OK. Not an offensive. As I suspected.
Members banned from this thread: donttread |
OK. Not an offensive. As I suspected.
ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Peter1469 (04-08-2016)
Skirmishes continue.
The NYT says to stop the fighting now before it escalates.
ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
On the outside, trickling down on the Insiders
We won't live free until the Democrats, and their voters, live in fear.
Peter1469 (04-09-2016)
In a preview to 9/11, an offcourse Libyan airliner was shot down by Israel over its territory on February 21, 1973. The Israelis' explanation was that they found out that terrorists were planning to hijack an airliner and use it as a bomb. The pompous NYTwits condemned Israel for being trigger-happy and trying to act like tough guys--the usual overeducated squeamish babble. From what we know now, the rag's editorials really look ignorant, weak, and dangerous. But perceptive readers should have known that about them even back then.
On the outside, trickling down on the Insiders
We won't live free until the Democrats, and their voters, live in fear.
Peter1469 (04-10-2016)
Israel has inserted itself into the conflict. Here is an article about it.
Armenia is closely allied with Russia and Iran, while Azerbaijan is a Turkic-speaking country with cultural, historical, and political ties to Ankara. Russia and Turkey don’t quite get along these days, and a renewed war in Ngorono-Karabakh—at worst, a full-blown Russo-Turkic proxy conflict in the central Caucasus—belongs on the short-list of plausible geopolitical nightmare scenarios. This month’s fighting was especially awkward for Israel: Thanks to their close defense relationship and shared antipathy towards an Iranian regime ensconced directly to the country’s south, Azerbaijan is one of Israel’s closest majority-Muslim allies.
The Ngarno-Karabakh fighting—Haaretz reported that 112 people have thus far died due to the conflict there—and Israel’s apparent bit role in the outburst, did not come at convenient time for Israel’s foreign policy. Russia and Israel are just one mid-aircollision over Syria away from a diplomatic crisis while a “deconfliction” agreement between the countries has likely preserved Israel’s ability to go after Hezbollah targets in the country. Israel and Russia are effectively on opposite sides of the Ngorno-Karabakh conflict: a modest Russian deployment in Armenia acts as a deterrent on an Azeri military strike to reclaim the territory, while Israel is Azerbaijan’s only supplier of advanced weaponry, according to a 2015 paper by the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies’ Gallia Lindenstrauss. As Lindenstrauss notes, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe maintains an “embargo on arms sales to Azerbaijan and Armenia, at the declarative level at least.” Israel considers its relationship with Azerbaijan to be more important than any nonbinding OSCE directive: According to Haaretz, Israel has soldAzerbaijan some $5 billion in weaponry over the past four years.
Notably, Israel has helped Azerbaijan keep its military options open—without going gone quite as far as it could in backing Baku’s position in the Ngarno-Karabakh conflict. As retired IDF general Efraim Sneh observed in an April 15 piece in Al Monitor, Israel hasn’t called for an Armenian withdrawal from Azberbaijan’s territory and has done little to back its ally in the diplomatic sphere in the wake of the flare-up. Sneh attributes this to similarities between Armenian occupation ofAzerbaijan’s land and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank: In calling for a military withdrawal in what Sneh believes to be an analogous situation, Israel would only draw attention to its own failure to remove its troops from land that doesn’t belong to it.
There are other possible explanations: Israel might think that the status of Ngorno-Karabakh is a matter better left for Armenia and Azerbaijan to determine. And while it’s one thing to provide military assistance—which remains largely hidden from public view, save for the occasional Haaretz article—a diplomatic spat with a Russian ally would be a more public and potentially messier affair.
ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Always a bad idea to step into somebody else's pissing match.
People who think a movie about plastic dolls is trying to turn their kids gay or trans are now officially known as
Barbie Q’s
Peter1469 (05-01-2016)