Israel and Jordan are our friends, to the extent that nations can have friends rather than mutual interests.
Israel and Jordan are our friends, to the extent that nations can have friends rather than mutual interests.Pretty much this, I said the same thing earlier. We have no friends in the Middle East, everyone there will try to use US power to their own agendas. We really should pull out and stop wasting money there, we have enough problems at home to deal with that needs money.
Let them wipe each other out. Diplomacy won't work there, we do not have the right mindset or the money to achieve military dominance in the area. Religious conflict has raging in that area for over a thousand years, we won't be the ones to stop it.
Source.Moscow has recovered the black box of the Russian jet downed by Turkey last month and will analyse it with foreign specialists, President Vladimir Putin said.
"I ask you not to open it for the time being," Putin told defence minister Sergei Shoigu at a meeting during which he was presented with the black box, Russian news agencies reported.
"Open it only together with foreign experts, carefully determine everything."
Maybe it isn't. I am no expert on this.He wants foreign experts there when it's opened and examined.
I don't know, but it will be interesting to find out what really happened.That makes one wonder... is Putin calling Obama and NATOs bluff?
The RussianCruiserFrigate open fired when the Turkish fishing boat was on a collision coarse and did not responded to hails.
The incident happen at 8:30am Local time, 22 miles away from the Greek island of Lemnos. Both ships were at international waters.
ISTANBUL — They were used to stalk Russian helicopters in Afghanistan, and the United States has worked hard to keep them out of chaotic Syria. But now Kurdish guerrillas battling Turkey's security forces may now have shoulder-fired missiles — an acquisition analysts say will seriously challenge Turkish air power and potentially intensify fighting in the region.
On Saturday, media affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a leftist militant group battling the Turkish state, posted a video purporting to show a fighter downing a Cobra attack helicopter with a man-portable air-defense system — or MANPADS — in the mountains of southeastern Turkey on Friday morning. Arms observers said this is the first time they have seen PKK fighters successfully using MANPADS in their four-decade fight against the Turks.
But the use of a surface-to-air missile — which arms experts said is likely a Russian-made 9K38 Igla — is a new and troubling development. It’s unclear where the militants, who maintain bases in both Turkey and Iraq, would have obtained the weapon system. But former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was known to have acquired the same Russian-made system in the 1980s, as did Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-challenged-turkish-air-power-in-a-major-way/The PKK was, to a considerable extent, a Soviet creation. When Soviet agents found Abdullah Öcalan et al., they weren’t much to look at. But at the price of espousing Marxism-Leninism, meager PKK cadres soon found themselves awash in weapons, bombs, money, intelligence, and networking aid to ideologically like-minded groups elsewhere in the region and beyond (for example, the East German and Czech secret services).
Now pay attention, please, because this is where things get pointedly relevant to current matters. Of course there have always been Kurds in Syria. During the Cold War the Soviets set out to use these Kurds, living in a state with which the USSR was closely allied by the 1960s, to “liaise” with PKK-affiliated Kurds inside of Turkey. That is how the PYD got created, and that it why it has long been “ideologically” associated with the PKK. Soviet aid to the PKK via its Syrian Kurdish agents worked very well. It was designed to create violent havoc up to and including civil war in Turkey (as earlier in Greece), or, failing that to prompt military intervention into Turkish politics, the better to roil relations between the United States and its NATO ally.