[SeaGypsy]

Or from another POV we are the necessary evil required to prevent carbon death, a purpose we appear to be designed for & a job just about done for a few billion years.

[Fishman]

Agent, I sincerely doubt our present potus has the skill set to do either of those option effectively.

[Cog]

Both Russians and Turks are back-stabbing pieces of crap. I'm down with them shooting at each other from time to time. Win-win.

The Russians are funny. They are now wanting to play the victim card. As I recall, no one forced them to insert themselves into a civil war. Tough luck Ivan. Except for the usual suspects who worship every word coming out of Putin's mouth, most people don't give a care how many Russians die during this latest foreign adventure. I certainly don't.

Perhaps it will make up in some small way what happened in the Katyn forest massacre.

[Sixstrings]

Some GOOD news:

Turkish FM calls Russia’s Lavrov 'to express sorrow'

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Nov. 25 'to express his sorrow' over the downing of a Russian jet by Turkey near the Syrian border.

Turkish foreign minister expressed “his sincere condolences,” Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov told reporters at a press conference in Moscow. “But the Turkish minister tried to excuse the incident,” Lavrov added.

He also said Russia “is not going to wage a war against Turkey,” and that Russia’s attitude toward Turkish people remains unchanged.

“But we will seriously reassess all bilateral agreements,” he added. “As for specific measures, we’ve recommended our citizens not to travel to Turkey.”

Lavrov also argued the downing of the SU-24 fighter jet by Turkey appeared to be a “planned provocation” as the incident heightened tensions between Moscow and Ankara.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/Default.aspx?PageID=238&NID=91654

That's a good sign for de-escalation, and Russia saves face with an apology from the Turkish foreign minister.

[Cog]

Well there we go. Crisis adverted and we can enjoy the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in peace.

[radon1]

http://sputniknews.com/military/2015112 ... eymim.html

The rescue operation of Russia's Su-24 navigator has been successefully completed with the pilot back at the Hmeymim airbase safe and sound, Russian Defense Ministry Gen. Sergei Shoigu said Thursday.

"The rescue operation was completed successfully. The navigator is back at our airbase. [He is] safe and sound," the minister said at the Ministry of Defense board meeting.

Shoigu noted that the operation lasted 12 hours and thanked "all our men, who risked [their lives] working through the night."

http://sputniknews.com/russia/20151125/ ... -su24.html

Lavrov spoke to his Turkish counterpart in a phone conversation.

"Moscow is not avoiding contacts with Ankara — my phone conversation with the Turkish FM is proof," Lavrov said.

Turkey's foreign minister expressed his sincere condolences to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister said. But the Turkish minister tried to excuse the incident, Lavrov added.

The Turkish minister said that Turkey did not know it was a Russian jet.

"We have serious doubts it was an accident and prepared footage of the jet downing suggests it wasn't," Sergei Lavrov said. "It all looks like a planned provocation".

http://sputniknews.com/military/2015112 ... wning.html

US President Barack Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have agreed on the importance of preventing incidents like Tuesday’s downing of a Russian bomber jet over Syria by a Turkish plane, from happening again.

ANKARA (Sputnik) — According to Turkey’s national Anadolu news agency, the leaders said in a phone conversation late Tuesday it was necessary to make arrangements that would ensure that similar incidents did not occur again.

The Turkish do seem to be confused. Erdogan is rumored to be having some health issues, may be these were some bad temper splashes, who knows.

[Newfie]

I am noticing more and more in these conflicts everyone is calling each other terrorists. Culpability is not simple black and white as there are so many shades of gray that one feels like they are in a Beijing smog. And this current conflict is happening right now eclipsing the climate change conference in Paris. Probably undermining it. A conference dedicated toward trying to mitigate what? Our species actions that in the POV of the flora and fauna, our brethren on the planet we are? Terrorists.

Nice to see someone keeping a reasonable perspective.

[Newfie]

Or from another POV we are the necessary evil required to prevent carbon death, a purpose we appear to be designed for & a job just about done for a few billion years.

Don't know what you mean be "carbon death."

I have postulated that Nature evolved humanity to assist entropy by getting at and reducing otherwise locked up energy sources....carbon and uranium.

[radon1]

Another map with some explanations.

https://youtu.be/9Cs8jdJKSGo

[AgentR11]

I don't think Syria is worth ANY of these risks or costs.

Someone should tell Mr. Putin that. Lavrov has already told Kerry that Russia isn't really tied to Assad. So Putin should stop gaming out for max advantage and cut a deal with the coalition and cooperate with / join the existing international coalition.

I should have been more clear. Syria is not worth any of these risks or costs to NATO. Tartus is worth the cost to Russia; and Crimea is existential, basically worth any possible cost you could write on paper.

Thus the Russians are staying.
They will continue bombing near the Turkish border.
Perhaps they'll be a bit more careful and not give Turkey an opportunity for a legal kill.
Latakia will have S400, straight up acknowledged by Russia now.
Lavrov & Co seem to be having some fun describing all the repulsive terrorist financing stuff and terrorist milking stuff Turkey's been engaged in. If we live through this engage, Turkey needs booting; they are a liability, and really, an enemy of civilization.
Maybe Russia will realize why we used armed drones now too. They should bring their own online and use those near the border, then even if Turkey blew it up, no one would need get all that upset.

And folks, don't misread the title into thinking this is some movie thing that happens at a rate that keeps you at the edge of your seat chomping popcorn. Escalation events happen, usually, over weeks of time, not days or hours. In the real world, it takes hours and days to just figure out what you're escalating from.

To know if we've avoided WW3, we need to know what happens when a Turkish jet fires on a Russian jet that hasn't crossed their little border protrusions. Russians will fire back, and they have stuff that can make the kill and even if you'd like to pretend they don't, they will still have fired on a Turkish F16 that likely will have been in Turkey.

Of course, if the S400/S300 proves unable to to kill the F16; that's actually bad, because it means when we go back for Crimea, those Bouyan's will have to launch their cruise missiles as openers, and to have any impact on the conflict, those missiles will have to all be nuclear. I don't know that they'd even have time to fire a warning shot to prove willingness. And thus, the exchange of our strategic forces proceeds from that point.

This asymmetric weakness of Russia is very unsafe, it much too easily gives them a die alone, or die with everyone else choice. And the more asymmetric it is, the weaker Russia is, the MORE dangerous it becomes. Anyone honestly believe Russia would choose "die alone" in order to preserve the glories of American Capitalism? Seriously?

Russia being unable to conventionally defend itself is catastrophically dangerous. And that is the world we are pursuing because we believe the Russians would accept being oil and gas pumping slaves to the West.

[AgentR11]

nb... on the so called safe zone or no fly zone Turkey was talking about?
Russia just got through, today, dropping bombs right in the middle of it, destroying a group that was giving the Kurds some trouble.
Azaz, north of Aleppo. Close to the border.

Turkey's going to end up with a functioning Kurdistan on its Southern Border.
idiot turks.

[Tanada]

It used to be a popular belief that the US State Department cared a lot more for the viewpoint of whomever they were negotiating with (the EU, China, Australia did not matter whom) than it did for the viewpoint of the average American. The reason was in any large bureaucracy with the goal of making treaties the only way to do so successfully is compromise when the other side stuck hard and fast to their requirements.

This kind of dealing angered a lot of people who were paying attention because the idea that any treaty is good rather than your treaty being good means you are willing to compromise on all sorts of things like the whole NAFTA deal that actually cause a lot of problems for Joe6P.

Well as much as I disliked that kind of treaty making at least in a nuclear armed world it made a certain kind of sense to do whatever you could to prevent conflict escalation. That goal created a culture of compromise that obviously worked between the Cuban Missile Crisis and so far this morning. However right now a different mood seems to have taken over the bureaucracy of the USA. We have gone from compromising too easily in international negotiations to becoming brittle and immovable on certain topics.

In this case the topic we became brittle on is Bashar Assad. Six years ago the average American couldn't find Syria on a map where everything was labeled for them. Honestly the vast majority of us could not care less who is running Syria and after the mess that has become Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya since we intervened in those places the Joe6P does not want to be involved in any more wars.

No matter how hard the Bureaucracy has been hyping the 'evils of Assad' we just don't care. The best case scenario would be for our government to make some face saving excuse and pull every asset and sneaky supply system out of the Syrian Civil War and pretend like we achieved our goal even if Assad rules for another 50 years. After All we have precedent, in the early 1960's we declared Castro must go in Cuba and his ancientness is still theoretically in charge. Just severe Diplomatic relations with Syria and declare it a no go zone for Americans and in 2017 or 2067 whomever is President can restore relations.

[ennui2]

And yet, its a NATO country that makes the first kill.

And what about the downed airliner in Ukraine?

We should be honest. We, NATO, exist to destroy Russia. That is its purpose. As long as some Europeans survive to loot it afterwards, we call it victory.
And we're now in it.

Bullshit. Nobody wants this to balloon out into a war.

The rest of your message is you drooling over this like it's pregame analysis for the super-bowl.

I think the best thing Pops did here was split these kinds of discussions off into Members Only. The chest-beating threads where people just argue over politics or people issue their usual end-is-nigh predictions or tinfoil conspiracies tend to gravitate here and I know what to expect.

[Plantagenet]

And what about the downed airliner in Ukraine?

That was shot down by the Caliphate---not NATO.

]

Nobody wants this to balloon out into a war.

Turkey shooting down a Russia plane is an act of war---fortunately Putin knows it was a "provocation and is refusing to take the bait.

Meanwhile the civil war in Syria has ballooned into something like the Spanish civil war---its become a global proxy war---. The civil war in Syria began 5 years ago and has sucked in many other players over the last five years---- Its the Caliphate vs Syria vs Turkey vs Iran vs USA vs Russia vs. France vs. Hezbollah vs. Kurds vs. Turkmen vs. Iraq vs. the Free Syran Army... etc. etc.

[onlooker]

No matter what we may thinks of anyone's overblown reaction on this board, dangerous games are being played and WWIII is possible!

[Sixstrings]

Update, Hollande's meeting with Putin seems to have gone well:

But he said he would order Russia's military to intensify cooperation with the French armed forces - including exchanges of information about targets - and viewed that as part of creating a broader international coalition bringing together Russia and Western states.

"We are ready to cooperate with the coalition which is led by the United States. But of course incidents like the destruction of our aircraft and the deaths of our servicemen... are absolutely unacceptable," Putin said at a news conference, standing alongside Hollande.

"And we proceed from the position that there will be no repeat of this, otherwise we'll have no need of cooperation with anybody, any coalition, any country."

He said he and the French leader had "agreed how we will cooperate in the near future, on a bilateral basis and with, as a whole, the coalition led by the United States.

"We are talking about a designation of the territories against which we can conduct strikes, and where it is better to refrain from strikes, about the exchange of information on various issues, and the coordination of our actions on, so to speak, the battlefield," Putin said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/26/us-mideast-crisis-france-russia-putin-idUSKBN0TF2D320151126#QsWGBWf9DMdc6J2J.97

Key points:

* Putin said several times, he will "cooperate with the coalition *lead by the United States.*"
* Putin says he will cooperate with the US lead coalition on "where it is better to refrain from aistrikes." Sounds like Russia maybe won't keep bombing the same areas near the border, so that should help with preventing another incident with Turkey.
* The above is all contingent that Turkey doesn't repeat this plane incident, if it happens again then Putin says Russia won't be part of any coalition or cooperate with any nation.

And this is interesting:

"Why did we pass this information to the Americans? Either they were not controlling what their allies were doing, or they are leaking this information all over the place," Putin said.

If the Turkey incident happened because Obama was asleep at the wheel, then that's not good folks. And certainly at this point, President Obama's personal time and the administration overall should be giving priority to this crisis.

They just need to know what they're doing, and someone be in charge -- it's risky if there's actually nobody in charge of the US lead coalition and NATO. I worry about that a bit.

Overall though, it looks like things could be moving to a positive direction and Russia cooperate more and if Obama has been asleep at some wheel then they should make a pot of coffee in the WH and the other NATO leaders need to get involved too. Hollande already is, David Cameron should be doing a lot more, and Merkel, etc.

P.S. Tanada mentioned "sleepwalking." I worry a bit that O's actually been *asleep at the wheel*, like, not really interested and involved yet his job is commander in chief. It's just odd to me, why isn't there news of WH updates on the Turkey crisis? Why don't we see pictures of Obama huddled in meetings and Joe Biden there and all the natl security team and generals etc.

[Sixstrings]

Hannity Blames Obama For Turkey Shooting Down Russian Warplane
Sean Hannity: Because Of Obama "You Have ... More Players Fighting For The Power That America Should Be Leading In"

Mistake number one is the president pulled out of Iraq too early ... You add to that the red line issue when he draws a red line, if Assad uses chemical weapons, that there's going to be severe consequences, blah, blah, blah. America's absence in the region has now created a void, and as a result of that void, you have more chaos and more players fighting for the power that America should be leading in.
http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/11/24/hannity-defends-putin-blames-obama-for-turkey-s/207080

[Apneaman]

Think of people like Sixstrings in charge and making the decisions.

LMAO


Russia destroys Turkish truck convoy headed for Syrian militants -- Erdogan silent

"Last night (November 25) the first photos and video came up of the destroyed Turkish convoy that arrived in the militant-controlled city of Azaz. First, some photos:"




http://fortruss.blogspot.co.nz/2015/11/ ... onvoy.html

[Plantagenet]

Russia destroys Turkish truck convoy headed for Syrian militants -- Erdogan silent

AND what was in the truck convoy that the Russians destroyed? Chances are the trucks were loaded with US weapons and ammunition bound for the Syrian rebels.

The photos the rebels released after they shot down the Russian helicopter trying to rescue the pilots showed they were armed with US TOW missiles and other US equipment.

[onlooker]

Russia destroys Turkish truck convoy headed for Syrian militants -- Erdogan silent

AND what was in the truck convoy that the Russians destroyed? Chances are the trucks were loaded with US weapons and ammunition bound for the Syrian rebels.

The photos the rebels released after they shot down the Russian helicopter trying to rescue the pilots showed they were armed with US TOW missiles and other US equipment.

Good catch Plant.