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| Europe |
| Turkey is the next failed state in the Middle East: Spengler |
| 2015-10-13 |
| We do not know just who detonated the two bombs that killed 95 Kurdish and allied activists in Ankara Saturday, but the least likely conjecture is that President Erdogan's government is guiltless in the matter. As Turkish member of parliament Lutfu Turkkan, tweeted after the bombing, the attack "was either a failure by the intelligence service, or it was done by the intelligence service." Betrayed by both the United States and Russia, and faced with the emergence of a Kurdish state on its borders and the rise of Kurdish parties in the parliamentary opposition, Erdogan is cornered. At risk in the short-term is the ability of his AKP party to govern after the upcoming November elections. At risk in the medium term is the cohesion of the Turkish state itself. In public, Western leaders have hailed Turkey as "a great Islamic democracy," as President Obama characterized it in a 2010 interview. That was the view of the George W. Bush adminstration before Obama, which invited Erdogan to the White House before his election as prime minister in November 2002. A minority of military and intelligence analysts, though, has warned that Turkey may not be viable within its present borders in the medium term. The trouble is that its Kurdish minority, now at 20% of the overall population, has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so many that half of Turkey's military-age population will speak Kurdish as a first language in fewer than twenty years. |
| Posted by:Blossom Unains5562 |
| #5 Demographically Turkey is on borrowed time anyway. Kurds breed faster. They should have cut a devil's bargain and invaded Syria to recreate a mini-ottoman Empire and have a few other ethnic groups to pit against the Kurds and others in a hope to delay their eventual morph into Greater Kurdistan. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2015-10-13 20:27 |
| #4 Ankara's covert support for the East Turkestan Independence Movement That won't please China. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2015-10-13 07:35 |
| #3 Hammam. Erdy sweating. Drip, drip. "You'll know I am done," quips Tayyip, "As soon as this oven Gets too hot to govern, And out pops my little red tip." |
| Posted by: Zenobia Floger6220 2015-10-13 07:07 |
| #2 I was hoping for Saudi to be the next to fall... |
| Posted by: BrerRabbit 2015-10-13 04:27 |
| #1 Ankara's covert support for the East Turkestan Independence Movement Recep sure gets around! |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-10-13 02:46 |