From haaki
>I said in the first post of this thread that the anti-govt marchers from the
>Friday prayers crowd, normally aligned with the ruling AKP, were holding
>professionaly printed signs and shouting "come to your senses, Erdogan".
>Erdogan is the banned head of the party who's trying to get elected in a
>by-election in order to take over officially as Prime Minister, in place of
>the party's second man Abdullah Gul, whpo's keeping the seat warm for him.
>
>Those signs attracted my attention bec this is a poor and uneducated country
>where only intellectuals have access to desktop publishing services. The
>only way the AKP grassroots can get those signs designed and printed is
>through the party itself, since they can't afford to pay for them
>themselves. So the AKP is printing signs for a demo where everybody is
>shouting "Erdogan, watch your step, don't try our patience" (it rhymes in
>Turkish)? What gives?
>
>Well, it turns out yesterday was even better. Over 100,000 people were
>_bussed_ in to demonstrate in front of parliament, with top grade signs &
>banners and full police cooperation, a party-organized demo if ever. Then,
>69 AKP members of parliament defected. So what's up? Well, just as the AKP's
>predecessor Refah split down the middle between supporters of the
>Saudi-aligned fundie patriarch Necmeddin Erbakan and moderates who backed
>his /dauphin/ Tayyip Erdogan, the AKP, barely 6 months in government, has
>just split between supporters of the Imam's son and Islamic seminary
>graduate Erdogan and those of the urbane, English speaking, moderate
>Abdullah Gul. Army pressure had split Refah and US pressure has split the
>AKP. The defectors are Gul supporters.
>
>So with the opposition, the army, the president, and now the moderate wing
>of the AKP washing its hands of the deal made with the Dubya junta, Erdogan
>and the fundie wing of the AKP are left holding the baby. And the govt has
>just said it doesn't envisage a revote anytime soon.
>
>That bears repeating: The government has stated that it does not intend to
>ask for a new vote on US and Turkish troop deployments to Iraq in the near
>future.
>
>Ladies and gentlemen, the northern front has just collapsed.
>
>What about the southern front? It will take the warmongers 30 days to ship
>the heavy armor of the 4th infantry from Cyprus, where it was waiting for
>Turkey's OK, to Kuwait. Troops airlifted to northern Iraq will have only
>light armor with which they can't take Arbil, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Baghdad,
>bec a few Iraqis with shoulder-fired RPG's can trap them all in city streets
>and slaughter them, à la Grozni. The only other US option is to flatten
>everything, again à la Grozni. Not likely.The invaders will have to fight
>their way up from the narrow Kuwaiti front, giving Saddam plenty of time to
>kill an unacceptable number of them and to blow up the oil fields in the
>north.
>
>Could they land the tanks at Aleppo? What, and drive by the Syrian Baath
>dictatorship's chemical weapons complexes and Scuds in order to whack the
>Iraqi Baath dictatorship for allegedly concealing some germs and poisons?
>That would really be pushing it.
>
>Could they land at Haifa and drive to Jordan? If they weren't planning to
>put Prince Hassan in Saddam's seat, they might. But it would be very
>difficult to get the Iraqis to accept a ruler, Hashemite though he may be,
>that is an open accomplice of the US invader. Their motivation for accepting
>the Hashemites is supposed to be that they are the prophet's descendants and
>the rightful guardians of the Mecca. But a prophet's descendant that is an
>open stooge of the infidel killers? No fucking way.
>
>So those M1A's on the high seas have nowhere to go but Kuwait, my friends,
>and that is a bridge just too damn far away.
>
>Here, the sun's come out after a long wintry spell. The snow has almost all
>melted and you can feel spring coming. Have a nice week.