1.) the Turks are supporting Daesh (and making money) by buying oil smuggled out of Syria by Daesh. (I find this quite believable.)
and
2.) That Erdogan would never have dared shoot down a Russian plane without prior approval from the US, and so the shoot-down was a provocative move, presumably by neocons in the Obama administration. (I am dubious about this one; it doesn't seem Obama's way.)
and
3.) That Vladimir Putin and the Russian military will shortly interdict the oil sales by taking out all of the tanker-trucks participating in it. (On this, we will just have to see.)
The French pivot is not surprising, and Paris has been telegraphing it for days.
After all, Assad did not attack France. Daesh did. Assad is at most a secondary target now, and you can bet that if leaving him in power is the price the French have to pay to destroy Daesh, they will pay it.
I hate to complain, but I don't believe that one place name mentioned in the text is shown on the map provided with the article. Maybe it is displayed in the wrong language, but it doesn't help.
On Twitter, a lot of Kurds seem convinced today's bombing was anti-Kurdish, not anti-Daesh. The hashtag #TurkeyAttackKurdsNotISIS seems to express a common opinion.
You do notice that none of this stuff actually really works? The Baltimore protests were not suppressed; the protesters won (at least, this round). Oh, and in Iraq, it is all we can do to keep our sponsored army from throwing away its gear faster as we can give it to them. Da'ish makes much more effective use of it than does the Iraqi army.
The primary (and successful) goal of these give-away programs is the funneling of cash to the politically connected contractors who make it. Anything else is incidental.
My Russian sources tell me that
1.) the Turks are supporting Daesh (and making money) by buying oil smuggled out of Syria by Daesh. (I find this quite believable.)
and
2.) That Erdogan would never have dared shoot down a Russian plane without prior approval from the US, and so the shoot-down was a provocative move, presumably by neocons in the Obama administration. (I am dubious about this one; it doesn't seem Obama's way.)
and
3.) That Vladimir Putin and the Russian military will shortly interdict the oil sales by taking out all of the tanker-trucks participating in it. (On this, we will just have to see.)
The French pivot is not surprising, and Paris has been telegraphing it for days.
After all, Assad did not attack France. Daesh did. Assad is at most a secondary target now, and you can bet that if leaving him in power is the price the French have to pay to destroy Daesh, they will pay it.
Wittgenstein was evidently not a Washington pundit.
I hate to complain, but I don't believe that one place name mentioned in the text is shown on the map provided with the article. Maybe it is displayed in the wrong language, but it doesn't help.
On Twitter, a lot of Kurds seem convinced today's bombing was anti-Kurdish, not anti-Daesh. The hashtag #TurkeyAttackKurdsNotISIS seems to express a common opinion.
You do notice that none of this stuff actually really works? The Baltimore protests were not suppressed; the protesters won (at least, this round). Oh, and in Iraq, it is all we can do to keep our sponsored army from throwing away its gear faster as we can give it to them. Da'ish makes much more effective use of it than does the Iraqi army.
The primary (and successful) goal of these give-away programs is the funneling of cash to the politically connected contractors who make it. Anything else is incidental.
Iraqi Shiites have the regional superpower (Iran) solidly on their side; they (as opposed to Maliki) may not want the US to intervene.