Kurdistan: Your Time Is Now

Uncle Sam, I see people like us, good people fighting for their very existence, who are in desperate need of our help.
Why?
Because your brother from another mother Uncle Ernie The Sultan of Turkey, is using our technology bombing our best friends in the region.
When he's supposed to be bombing the ISIS he helped create and sustain.

How will we respond?

Will we turn our backs on the Kurdish people carrying our burden?
After all, the reality is if we don't invade Iraq based on bullshit in 2002, there is no ISIS now.
Or, if the "Great White Hunter" Cheney, Bremer, Bush, Rumsfeld and company had the collective intelligence to co opt the Iraqi Army, rather than disburse it with it's weapons caches, know how, and terrain advantage...but that's a whole other post isn't it?
Summing it up in a few words for those who weren't aware: History will not be kind to this "brain" trust.

Then we sat back and looked the other way while Uncle Ernie fed a steady stream of ignorant ISIS fodder into Syria, cynically hoping they would topple Assad, counter Iranian interests, and help decimate the ranks of Hezbollah, all in one brilliant motion.
Didn't happen Ernie.
All while murdering and displacing millions of innocents.
Why are we allowing Uncle Ernie and the Turks to murder the finest allies we have in the fight against daesh, as they continue the struggle to establish a long denied homeland?

Turkey under Sultan Erdogan is a disaster specifically for NATO, Syria, Israel, Kurdistan, and more generally the entire Middle East. Hasn't been a picnic for us either.
So what's our next move Uncle Sam?
Fiddle about while a murderous little despot widens the war?

The Kurds have no intention of waiting for your reply, they're taking the battle straight to Uncle Ernie, and the nutless TAF he neutered so successfully.
Witness the attacks taking place even as I write this.

May God be with them in their fight for freedom, justice and the Kurdish way.

Erdogan: Not America's Ally

Remember the good old days?

When elected governments in Turkey were actually good NATO allies; rather than the duplicitous pile we deal with today?

I do, the guardians of secularism the Turkish Armed Forces, kept wannabe sultan's like uncle Ernie from rising and building 1,000 room palaces, along with religionist cults of personality.

Unfortunately the TAF has been rather successfully neutered, the kangaroo courts hop to Uncle Ernie's dictates; and the ignorant masses of illiterates populating the countryside determine the elections that keep this midget despot in power.

What happened? 

The European Union happened, and Turkey wanted to join really really bad.

However, those incredibly proper Euro's, the same people that plundered planet earth through colonialism. Fomented divisions where they did not previously exist,  and drew up national boundaries without regard for the indigenous who lived in the lands they occupied....

They basically told the TAF: " All these military takeovers of elected governments are rather uncivlized you know? In order to join our elite group of pirates, you'll have to comport yourselves in a wholly different manner." "Should your people wish to elect a Islamist party to govern, then so be it."

How magnanimous Euro zone! The heady days of beating the USSR into economic submission, allowed you to delude yourselves into believing that Ernie's ideas of a new caliphate were somehow compatible with the secular free market ways of the zone. Once again Euro, you chose poorly. As in 1920, when the Ottomans collapsed a free and strong Kurdistan could and should have been allowed to form; predictably your leaders acted only with greed in mind, carving up the carcass and distributing the meat to the victors. Unfortunately, the US government was every bit as guilty, and still hasn't woken up and smelled the Kurdish coffee either.

So now are we going to allow Uncle Ernie to fiddle about and degrade the only fighting force standing up to daesh? 

Why not take this opportunity to correct a historic tragedy? Arm Kurdistan, depose Ernie, return the Turkish Republic to a reliable secular NATO ally. 

Those were the days my friends...

World War III Anyone?

Just read Chancellor Merkel's speech, giving her reasoning, for not providing Ukraine with heavy defensive weapons. While she makes the valid point, Vlad's not going to back down if we up the ante; she misses the larger more salient point. Aggression unchecked, leads to more aggression. A lesson taught so well by her own ancestors, I'm flummoxed at the idea she can't see it.

As I read Ms. Merkels' statement, I couldn't help but be transported back to 1938.
The phrase "peace in our time" as proclaimed by Neville Chamberlain, upon his return from meeeting with Hitler, during which he gave Herr Hitler the West's blessing to Germany's march into the Sudetenland, rings with an ominous echo today.

Putin, has become bolder in his actions in light of the economic sanctions put into play, not less so, and certainly if we send in weapons, Russia will respond. Disproportianately.
In Czar Vlad's eyes, Ukraine is Russia, has been forever, and will continue as the western frontier of the largest nation on earth. Think "lebensraum" or in English "living room", the German term used by the Nazi's to describe their push east into Poland, Czechoslovakia....
Putin's using the same rationale, Ukraine is to Russia, what Eastern Europe was to the Nazi's.

Witness the demands coming from Moscow, while Merkel insists the original peace plan be the starting point for future discussions. Those demands for territory grow with every word passed in negotiation. So far as Putin is concerned, that first disingenuous offer made, which was never to be honored, was only subterfuge allowing Russia to inject more and better armed forces to the region, while consolidating facts on the ground.

Peace negotiations with Vlad are doomed to fail; sending only defensive weaponry to the Ukrainians, will only forestall the inevitable crushing of Ukraine, with inherent catastrophic effects to their society.
No, the only way to roll Vlad back, is to commit the full force of NATO to the cause, and do it soon.
Should Vlad find success in this folly, does anyone believe it stops there?
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, these countries know all to well it stops when the Russians hit the Baltic.

Invasion Time

It's on now, the full fledged invasion of Ukraine is now fact. Vlad has no intention whatsoever of backing down. Kerry, you're wasting your breath with Lavrov, or just killing time while NATO gears up for the big stare down.

Something tells me that Vlad's been pining for this day, since he was strutting around in loaded diapers.
Raised on the valiant stories of Soviet success in defeating the Nazi's; he's been handed an opportunity in adulthood, to prove that he too, should be added to the pantheon of great leaders.

Problem is, he's dealing with a whole new reality that he has surely not grasped.
First, the nations he's lining up as foes, are his main trading partners. Not the brightest bulb in the shop Vlad.
In regimes past, the USSR, nor the czarists were as financially intertwined with the rest of the world as Russia is today.

Second, after years of mafiosi cronyism in government, and little real investment in modernizing the armed forces; you're setting yourself up for the big fail Vladdy boy. Your army could no sooner stand up to NATO, than a Boy Scout troop.

Third and not least, is the fact that truly great leadership as demonstrated by the likes of Churchill, Roosevelt, and even Stalin after the Nazi double cross of WWII, was the fact that these men rallied their people against an invasion, and the defeat of evil. They had the balls to join together two disparate antagonistic forms of government, into a formidable military alliance.

You Vlad offer just the opposite, you have no allies to your evil. Even your own oligarchy are now casting wary eyes on this folly as they fall victim to travel restrictions, freezing out of financial markets.
This is your reality Russia; Vladdy boy is leading you down a well worn path to the pits of hell, from which you will have to dig your sorry third world country out of, once again.

Haven't the past 400 years or so taught you people anything?