Turkey did not make good on its ultimatum to Assad back in the beginning of the crisis.
In part, it seemed as if the Islamist-friendly government could not trust the military and the military was too dispirited from purges to be reliable.
Whether Turkey could pull off the logistics is another question, given that their Cold War role was to defend in place as part of the NATO alliance.
But foreign wars are often a distraction from internal problems. Might not Turkey's leaders decide that economic collapse and the danger of a military-led coup could be countered by sending the army into Syria to overthrow Assad?
I only ask because Turkey is in trouble:
Turkey is coming apart. The Islamist coalition that crushed the secular military and political establishment–between Tayip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and the Islamist movement around Fethullah Gulen–has cracked. The Gulenists, who predominate in the security forces, have arrested the sons of top government ministers for helping Iran to launder money and circumvent sanctions, and ten members of Erdogan’s cabinet have resigned. Turkey’s currency is in free fall, and that’s just the beginning of the country’s troubles: about two-fifths of corporate debt is in foreign currencies, so the cost of servicing it jumps whenever the Turkish lira declines. Turkish stocks have crashed (and were down another 5% in dollar terms in early trading Friday). As the charts below illustrate, so much for Turkey’s miracle economy.
Now, I don't share the author's notions that troubles in the Middle East are not soluble and that "except for the state of Israel and a couple of Sunni monarchies that survive by dint of their oil wealth, we are witnessing the unraveling of the Middle East. The best we can do is to insulate ourselves from the spillover effect."
I'm certainly not in favor of trying to defend the current weave of the Middle East. Supporting autocrats--however necessary it was in the Cold War--just helped Islamism thrive both in opposition to those autocrats and in service of the autocrats.
The Arab Spring at least offers the hope of an alternative to autocracy or Islamist rule. Even though that struggle will last decades if it is to change the culture that has made the traditional alternatives the only choices.
I digress because I have no idea what "insulating ourselves from the spillover effect" even means, given that jihadis in even isolated and backwards Afghanistan managed to hit us hard on September 11, 2001.
Anyway, if Turkey is coming apart economically, their rulers wouldn't be the first to attempt to distract with a foreign war.
And after nearly three years of unrest and increasing violence, the Syrian armed forces are a shell when it comes to conventional warfare. The logistics burden on Turkey might be low enough now to work well enough even if no efforts to prepare to support an invasion were made over the last few years.
Those Hezbollah gunmen and the Shia foreign legion Iran pays for may be able to spearhead attacks for Assad on rebels, but they'd be slaughtered if they tried to fight the Turks as they marched on Damascus and Latakia.
Heck, the Turks could claim they are just trying to secure the routes for chemical weapons disarmament efforts.
So watch those chemical agents that we are trying to get out of Syria in the next weeks to destroy at sea. Once Assad loses those, a possible deterrent to Turkish invasion is greatly reduced. NATO Patriot batteries may shield Turkey enough from whatever residual threat there is to make the risk of war seem better than the risk of coming apart internally.
Not that the prospect of war is funny, actually. War is death and tragedy whose only excuse is that without it the death and tragedy might be greater for more people or for longer periods of time.
But it is funny in the sense that we played with Islamists we thought were tame in Turkey and might find that their failure to run an economy compels them to undo the stupid agreement we made with Assad and short circuit the even dumber idea that Assad might be a partner in the fight against al Qaeda.
Could multiple screw ups in our foreign policy actually cancel each other out and give us a better result than you'd think?
And if it works out, don't dare tell me that this bank shot was the Obama administration plan all along.
