Too clever by half?

We were wrong. We thought that supplying arms to the Kurds in Iraq and Syria will result in a war between the Turks and the Kurds at a future date. In fact Turkey is enjoying the slaughter of Kurds in Kobani, with tourists gathering on a hilltop overlooking the town to watch the fun. This is exactly what the Israelis did when their air force was pulverising Gaza. Not much different in levels of inhumanity but what is really different is that while Jewish Israel was fighting Muslim Hamas here all the players are Muslims. Not just that, the Turks, Kurds and Islamic State fighters are all Sunni. Turkey is not only sitting on the sidelines, it is stopping Kurdish fighters from crossing the border to help their kin in Kobani. The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an extremely corrupt and authoritarian fellow, said," For us, the PKK ( Kurds ) is the same as ISIL ( same as IS and ISIS ). It is wrong to consider them as different from each other." He fought with Israel quite unnecessarily in 2010 by encouraging a Turkish ship to try and break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Like all thugs Erdogan thinks he is too clever. He thinks that he can use the IS to destroy the PKK, use the US to destroy the Alawi regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by imposing a no-fly zone and weaken the Shia led government in Iraq by buying oil from Kurds in the north of Iraq in violation of Iraqi sovereignty. However, Erdogan is not the only one with delusions of cleverness. The Saudis are encouraging a fall in the price of crude apparently to stop development of shale oil in US and Canada, which becomes uneconomic when prices fall below $80 a barrel. We do not know whether the gasbag, Obama, who struts around as commander-in-chief, is party to this. The shale oil industry may suffer a bit but cheap oil will be good for the US economy. This will cause incredible pain to other oil producing nations. The Russian economy is already suffering due to sanctions, forcing Putin to negotiate a $400 billion gas deal with China. This is highly advantageous to China, making it a more dangerous adversary for the US. The fall in the earning from oil exports may deter Russia from cutting gas supplies to western Europe this coming winter in retaliation for sanctions. Venezuela may default on its foreign debt with the danger of great social unrest. Now Iraq has followed Saudi Arabia in reducing the price of its oil. All this uncertainty is pushing the dollar up against all currencies so the gains from cheap oil will be lost due to the strong dollar. Among all these clever clogs the Islamic State has a simple belief in its ultimate victory. Trouble is that ordinary people like us, with no delusions of grandeur, will suffer the fallout of all this cleverness. God help us.