And once again, a Russian fighter plane breached Turkey’s air space. Erdogan acted with commendable restraint and did nothing but issue warnings. Let’s see how many more times he will let these provocations slide.
If there are still people who don’t think Russia wants to provoke a conflict with the NATO, I’d like to know what they are smoking.
If Putin REALLY wanted to provoke a war with NATO, and not just mockingly humiliate it, he’d make a move on a NATO Baltic state.
I will be very surprised if Erdogan actually shoots down another Russian plane.
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It’s not war that he wants. He wants to show that the NATO is impotent and pathetic. He gets it to swallow one tiny thing, then one slightly bigger thing, then one a mite bigger, etc. It’s a gradual, slow escalation. And it’s working.
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“And it’s working.”
Maybe it will stop working in January 2017, when a new President is sworn in.
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Turkey, a brutal dictatorship, has filled a vacuum in the Middle East. It supports the Islamic State while making war on the Kurds and its own media. Russia, now helping Iran in the Middle East and supporting Assad, is more powerful but no better.
Not that many seem to care, but Iran’s human rights record is execrable and getting worse. Women fare ever worse than men.
Despite all the atrocities that Iran commits towards its citizens, women hold a special place of denigration and humiliation in Iranian society. Young women are reported brutally arrested by the thousand every week for not wearing a “proper hijab.” A woman in Iran is de facto first her father’s property, then after marriage, her husband’s property. According to the UN Secretary General’s February 2015 Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran, child marriage is prevalent. The legal age of marriage for girls is 13; some as young as 9 may be married by permission of the court. In 2011, about 48,580 girls between the age of 10 and 14 were married; in 2012, there were at least 1,537 girls under the age of 10 who were reportedly married. Pedophilia is thereby widespread and legal.
Why won’t we just say “a plague Turkey, Russia and Iran,” get the U.S. to assume the lead and do something more useful than bow to Iran while following Russia?
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It currently seems that the only way the US has left to keep Russia at least a bit in check is through supporting Erdogan and Iran. It took a while to get to this truly crazy place and to walk away from it will take a lot of effort.
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You aren’t going to see any effective American leadership in the Middle East — or anywhere else on this planet — until Obama is out of office. The next President will either be Hillary or a Republican, and things will begin to change for the better in foreign affairs.
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Saw on Israeli website that Russia denies it happened at all.
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How very uncharacteristic of them. 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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