CRESENTS and STARS

This is a problem and it couldn’t have come up at a worse time:

"...EU foreign ministers agreed Monday to punish Turkey for refusing to open its ports and airports to Cyprus, an EU member. They suspended talks on 8 of the 35 issues under negotiation ahead of the possible accession of the mainly Muslim country more than a decade from now. The decision is expected to be endorsed by EU leaders at their summit talks on Thursday.

"This decision is unfair to Turkey," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised speech. "Let us not forget that our friends in the EU also have promises they have not fulfilled."

He said that relations between Turkey and the EU were "going through a serious test, despite all our efforts."

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the EU's decision represented "a lack of vision."..."

Read it all HERE

Why? Because it is long past time that we Americans were disabused of the notion that there are, what we would call, “armies” in Europe – or elsewhere for that matter. Let me put it this way …there are essentially two kinds of military organizations in the developed world (read in the G-20 or so) . . . war-fighting armies and police force armies. And while the Europeans do indeed have plenty of police force army divisions laying around, there is only one war-fighting army in the EU (England’s) and it’s tied down along with ours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for the remainder of Europe . . . Russia has a war-fighting army but it is doctrinally ill-equipped for peace-keeping (read: Chechnya) and Turkey is holding-out the prospect of using its rather large war-fighting army in such forays as a bargaining chip to get into the EU (a strategy that happens to depend on us throwing our weight on the scale – though for reasons that baffle me we haven’t – O’ and plain fear of obvious military impotence is partly why "Old Europe" needs a bit of coaxing). The Turks are also justifiably paranoid – worrying that if Dennis Kucinich & Arianna Huffington get their way, they’ll have to send it into Iraq to help counter whatever Iran and Syria try to cook up.

Unfortunately Turkey’s problems are pretty typical of the democracies with war-fighting armies (India, South Korea, Taiwan et al) and that means the United States should be doing more to help them sort-out freakin’ nonsense, like that nonsense above -- which is just my way of suggesting that 5,000 Turks would go a long way toward killing off our troubles in Southern Afganistan.