In a clearly US-driven, desperate attempt to create some cover for a badly battered President Bahamas, Turkey uninspiredly decided to involve itself in the US-RU conflict over Syria. Transparently, the State Department judges that downing an old Russian plane might offer some opportunity to re-brand a multi-year string of painful humiliations the US president suffered on the global stage into a local conflict between local powers. As outright insane as this approach may be, it is perfectly consistent with the US tradition of denial and misrepresentation of failure, a tradition that ensured a century of constant, predictable and egregious failure while effectually preventing any possibility of learning, with the ultimately unsurprising result of ruining that country. Continue reading →