...this means war.
No, not the Bugs Bunny cartoon joke.
Bets are, this is the run up to the real thing.
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"There is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork." -- Edgar Wright; "Hot Fuzz" screenplay
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The semi-professional weblog from L. Douglas Garrett, for the purpose of providing a forum for discussion of World Events. All content is copyright L. Douglas Garrett. Comments are the property of that commentator, and are solely their opinion. Please credit your sources, and credit this 'blog if you link to it. Thank you.
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- L.Douglas Garrett
- Tochigi-shi, Tochigi-ken, Japan
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4 comments:
Who will back the Palestine Authority, militarily? Or will the Arab League just use it as an excuse to try and wipe Israel off the face of the planet?
@Mr. Bill
That's the $64 question right now.
The League likely would not act as a whole.
The usual suspects of Syria, Hizb'allah (dragging in the state of Lebanon, again) and HAMAS are all on the list of either enablers or opportunists... and all three depend on Iran for money, material and specialized personel, so count them in, too.
Where this turns from trouble into BIG trouble is if either (1) the Egyptian Army junta goes over to open support of al-Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) *and* they decide to intervene in support of their Gaza subsidiary HAMAS, or (2) Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey really is willing to walk the walk that goes with his talk recently... and he has succeeded in bending the will of the Turkish Armed Forces by his decapitation of the command authority.
Either is less than likely, but can't be safely ignored.
All right, there are a lot of ifs here. But let's take the case of Turkey. IF PM Erdogan is willing to walk the walk and he has the military under his thumb, what does that do in the body of the EU? I'd expect it would mean, at the least, cancellation of Turkey's candidacy for membership. But would it draw the EU into the conflict on the side of Israel? Or would they just excise Turkey from their ranks and turtle up?
@Mr. Bill
Not sure anything would draw the EU as a bloc into any intervention *on the side of Israel*, although I'd love to have the chance to argue before the Quartet that between the PA having invalidated the Oslo Accords in their entirety *and* to have attempted to subvert the rules of the UN to create a functional recognition of an entity at war with an already-recognized UN member state, the PA is the puppet of what is once again a group (the PLO) unworthy of any recognition...
anyway, to focus as you have on RepTurkey issues,
re: "excise from their ranks"
Yes, might play out that way. This is not an EU *membership* issue; RepTurkey isn't a member, and only recently tried to revive its mortibund application. That means, presuming Baroness Ashton can keep her personal opinions reasonably quiet, the entire EU could simply ignore what was going on when a fight starts.
However... it is a NATO *membership* issue. RepTurkey going out and starting a fight instantly invalidates any Art. 5 commitments. Worse, if RepTurkey military activities run roughshod over either Greek or Cypriot sovereignty (again) they probably won't be allowed to get away with it (again).
And, there being a standing recognition of the military legitimacy of the Gaza naval blockade, at least by the terms of the Gaza Withdrawal and that's what the UNSC used as its standard of recognition, then any blockade running by RepTurkey naval assets would also scupper any NATO Art. 5 obligations to intervene.
In either case, or in the case of Erdogan deciding to place his claim on the title of Caliph and just going to war, the repercusions in Europe are probably of secondary concern to the storm of bad things that would rain down on the relationship between the USA and RepTurkey: military cooperation and resupply agreements would go away; Basing rights would then be rescinded and then the USA would be faced with the choice of pulling out of Turkey or trying to play some version of the GTMO scenario. When that went from bad to worse, as it likely would, then the sky's the limit as to how widespread military intervention(s) might be.
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