Bloc 1. Assad, Iran, Russia, the Kurds. We could add Pakistan and China here.
Bloc 2. Turkey, ISIS, Saudi Arabia, USA. We could add India, France and some others here.

Paradoxically, Israel is against Turkey, which means they'll be in one bloc with Iran (!?)
Not entirely sure where Egypt stands in all this.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

ISIS is in the same group like France and the US?

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

Makes sense in some twisted sort of way, doesn't it? ;-)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Block 1:

A totalitarian dictator as murderous as his daddy but more crappy at it.

A totalitarian dictatorship run by a medieval backwards set of clerics.

A wannabe Tsar without the grandeur but all the murderousness.

Nationalists in pursuit of a Volksgemeinschaft by the crash of the revolver

An Islamist-military dictatorship

A one-party state with the largest mass murders in history to its credit

Bloc II:

1) The premier (and only) NATO power in the region. Flawed, but run either by soldiers or Merkel's Islamist equivalents in terms of relative firey-ness.

2) Daesh, whose goals fundamentally reject nationalism and thus both Turkey and Assad yet somehow, in spite of the two not hesitating to shoot at each other are allies.

3) A backwards medieval regime run as a petrostate absolutist monarchy with clerical overmighty aspects.

4) The current global empire with a Reverse Midas Touch in the region.

5) That's not a paradox, Israel's quite happy to blow up NATO in pursuit of killing Hamas the more it bombs Israeli babies, just like the Kurds blow up Turkish babies. If one is wrong, so is the other.

6) Has its own problems with its generals retaking power and trying not to be too overt about it.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Here's my count:

Bloc 1: Assad, supported by Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah
Bloc 2: The Kurds, kinda supported by the US and NATO as well as Russia and probably Assad.
Bloc 3: Al-Nusra and various al Qaeda groups along with the FSA leftovers, supported by Hamas, Saudi Arabia and some Gulf States, Turkey.
Bloc 4: ISIS and a bunch of people, mostly from the gulf area and Turkey who will never admit to supporting them
Bloc 5: The NATO Joint Task force thingy; the US, UK, theoretically the rest of NATO and our allies in the Gulf

Of course, Bloc 3 will disintegrate into infighting if they ever get close to winning, but the more they lose, the stronger their alliance will be.

Right now, it seems Blocs 1 and 2 are working together against Bloc 3, but this is of course subject to change. Bloc 3 is being helped by Bloc 5. Nobody admits to helping Bloc 4 but it certainly seems that Bloc 1 is in favor of keeping them in the fight as long as Blocs 2 and 3 are between them and Bloc 4. Several of the non-Syrian folks in Bloc 3 also seem to be helping them out. Bloc 5 is bombing Bloc 4 and helping Bloc 2 fight them, but is really kinda clueless and doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything except making the whole thing more complicated than it already was. Turkey is attacking Bloc 2 and maybe needs its own Bloc, or at least should be considered Bloc 5a.

My take is that Bloc 2 doesn't have a chance or the interest to run Syria. If Bloc 3 wins, it'll form a bunch of new Blocs and continue the civil war for a while. Nobody wants Bloc 4 to win, even their supporters just want to use them just to make themselves look good by comparison. This leaves Bloc 1 as the only ones who could conceivably win the war and govern Syria, except that Bloc 5 wants to prevent this. Unfortunately Bloc 1 seems to have mass executions every time they take over an area and are the ones causing most of the civilian deaths, so their victory will probably end in some form of genocide or at least mass killing. Maybe Blocs 1 - 3 can all agree on sharing power, but I don't see why either Bloc 1 or 2 would be in a hurry to do so.

All in all, it does make the overthrow of Gaddafi look like it may have been the least bad option. Sure, the country is in chaos, but the death rate is 1/8th what it is in Syria and the displacement rate is 1/100th. It also makes the Egyptians look like one of the winners of the Arab Spring, as long as we're grading on a curve that is.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If Israel is entitled to any means necessary to stop people blowing up Israeli babies on religious grounds, I daresay Turkey is equally entitled to react that way with the Kurds, who've done equally nasty things and whose goal is no different than Daesh in terms of dramatic redrawing of the map. When did mass murder on nationalist grounds suddenly become a moral and effective means of policy? I certainly don't think it was that way when it was Dixie raising the Stars and Bars over slavery or those funny men with the hammer and sickle and the swastika.

The Kurds are no more than that and Hamas with a better PR scheme. If terrorism and murder for political aims is wrong, their methods are wrong. If it's only wrong for some people....well the USA's pretty much given an open season on people of British descent so long as the terrorists are named O'Hara and O'Reilly for generations so that's pretty par for the course with us.