Divining the News (DTN)

The Black Sea is the back yard of three big players Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

Syria’s Assad has been billed as the first Arab leader to publicly support the Russians. And that was after nearly two weeks.

Is Turkey going to surprise the world? And continue to refuse the Americans? Is there is a pax Russia unfolding? And Ukraine for all its vitriol to Russia, transports about 90% of the Russian gas that goes to Western Europe. So there is clearly some interdependency between these 2 Black Sea neighbours. And if Georgia ends up a Russian dependency then Turkey is beholden to Russia for the BTC pipeline.

Public sentiment in Turkey for the US is still at rock bottom because of Iraq.

The President of Iran has just visited Turkey for two days against Israels objections.

It was in Turkey that the BTC pipeline was blown up, a few days before Georgia attacked, and a few days after Kazakhstan agreed to send its oil to Russia and not through the BTC pipeline. The Kurds claimed the sabotage, the Turks officially denied it was sabotage. If western agents had a hand in this might the Turks be upset? Their intelligence service knows what happened. As do the Russians, the Iranians and Israelis.

Are the Turks saying no to the Neocons?

This would P A N I C the Israelis, in fact Syria’s president visited Turkey this month, and Syria’s Interior Minister visited Turkey yesterday while Syria’s president Assad was in Moscow.

US in talks with Turkey for Straits passage of its naval vessels

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Lawmaker and analyst blasts Turkey for ‘not allowing a Georgia mission of U.S. hospital ships,’ whose passage into Black Sea would violate the straits convention. If Russia gains control of Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, it will be a blow on world energy markets, McCain warns
[...]

Hospital ships:

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the United States had a general plan to send two hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, to the Georgian coast for the planned humanitarian aid operation.A U.S. news report suggested at the weekend that Turkey had denied passage through the Black Sea to the two ships; quoting an unnamed State Department official as saying that “Turkey was not helpful.”According to the Montreux Convention of 1936, which governs the traffic of military ships to the Black Sea through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the number of naval ships from such states cannot, at any given time, exceed nine. In addition, the total displacement, or weight, of those military ships cannot exceed 45,000 tons. But according to official U.S. data, the USNS Mercy’s and the USNS Comfort’s tonnages both exceeded 69,000 tons, making them ineligible for passage to the Black Sea.[...]

Ariel Cohen, a Russian expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative “think tank” in the United States, also criticized Turkey for the hospital ships, expressing the view that “Turkey is our NATO ally and, as a friend of Georgia, in my view, should have been more supportive of their Georgian neighbors and of their American allies” He continued, “And this brings back the bad taste of Turkey, for example, barring American troops from going into Iraq through Turkish ports and Turkish territory in 2003 – a step that vastly damaged the Turkish- American relations. I’d hoped we were putting that behind us.”

Source

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19 hours after posting:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The first U.S. military ship carrying humanitarian aid for Georgia is headed to the Black Sea after loading the supplies from a port in Crete on Wednesday, according to U.S. Navy officials.

A woman sweeps her tent at a camp for refugees, many from the South Ossetia region, in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The destroyer USS McFaul is one of two ships the Navy will use to transport the aid because the two [Ships] had permission from Turkey to transit into the Black Sea before the conflict between Georgia and Russia began, according to U.S. Navy officials. Source CNN