This is from pepe escobar’s latest: “What the Turks – and America’s Arab vassals – do want is for Syrian ‘moderate rebels’, jihadists included, to get together and make a decisive play to conquer Aleppo. Syria’s largest city also happens to be Erdogan’s key strategic target. That, according to Ankara and the House of Saud’s wet dreams, would be the beginning of the road towards regime change.”
http://www.rt.com/op-edge/312361-syria-us-russia-kurds/
I think Escobar has this backwards. I think Erdogan knows that the Assad is on his way out via a “transitional government” and so he is positioning Turkey to seize Aleppo creating facts on the ground that will remain in place after Assad steps down.
This probably can be connected to MoA’s earlier post on Turkish tanks crossing the border.

Posted by: plantman | Aug 13 2015 15:59 utc | 4

@ 1 and @3
As an addendum : http://www.alternet.org/world/35-countries-where-us-has-supported-fascists-druglords-and-terrorists

Posted by: Yul | Aug 13 2015 16:37 utc | 6

Yes, that it why it ought to be called the Outlaw Empire and pursued by a planetary posse until it’s locked in a jail forevermore.

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 13 2015 18:14 utc | 8

Rg an LG @7
Links? I highly doubt that exploitation is fundamental to civilization. Your statement is equivalent to: “We need oligarchs – civilization can’t operate without them!”
There have been civilizations that have been cooperative instead of competitive(*). But the competitive model has been better at scaling – because desperate people can be made to work hard, think-up new technology, and fight others. Thus, Europeans conquered the Americas.
But there the advantages of competitiveness may have run its course. In our complex, inter-dependent world cooperative models of living and working may be more efficient and lead to better outcomes. What stands against such a development is principally oligarch resistance. For example, a cooperative world would have less need for military expenditures which is estimated to be 2.3% of World GDP in 2014!!
=
* Note a cooperative model differs from a command economy like the former Soviet Union. Co-ops operate within the capitalist system.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Aug 13 2015 18:28 utc | 10

first week in june
solly long links aah saw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2011_Jisr_ash-Shugur_operation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Northwestern_Syria_offensive
4 years and the wheel turns
for whom does the wheel turn ?
does a bear shit in the woods,does a turkey fly,does a camel hump…who knows
15 the september
i already posted this in the open thread …..first week in june is interesting….if you read both links carefully then it is all there to see and understand

Posted by: mcohen | Aug 13 2015 22:08 utc | 12

Posted by: jearls | Aug 13, 2015 4:24:31 PM | 11
Thanks for your shortlist of must-reads. However there are many extant examples of prose exploring the issues of What Went Wrong/ What’s Going Wrong/ What Is Wrong with the world. But the situation looks less ‘existential and very difficult’ if one focuses on what Is wrong. And the answer is the pantomime/shell game known as Politics. The majority of Politicians in Westernised demockracies are bought and paid for BEFORE becoming candidates for election in the utterly fake Two Party system.
This has led to the election of people whose loyalty is to their sponsors and explains why they pretend to listen to “voers” while ensuring that nothing of consequence is debated openly in the Mock Parliament. Everything of importance is debated in secret due to National Security or some other equally fatuous excuse.
It’s simply not true that something as important as Defense has to be debated and resolved in private/secret because:
1. Every country has its own spies in every other country of consequence and is also, equally, a victim of the spies of those ‘other’ countries. So our potential enemies know what our defense machinations are about before We The People find out, if ever.
2. The Military/Defense, everywhere, is more famous for its blunders than for its successes and any plans should, therefore, be subject to Citizen Oversight before being adopted as National Policy.
3. Since politicians can’t be trusted to make logical, coherent, cost-effective military/defense decisions, there is no compelling reason to trust them to decide any lesser issues without Citizen Oversight.
We’ve been brainwashed into accepting as fact the false premise that citizens, collectively, are too unqualified to resolve “important” issues. But the obvious flaw in that proposition is that, collectively, “citizens” includes ALL the smart people in a given country. We’re all comment Junkies because we want to know what real people really think, as opposed to what we’re told they think, by “official” polls over which we kave no control.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 14 2015 2:53 utc | 14

Yul @ 6: Another brick in the wall for my bookmarks. Thanks. The hard part, is finding an American to share this additional info with, that gives a shit.

Posted by: ben | Aug 14 2015 15:12 utc | 16

@7
It is, methinks, in our DNA.
Supposed genetic propensities radically underdetermine actual lived social and political reality. Looked at differently, if we posit a gene for imperial exploitation we really haven’t done any explanatory work. Why not a gene for, say, operating a motor vehicle?
What the genetic argument does, though, is let the rapacious psychopaths that run this world (exclusively to their own benefit) off the hook. The burden of responsibility shifts to the vaguely conceived “all of us”, what with our nasty DNA and all.

Posted by: Martin Finnucane | Aug 14 2015 16:39 utc | 18