"It takes a while to unlearn thousands of years of history." Very wise :)

Submitted by Alexandros (United Kingdom), Aug 21, 2014 at 06:40

First of all as far as Turkish aggressions. There is an amazing book written by Ahmet Davutoglu, " the strategic depth of Turkey" it is an amasing book, because it is the "gospel" or the "bible" :) of the current and as it seems the future Turkish foreign policy. I strongly reccomend it if wish to understand waht the Turkish plans are for the future.

Proxy wars between Israel and Turkey are going to be an issue as long as Hamas exists and maybe IS in the future and of course PKK in Turkey. But a Turkish attack or an Israeli attack using the official militaries, is not very possible i think! In the contrary Turkey has an active threat of war against Greece, in case Greece uses her lawful right to expand her territorial sea waters in 12 miles. This threat stands for more than 20 years now. In addition Turkey is in between huge military programmes, which consist mainly aggressive weapons in sea, air and land!

In any case the neo-Ottoman aspirations of Turkey, realised by Ozal and put forward by the current government, are not going to be abandoned easily. Roughly the plan is a Turkey leader of Islam, a Turkey that will be ale to control the region from the Balkans to Caucasus and the Indian Ocean, meaning, Bulgaria, FYROM, Albania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia! As crazy as it sounds, that is the plan the Turkish government is following! The "Islamic spring" was probably inspired by the Turks, even though Americans would never admit it and the goal was to help Islamists to take over the government in all countries, Islamists that would feel obliged to Turkey for their help, even though American politicians, naively thought that those Islamists would praise America, laughable assumption! If that happened they would have managed to surround Israel in one move! Greece has many financial problems and Turkey is sending in millions of Islamists from Asia, committing a vast crime of human trafficking and at same time they are pushing America to accept a Turkish solution in Cyprus. All that because Americans, a lot and important anyway, support that Islamists are the American weapon and Turkey very important for their plans, which is domination against Russia! This is waht Turkey exploits, American greed and the American failure in Middle East, but of course Turkey is not interested on American interests at all!

In any case Shimon Peres said recently that he knows a thousand reasons why Turkey and Israel should be allies, i would say that i know a million reasons why Greece and Israel should be allies, but unfortunately i don't really think that the politicians of both countries actually believe this and all this because of the phrase you have written and i am using as a title!

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".