🇹🇷🇮🇱 Israel just admitted it cratered a Syrian runway, and Washington says the region came one misidentified aircraft away from Turks and Israelis shooting at each other
Douglas Macgregor watched the timing and saw professionals, not recklessness.
A warning was sent and ignored, satellites tracked the Turkish survey officers leaving the base, and only then did the jets arrive.
His read on what happens next rests on a single image of Erdogan:
"a sort of bird of prey that sits on the top of the telephone pole and waits for the roadkill"
Douglas argues Ankara privately treats Syria as a Turkish province, and much of northern Iraq too, and that Turkish generals told Americans years ago that Erbil was a Turkish city.
The first Turkish foreign minister to visit the new Damascus began at a sultan's tomb.
Nobody in the region missed that message.
The comfort everyone reaches for is trade, since Azerbaijani oil crosses Turkey into Israel and billions in Turkish goods flow the other way.
Douglas points out Germany and Russia were each other's biggest trading partners in 1914.
Washington is now scrambling to stand up a round-the-clock cell working in four languages, purely to keep two American allies from colliding by accident.
@DougAMacgregor
