A Most Curious Opinion

In today's Wall Street Journal there is a most curious opinion piece which begins like this:  "Across Turkey’s southern border, Bashar Assad’s criminal regime has for seven years targeted Syria’s citizens with arbitrary arrests, systematic torture, summary executions, barrel bombs, and chemical and conventional weapons. As a result of the Syrian civil war, which the United Nations Human Rights Council calls “the worst man-made disaster since World War II,” millions of innocent people have become refugees or been internally displaced."  It almost sounds like something Nikki Haley would say.  Only it wasn't our UN Ambassador;  it was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the President of Turkey.  The same editorial was Twittered, appears in the New York Times, the Guardian, and lots more.  This was a world-wide dissemination strategy that managed to make the opinion pages and regenerate a lot of stories about the situation in both Syria and Turkey.  That was a good way to start that discussion.

How odd this seems, since one of his best buddies has been Vladimir Putin who, almost single-handed, managed to keep Assad afloat when lots of countries would have liked to see him gone.  Just this week,  Erdoğan appeared in an equal number of news outlets, holding hands of Putin and Rouhani, Iran's leader.  The Russians managed to keep their military bases in Syria at the expense of everyone else around that region.  The Russians and Assad are about the only countries in the world who use chemical weapons on their own people, sometimes when they are in other countries.  The US and some of its allies are preparing for that to happen again.

Erdoğan says he has some 3.5 million Syrian refugees in his country and he is probably glad he does not have more.  Now that few other countries will take them, he wants them to go back to Syria.  They are a little afraid to do that, and nobody has trouble blaming them for not wanting to.  As he says in this opening paragraph, Assad has not been a friend to his own people.  Those gas attacks are not particularly inviting.

Lest we have sympathy for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Turkey itself, or those people in Idlib who are about to be bombed, lets try to remember how it came to be that they are being bombed by their own leadership and the Russians.  The Russians were bombing those people when Turkey shot down a Russian jet.  You forgot that?  How could you not when Putin and Turkey's leaders are such good friends now.