No Replacement For Displacement

What's the deal with the Turks?

Well, it looks like my analysis of what was going on with Turkey a few days ago may not be correct. However, I'm still not ready to say I was wrong. Cato, Steven, Glenn, and Bill Quick think the Turks are sandbagging us. I'm not sure I agree. I think what happened is that the Turkish PM did a lousy job of vote counting, specifically those 19 who abstained. I think that what is going to happen over this weekend is that the abstainers are going to be told, point-blank, p-r-e-c-i-s-e-l-y what is at stake if they refuse to vote yes. Also, there was a major demonstration in Ankara today. That might have rattled a few nerves as well, and the abstentions might have been an attempt to delay the vote until after the demonstrations are over, though to be honest, I don't know enough about how the Turkish system works for that to be any more than a WAG.

In any event, any future votes are delayed until Tuesday, and that a major deployment of some kind is still proceeding for Northern(Free)Iraq. The fact that American ships are already in place in Turkish ports, that in spite of the talk of there being a "delay", or that use of Turkish land is "denied", I have seen equipment being unloaded from these ships, which makes no sense in light of them being "denied" access. From what I can tell, I don't think this is a major setback. If anything, this hurts Turkey far more than it hurts us.

Also, I dug up a link to a Turkish English-language daily newspaper, Turkish Daily News. It isn't completely up to date, but they have an article by Mete Belovacikli which discusses some of the details of the agreement.