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The United States warned Turkey against moving ahead with plans to buy a sophisticated Russian missile defence system that the Pentagon believes would threaten its advanced F-35 fighter aircraft.
The State Department made the remarks on a day when the head of US European Command spoke to politicians on Capitol Hill and said Turkey should reconsider its plan to buy the S-400 from Russia this year.
"We've clearly warned Turkey that its potential acquisition of the S-400 will result in a reassessment of Turkey's participation in the F-35 programme, and risk other potential future arms transfers to Turkey," said deputy spokesman Robert Palladino on Tuesday.
The US agreed to sell 100 of its latest fifth-generation F-35 fighters to Turkey and has so far delivered two of the aircraft. But Congress last year ordered a delay in future deliveries.
[...] The S-400 can track a large number of potential targets, including stealth targets such as the US F-35 fighter jet. Other advantages included its high mobility, meaning it can be set up, fired and moved within minutes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 06 2019, @08:54PM (1 child)
The wars in most of the Middle East, at least since 1900 or so, have relatively little to do with religion, and everything to do with who controls the oil. The US, UK, and most of the rest of the west will ally themselves with despicable monsters of all stripes so long as they allow western oil companies to make boatloads of money off of that natural resource. Why do you think the US continues to prop up the Saudi monarchy after a bunch of Saudis destroyed the World Trade Center and a bunch of Saudi money went to ISIS? Cheap oil and gas. Would it surprise you to learn that one of the major goals of the Obama administration in Syria was to establish pipeline routes from the now-conquered Iraq through Syria and Turkey into Europe?
The only wars in the Middle East where it's reasonable to say religion was a key cause are those involving Israel. However, the religious causes of those fights, at least since 1967, have had more to do with Jewish beliefs about which land God had promised to Israelites and Christian beliefs about the return of Israel being a sign of the Second Coming than with any Muslim beliefs about jihad. The Muslims in the area are generally more mad about the Israelis taking a bunch of their land and their stuff and killing a whole bunch of them than they are about the Israelis being Jewish.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:53AM
When the Jews came over they developed the land and settled in previously uninhabited areas / inhabitable swamp land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)#British_Mandate_era [wikipedia.org]
Both the British and the Ottoman tax survey in the region records aren't disputable: There were a few fishing villages. Some goat herders. A few tourist attractions. But no industry or agriculture. And no exports except the "holy relics" industry and funeral services serving old people coming over to get buried in the holy land. The most commerce the area saw was the ports where ships going from Egypt to Turkey made a pit stop... Literally a grave yard.
Regardless, Muslims and Arabs genocide each other over Sunni vs. Shia or whatever in every region of the Muslim -/+ Arab world so any person that claims a strong opinion with regards to Israel that doesn't have similar opinions towards at least a dozen other nations in the region (and can names them and similarly recite some bullet points) is just a self-deluded antisemitic fool. In the end it's just a tiny regional power that has no economic relations to its neighbors and the Palestinian refugees aren't numerous enough to make any difference on the local geopolitics.