Turkey prepares to invade Syria

[Hawkmoon]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Now ... if only we could figure out who our enemy is, and who their enemies are, we'd know who our friends are. Thanks to the Big O, I don't think we have a lot of friends today.

[Ron]

I was never very comfortable with some of our "friends" in the middle east.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait never really impressed me much as far as being "friends".

We should help the Kurds take over Syria, that would should stir things up a bit 

Cozy back up to Egypt also.

[wmenorr67]

Saudi and Kuwait are only our friends because we saved their asses in 91.  Turkey isn't our friend, they are a NATO ally at best.

[RevDisk]

If that's not damning with faint praise I don't know what is.

I haven't spent as much time with our allies as some here, but I have done more then a couple joint things with NATO.  My experiance has been that the Turks are muslem enough in culture that they are NATO's slow cousin.  We only let them in because we wanted missles there, and now we're kinda embarassed by their behavior.

I trained with several Turkish army units. Their infantry forces are good to very good, but very different than Western units. NCOs aren't as good until you hit senior NCO ranks, officers have damn near life and death control over their enlisted under all circumstances. I don't think their other forces were as good as their ground forces, but didn't spend much time with their other forces. They seemed adequately competent on land operations.

[Hutch]

To back of RevDisk, and the "and death" part, it was reported to me by an Airforce EM that a Turkish EM was summarily executed on the spot by the Turkish  officer of the guard for sleeping while on guard duty.  To hear our guy tell it, the airbase at Incirlik is notionally a Turkish airbase, with Turks providing base security.