Vladimir Putin: Forked Tongue on Syria?

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Everything is up in the air and nobody knows where it is all going to land.

I really don't think China has anything more than a commercial interest in all of this. They just want to do business. The Americans on the other hand, have a strategic overview related to oil resources and the military security of Israel, not to mention the containment/encirclement of Russia.

I think the Russians want stability and quiet on the Islamist front plus the freedom to evolve Russian "civilization" without being forced into a subordinate relationship with the West.

I think the Turks are going to try to play the Great Powers off against each other, for whatever they can get out of it, hopefully admission into the EU. They are playing a dangerous game and could well end up being "monkey in the middle".

Iran has a religious notion of itself and wants to become a center of gravity in the Islamic world, which they, and the Turks see as a distinct cultural/economic bloc in the world, perhaps unrealistically.

The Kurds want a state but, like the Arabs, they are unable to make common cause with one another. When ISIS is wiped out, they will become the principal means by which political formations are shaped in the "Kurdish Triangle". If the Americans still want to reduce the influence of Iran, as a power, the Kurds will have a hope for a national entity.

I think removing Assad from power, as the US and Turkey have said they want to do, is a recipe for chaos in Syria on the Libyan model. I'm not sure that Israel, even, would want that. Syria under Assad was trouble, but Syria under a collection of squabbling extremists might be much worse.

Nobody gets anything in that part of the world without murdering their neighbors, unfortunately.

The big advantage that would come with the creation of a Kurdish state, is that there would be two countries in the region that would depend absolutely on the United States for their existence. The second advantage is that the power of Iran in the region would be reduced, particularly if Iran lost territory to the new national entity, Kurdistan.

I think that for the immediate future we are going to see a lot of posturing of the Biden sort. Not to belittle what the Vice President is doing, of course. He is, after all, trying to put the toothpaste of Turkish/American relations back into the tube. Russia may want to make an issue of Assad, of keeping him in power, and I think it is more likely that they will attempt to do this, than to side with the Turks and Americans on that question. I don't think the Russians have a long term interest in trying to bring Turkey into their economic bloc and I don't think the Turks are doing anything but flirting with the Russians in order to try to get the Americans to stop meddling in their affairs (unless they are meddling them into the EU of course).

At this point, though, where the chips will actually fall, is hard to say.

Note: The failure of the Turkish coup is a huge problem. Tens of thousands of arrests have occurred. The effect of that is to destabilize and polarize important parts of Turkish society. When the next coup comes, and I think it will come, it is likely to be bloodier than the failed coup. If the Pakistani ISI had been in charge of this, we would have been dealing with a new Turkish leader at this point. We may yet.

I've been in this game for years, it made me an animal
There's rules to this sh1t, I wrote me a manual.



never let 'em know your next move
Don't you know Bad Boys move in silence and violence?
Take it from your highness

The latest technical communication intercepted by Putin of a conversation in Syria ..

"A NATO country has just rolled tanks into Syria and sent in head-chopper ground forces - the same ones Syria, Russia and Iran have been trying to kill for months on end in Aleppo and Idlib. ISIS isn't putting up much resistance in Jarabulus because they're too busy trading their ISIS ID cards/flags for al Nusra or al Zenki ID cards/flags. Head-choppers need paychecks to feed their families, too: Headchopper #1: "Snackbar - somebody is shooting at us! What flag are we suppose to be flying today, brother?" Headchopper #2: "Look on your paycheck, brother..." Headchopper #1: "No good, brother - it's from ISIS. That was last week!" Headchopper #2: "I'll get on the radio - our leaders should know, God willing..." (a few minutes later...) Headchopper #2: "Nobody knows for sure, but put on this white helmet for now, brother. Soros' checks are clearing." Headchopper #1: "Does that mean I have to shave? Snackbar... can't we just be al Nusra this week?" Headchopper #2: "No flags yet.. But you have to shave anyway, brother. The CIA won't pay you for FSA Nusra if you look too Wahhabi head-chopperish. Have a Captagon and calm down. Our Turkish brothers will be here soon." Posted by: PavewayIV | Aug 24, 2016 11:41:49 AM | 78"

a reply to: ipsedixit

You should have a look at this piece and think about how little China may be interested and how deep those interests are . Silk Roads, Night Trains, and the Third Industrial Revolution in China
By Pepe Escobar

A case can be made -- and Xi’s ready to make it -- that Washington, which, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, has gained something of a reputation for “strategic miscalculation” in the twenty-first century, might be doing it again. After all, U.S. military strategy documents and top Pentagon figures have quite publicly started to label China (like Russia) as an official “threat.”

The US has no carrots to offer China and so the barking over a group of Islands is a king of stick .

It turns out that the Chinese leadership has no problem with the idea of harnessing cutting-edge Western soft power for its own purposes. In fact, they seem convinced that no possible tool should be overlooked when it comes to moving the country on to the next stage in the process that China’s Little Helmsman, former leader Deng Xiaoping, decades ago designated as the era in which “to get rich is glorious."

It helps when you have $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves and massive surpluses of steel and cement. That’s the sort of thing that allows you to go “nation-building” on a pan-Eurasian scale. Hence, Xi’s idea of creating the kind of infrastructure that could, in the end, connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. It’s what the Chinese call “One Belt, One Road”; that is, the junction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road.

www.tomdispatch.com...

China has turned its economy to one that is internal focused on service but its investments are going to go to the EU and as many places in-between as it can . These large city's they built that were empty are filling up during the transition . There is a really big story when it comes to China happening but the west is not talking much about it . One of the subjects that our potato head Justin wanted to talk about while at the G20 was Canadas sale of Canola to China .Its a billion dollar thing but there is a hook .China will refuse GMO's products .They rejected them from the US ,so I have no idea where Justin can get it because I think its only PEI that is non-GMO .