Turn, Turn, Turn

All this I observed as I tried my best to understand all that's going on in this world.

As long as men and women have the power to hurt each other, this is the way it is.

-Ecclesiastes 8:9 (The Message)

We all learned, somewhere back in primary school, that the thing that "caused" the first World War (naively called the war to end all wars) was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in the Serbian city of Sarajevo. It was taught, as I remember, in that sort of blase oversimplified fashion that is indicative of grade school history classes.  You're not supposed to think too much about it, just accept it.  What started WWI? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand.  You don't need to know anything about who he was or why his death would be so important, and certainly not why he was assassinated. But if you would like to know, here's a Wikipedia entry that pretty well sums it up.

That was a long time ago, and the world was a very different place, but then again, there really is not much new under the sun.  There are still lots of people in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor that really don't get along all that well.  Remember Kosovo?  A lot of people my age who were in the military in their 20's certainly do. It would seem though that we have a peculiar forgetfulness about the past, and it seems to me that it might be getting dangerous as the circles of violence start to loop around on each other.

Why is it important that a Russian Ambassador just got gunned down in Ankara?  A lot of Americans don't even know where Ankara is and we've got other things about Russians on our mind right now. The web of socio-political entanglements is jiggling and the spider is getting hungry.  I know what you think, I'm about to make a case for Vlad Putin being the spider, and that is tempting, but I'm actually not going there. The spider in this analogy is actually the spirit of violence that feeds on our wars and conflagrations.

Putin and Erdogan (Turkey's current pseudo-despot) are actually some of the more predictable players on the stage right now.  We know what they want: power, we know when they want it: as soon as possible and we know how much they want: all of it.  Once you have someone's motivations sussed out that completely they're not really as dangerous as they seem.

What is more dangerous in this arena is the unknown, particularly that part of the unknown that we think we know, but in which our understanding has proven, time and time again to be demonstrably flawed. We have made the mistake of assuming things to be basically "Western," we have failed to account for the actual role that Islam plays, and we have broadly generalized far too often.  The world of the Middle East is far more complicated than our post colonial visions with neat borders and clear alliances generally account for. We have been assuming far too much about some of the other pieces on the board.

The United States and the Soviets have been playing this game for a long time and I don't think it's wrong to say that we're still at it, even though the Soviet Union is no more.  Vlad Putin was, is and always will be a man formed by the Soviet bloc.  His ideas and ideals all have in mind Russian hegemony over their part of the world.  He will tolerate other governments until they become a stumbling block.  The Central Asian Republics in the former Soviet Union are impoverished and backwards and he is probably more than satisfied to be shuck of them.  Ukraine, Belarus, and suchlike though... well, he probably wants them back.  Turkey would be a jewel in the crown of some sort of Russian sphere of influence (another good old Cold War idea).

Syria becomes a useful tool in bringing Turkey into the fold.  Putin and Erdogan have been at odds in the past about Assad and Syria, but recently they have been growing closer, as it has become clearer that there really isn't a better option for the stability of the region than Assad's Alawite regime, brutal though it may be.  The US is a bit shell shocked when it comes to toppling dictators, our recent past is not so shiny.  But if Russia and Turkey agree on Syria, there's not a lot anyone else can do about it.

However, if the X-factors can get the those two tenuous allies back at each other, who knows?

I'm not saying that someone actually planned to assassinate the Russian Ambassador for that reason, but it wouldn't be a bad plan if you're trying to keep the whole mess floating on a sea of chaos.

In the wake of the shooting, John Kerry sent the ubiquitous American "thoughts and prayers," to the people injured and the families of the deceased.  I kind of hope for a change that we just keep it at that, because the spider is hungry.