In August 2011, Turkey issued an ultimatum to Syria: stop killing your people or we will stop you.
I quoted news of the day:
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Bashar al-Assad on Monday military operations against civilians must end immediately and unconditionally, warning the Syrian president that this was Ankara's "final word."
"This is our final word to the Syrian authorities, our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally," Davutoglu said in Turkey's strongest rhetoric yet against its once close ally and neighbor.
"If these operations do not stop, there will be nothing left to say about the steps that would be taken," he told a news conference, without elaborating.
I thought Turkey should set up safe zones inside Syria:
If I was going to deploy Turkey's troops, I'd create pockets all along the border 10-20 miles inside Syria and declare them to be safe zones for refugees.
These would enable the rebels to have a secure rear area and allow them to expand out into Assad-held Syria.
And these rebels weren't yet jihadis, remember.
But two years later, the slaughter by Assad has continued, refugees flow to Turkey, Turkey has not acted to back their threat, and America did not intervene with air power to tip the scales (at least psychologically and perhaps concretely depending on the scale).
And what does Turkey have to show for their failure to back up their words?
The brutal, Al Qaeda-linked group rebels invited into Syria to help topple President Bashir Assad has virtually taken over northern Syria, raising fears that its brand of indiscriminate terror could spill into neighboring Turkey, where some 300 U.S. soldiers are based to protect Turkish airspace from Syrian missile attacks.
ISIS -- whose name has been translated as "Greater Syria" -- joined the Free Syria Army's bid to oust Assad, but now seeks to turn the embattled nation into a building block in a radical Sunni Islamic empire, or caliphate, across the Middle East. The group has captured towns and swaths of territory along the border with Turkey.
That's swell.
Now if Turkey wants to intervene just a bit to help the rebels, the Turks will find they must not only defend the enclaves against Assad's forces, but conduct a counter-insurgency campaign against jihadis within those enclaves.
And that's assuming the Turks want to interrupt the work of the people dismantling Assad's chemical weapons capabilities.
Unless ...
Could Turkey actually put forth the notion that moving into northern Syria is a way to support Assad and compel Assad to go along even as the Turks enable non-jihadi rebels to fight Assad?
After all, during the Iran-Iraq War the Turks began operating in northern Iraq against Iraqi Kurds who were having success in fighting the Iraqis while Iraq was busy fighting Iran on the main fronts to the south.
