Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has informed other Arab leaders that he is willing to temporarily relocate half a million residents from Gaza to northern Sinai in a designated city as part of the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, according to a Friday report.

According to the report in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper, Sissi made his willingness known during meetings held by Arab leaders in recent weeks in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There was no confirmation of the report from any other source.

The Egyptian State Information Service denied the report, saying, “Egypt’s position is firm in its absolute and final rejection of any attempt to displace Palestinians, and the Cairo Arab Summit’s emergency plan for reconstruction is based on it.”

Of course, you can hardly blame Egypt if it sticks to its “no.” Gazans are trouble wherever they go. Egypt and Arab nations only pretend to champion them, but in reality they want nothing to do with them and only use them as foils to Israel.

The next bit of news isn’t about Egypt or Arab nations or even about Israel, but I’m putting it here because it’s about an Islamic regime that’s seeing some disruption right now – Turkey:

The arrest of the mayor of Turkey’s largest city in a dawn raid last week was a watershed moment in the country’s prolonged shift away from democracy. Opponents of president Recep Tayyip Erdo?an fear it is a move to ­sideline the sole challenger capable of defeating him in upcoming elections, expected before 2028.

On Saturday, protests in support of ?mamo?lu erupted in Istanbul – where flares and stones where thrown at police, who responded with pepper spray – while in Ankara, the capital, police used water cannon and tear gas on demonstrators.

The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, said 323 people had been detained in connection with an investigation into the Istanbul municipality on Saturday night, following protests. …

Within days, what began as protests in response to ?mamo?lu’s detention has grown into something more. “This is bigger than ?mamo?lu. It’s about a fight for democracy, law and equal rights,” said Azra as demonstrators massed around her. …

Supporters of the mayor said 300,000 people joined the demonstration in Istanbul on Friday night, while video showed protesters taking to the streets and clashing with the police in major towns and cities across the country.

Much of the rest of the article, which is in The Guardian, blames Erdogan’s actions on Trump. I kid you not.

By the way, Erdogan is the guy who famously said, back when he was mayor of Istanbul:

Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.

Street demonstrations are all very well and good, but they lead to nothing expect arrests and violence against the demonstrators unless and until the police or the army decide not to fight them but to join them in toppling the government.

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He lacks the common touch completely, which is probably the main reason he lost in 2012 and helped us get four more years of Obama. Although Romney was far from my favorite of the rather anemic choices available to the GOP in 2012, once he was nominated I supported him fully against Obama, as I would today if it were to somehow happen all over again.

In that sense – the “consider the alternative” sense – it was an easy thing to do. It was easy in another sense, too, because on a personal level Romney was and still is the kind of guy who doesn’t cheat on his wife or beat his kids. The worst thing Democrats could come up with in that sense was a prank in high school and putting his windshield-equipped dog carrier (with the dog in it) on the roof of his car for a 12-hour road trip.

Romney the politician was another story. It’s not true that he didn’t fight back at least somewhat in 2012 or that he didn’t criticize Obama. He did both, as I detailed in posts at the time. But he did not do so effectively, and not at all at especially critical times (the awful Candy Crowley intervention in debate number two being a prime example). I think Romney would have been a mediocre but okay president and a much better one than Obama (a low bar, to be sure), but he had and still has no big constituency and no large following, although he seems to be aiming to be the leader of the rather small but vocal group of GOP NeverTrumpers.

In addition, I think that Trump fills Romney with personal revulsion to go with the political envy. Trump is the un-Romney: he’s richer than Romney (hard to accomplish, because Romney is plenty rich) but has the common touch, he’s relaxed in front of the camera rather than stiff, he’s cheated on wives, and he fights. He fights and fights and fights, rather than turning the other cheek. Plus, Trump won the election and Romney lost, and then Trump did some public humiliating of Romney.

It’s with that sad background that I’ll (briefly) take up the subject of Romney’s speech criticizing Trump’s decision on Turkey and the Kurds. It’s certainly possible to criticize that decision, and as I’ve said several times we don’t know how this will work out or not work out. But I’ve read the speech, and the fact that Romney calls the Kurds an “ally” and says that we are therefore abandoning that ally to our dishonor and shame, and yet doesn’t mention that it is Turkey that is actually an ally of ours (NATO, for example) in the formal sense, seems to be a major major omission of a vital fact. Talk about simplifying the matter!

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Just as one small example, we have this article in the WSJ yesterday, with the headline “Turkey Rejects U.S. Call for Immediate Cease-Fire in Syria: Turkish troops pursue their offensive against Kurdish forces, as Russia fills void created by U.S. departure from the region.”

Leaving aside the fact that if there were only 50 troops there who were withdrawn in the first place, as I’ve seen reported in most venues, then it’s hard to see how their withdrawal could leave such a big void – we have the fact that today Mike Pence announced Turkish agreement with a five-day ceasefire. Of course, the WSJ was not incorrect in its earlier reporting, because Turkey did reject a ceasefire. But that was yesterday, and today is today, and everything is provisional.

I would love to find an objective and knowledgeable source to analyze what these latest developments mean, but so far I’ve turned up nothing I trust. However, it is my observation, based on previous evidence from turmoil Syria, Libya, and similar places, that the different factions are all tainted to greater or lesser degrees and we often back people who turn out to be enemies greater than those we don’t back.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act. But what is the best action?

Given all those caveats, I’ll quote from one of today’s articles:

After more than four hours of negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and remained silent on whether the agreement amounted to another abandonment of the U.S.’s former Kurdish allies in the fight against the Islamic State.

Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area.

Pence and Secretary of State Mile Pompeo lauded the deal as a significant achievement, and Trump tweeted that it was “a great day for civilization.” But the agreement essentially gives the Turks what they had sought to achieve with their military operation in the first place. After the Kurdish forces are cleared from the safe zone, Turkey has committed to a permanent cease-fire but is under no obligation to withdraw its troops.

In addition, the deal gives Turkey relief from sanctions the administration had imposed and threatened to impose since the invasion began, meaning there will be no penalty for the operation.

Kurdish forces were not party to the agreement, and it was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Before the talks, the Kurds indicated they would object to any agreement along the lines of what was announced by Pence. But Pence maintained that the U.S. had obtained “repeated assurances from them that they’ll be moving out.”

Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.

See what I mean? Are the Kurds PKK and what are they aiming for? What have the Kurds actually told Pence? And why assume that sanctions are off the table forever just because they are off the table for the moment? One thing I’ve learned is that Trump is not shy about applying economic pressure to get what he wants.

I believe that what we are seeing now in Turkey is the tip of a very considerable iceberg. Whether the Trump administration is doing good here or bad (or something in-between, which is more likely) remains to be seen.

One thing the anti-Trump people seem to be doing is championing the idea of intervention here, whereas before they were shrieking “get out of the Middle East!” for years and even decades. But consistency is not their strong suit (except, of course, for consistency on their opposition to whatever the right is doing). Trump, on the other hand, has been consistent, in that it’s always been part of his campaign promises to do this sort of thing.

As for my own opinion, right now it’s watchful waiting.

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In the current mess in Turkey with the Kurds, it’s even more apparent that most people are reacting in kneejerk fashion without much knowledge. I’ve seen way too many times before in that region of the world that predictions made by supposedly knowledgeable people have been way off, and yet they nevertheless retain a sort of hubris about themselves that seems wildly inappropriate.

In the case of Turkey and the Kurds, I admit to being largely ignorant about all but the most basic things. That makes it doubly hard to sort out what’s what. But I think that Victor Davis Hanson, whose analyses have impressed me in the past, not only seems to make sense in this recent article on the subject, but he’s also well-positioned to analyze it as a professor whose specialty is war, the military, and the history of war.

The entire article is well worth reading, but here’s an excerpt:

…[I]t is incumbent on the Trump administration in general and on Secretary Pompeo in particular to find ways to prevent mass Turkish attacks on the Kurds, while not inserting American ground troops into a cauldron of fire between Turks and Kurds. That effort will require a great deal of skill and deftness that are weirdly forgotten in the current bipartisan exclamations of “We sold out the Kurds!” — given the labyrinth of paradoxes that surround Turkey, Syria, Kurds, and the U.S. and the lack of information about the actual redeployment of American troops…

Many of the critics demanding that we restrain our NATO ally Turkey are precisely the same who have damned Trump for undermining the NATO alliance by loudly reprimanding allies for not keeping their promises of military contributions. Yet an American presence in between the Kurdish and Turkish trajectories may not necessarily serve as a successful deterrent to violence given our present limited deployment. If all Trump has done for now is to remove a few dozen Americans from a “trip wire” deployment between the two belligerents, he can hardly have “sold out” the Kurds.

Much much more at the link.

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Step by step over the years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey sought to ensure nobody could challenge him. He marginalized adversaries. He purged the army, the police and the courts. He cowed the press. He strengthened his powers in the Constitution. And he promised Turks a bright economic future.

So it was a huge surprise when the outcome of weekend municipal voting showed on Monday that Mr. Erdogan’s party had not only lost control of Ankara, the political center, but maybe Istanbul, the country’s commercial center, his home city and longstanding core of support.

Even if the results were not final, they amounted to the most momentous political earthquake to shake Mr. Erdogan in nearly two decades of basically uncontested control at the helm of Turkey, a NATO ally and critical linchpin of stability in the region.

What was different this time was the rapidly tanking economy and a highly disciplined opposition.

It deployed monitors to not only scrutinize the vote tallies but also sleep on sacks of sealed counted ballots to guard against possible tampering by members of Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP.

“We think they were not able to rig the election,” said Ilayda Kocoglu, 28, vice president of the Istanbul branch of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, who slept on some sacks herself. “They were not expecting us to be that organized, or that resolved.”

Republicans, take note.

This doesn’t mean the Erdogan is finished; he remains in office. And his party has some tricks up its sleeve. They are contending all of the results, for example. I haven’t yet found a description of what that process entails in Turkey, but since Erdogan controls so much of the country and has no hesitation to clamp down to guarantee the continuation of his power, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way to reverse the results. After all, it was Erdogan who said early in his career, “Democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.” Erdogan believes he’s the destination, and democracy was just the vehicle that got him there.

[NOTE: For more details of my opinion of Erdogan, please see this.]

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