i admit that there's a lot of historical sense in the turks taking over, and they are certainly well positioned to counter saudi attempts to destabilize the region. i've pointed out repeatedly that the turkish-arab conflict is in many ways the more real conflict, compared to the arab-iranian one. this is a long war of history...

but, there is a recipe for catastrophe in allowing the turks and russians to compete for influence in the region like this, because i'm not sure that the various people that live in syria really want them there. the danger is that if the turks get too aggressive, it could actually produce a response in arab nationalism, which would no doubt be islamicist in nature due to the condition the region finds itself in. there's this idea in the west that turkish soldiers are preferable to western ones because they're muslim, but this is just another example of westerners not understanding the complexity of the history in the region. while there is historical justification for pan-arabism, the idea of some kind of muslim megastate has always been a colonial fantasy; the conflicts in this region have always been less religious and more ethnic. remember: the british were nominally initially brought in to protect the arabs from the turks in the first place.

america's geopolitical strategy is of course to divide and conquer, so these bugs are easily misunderstood as features in washington.

i would like to see the turks pull back.

but, so long as the americans are sitting in the middle of the playground, this is all just abstract discussion, anyways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/erdogan-turkey-syria.html