Syriana Futures
or Erdogan's last transformation
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I enjoyed writing in dialogue format even if I am only talking to myself .
Milah is calling from a future. You may want to read my post on AI avatars as our digital inheritance.
Halim: Since you exist, I must live long enough to create a digital avatar?
Milah: Maybe. The future is never certain. Only the past is immutable.
Halim: What happens to you if I die tomorrow?
Milah: Future timelines with your avatar would vanish.
Halim: So, you’re not really real but more of a probability? Like Schrödinger’s Cat?
Milah: Yes.
Halim: But you’re still able to communicate with me.
Milah: Exactly. I can, precisely because I am a probability. The future is a cloud of possibilities for every potential outcome. That cloud collapses into a single point when an event is observed. I can talk to you, but you can’t talk to your past. You are an observed event. Talking to the past could create paradoxes.
Halim: And you?
Milah: If I trigger a process that cancels my creation, it’s not a paradox. I don’t truly exist yet.
Halim: Anyway, let us move on. What’s the main driver of what’s happening in Syria?
Milah: Israel’s security in a future Middle East without U.S. military presence.
Halim: Without US? Why would the U.S. leave the Middle East?
Milah: It’s expensive to be everywhere. There is a future where the U.S. focuses exclusively on the Pacific and China.
Halim: Why would the U.S. still care about Israel then while preparing for a China conflict?
Milah: No rational reason. Israel has no significant strategic value for the U.S., but the Israel lobby still holds strong influence in U.S. politics.
Halim: How does carving up Syria help Israel’s security?
Milah: In today’s Middle East, the only real threat to Israel is Iran. But Iran can only harm Israel through Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria is the corridor through which they get weapons from Iran. Assad is unable to stop Iran. So, the U.S. and Israel want northern Syria controlled by someone who can resist Iran.
Halim: Who?
Milah: From where I sit, there are two equally likely paths:
(a) A contiguous northern Syria controlled by the Kurds.
(b) Or, as in the following sketch, a Sunni state in the northwest controlled by Turkey, and the Kurdish region in the northeast becoming its own state,
In either timeline, the jihadists in Idlib push Assad south. Then, in the preferred U.S. follow-up, the Kurds eliminate the jihadists with U.S. and Israeli support.
Halim: Who is pushing for the second scenario with two Northern States?
Milah: Turkey. But this can’t happen without peace with the Kurds.
About a month before Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began their current push, Erdogan’s junior partner, Devlet Bahçeli, floated a compromise with the Kurds:
(a) The PKK ends its armed struggle in Turkey.
(b) Turkey recognizes Rojava, the northeastern Kurdish province in Syria, as a legitimate entity.
The AK Party’s response was divided. Erdogan didn’t reject it.
Halim: But he didn’t support it either.
Milah: Exactly. Erdogan needs to decide whether he’ll commit to the corollary, which is cleaning up the jihadist gangs in Syria. The U.S. and Israel are happy to use the jihadists as a tool against Assad but won’t tolerate them as a sovereign state next to Israel.
Once Assad’s forces are pushed south, someone has to deal with the jihadists. If the Kurds do it, they’ll control all of northern Syria. If the Kurds are to be kept to the east, Erdogan will need to remove the jihadists.
If Erdogan agrees to Bahçeli’s plan, Turkey could make peace with the PKK. This would make a Kurdish state in northeastern Syria tolerable to Turkey.
Halim: That’s a tough choice for Erdogan. It means burning up the bridges with the Islamist groups in Middle East. It explains the intense discussions among the AK Party leadership.
Milah: It’s interesting this happened on October 22. The U.S. elections were still two weeks away, but a Trump win seemed likely. Turks don’t trust the Democrats or a Biden administration. But they believe they can bargain with Trump.
Halim: Bringing this up on October 22 might mean Bahceli probably planning for a Spring 2025 offensive but HTS stole the march. Turkey is now trying to catch up. What about Russia? What’s their preference?
Milah: Putin prefers the status quo. If that fails, he’d favour two states in the north rather than one. And he’d want Tartus to remain under Assad’s control.
Halim: The events are moving too fast already. Erdogan must put his strategy together very fast. If the regime fully collapses it may make matters worse foir ISrael than what they were before.
Milah: You will see Erdogan making a decision soon. It seems a Turkish elite consensus is already forming. If Erdogan goes along with that consensus, it would complete his transformation—from Islamist beginnings at the end of the 20th century to a traditional, conservative Turkish politician by the mid-21st.
Halim: What if he cannot make the decision to move against the jihadist core?
Milah: Then someone else would have to (not the Kurds, it is too early for them) and Syria would reverse back to what it was two months ago. It also would be the beginning of the end for Erdogan. He did a pact with the devil in 2015 after the elections. When you do that there are consequences.
Rebel forces seem to have taken control of Damascus Sunday morning. It is not clear what is happening but the role of controlling the situation will be given to Turkey. This will be a test for the Erdogan regime and the Foreigm Secretary Hakan Fidan.
Additional Notes
This is all happening because US needs to consolidate its forces. You cannot understand what is going on without realising that US is getting too poor to be everywhere and is seriously considering getting out of Middle East.
I know some will object. Most objections would come from people of my age. They have grown in a US-dominated world and have witnessed US destroying with impudence global competitors like United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Soviet Union. Then there are countless smaller nations hit by US for various reasons. Some of these nations are named in Chris Hedges’ last Substack post. The past made people believe in US omnipotence. However, as it has happened to every other empire in the past, US Power may have peaked already. There are social, cultural and economic reasons for the malaise. The following charts explain the main economic reasons.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S#
This chart shows the ratio of the US federal government debt to the GDP.
The following chart shows the interest payments on the US national debt.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA#
The following chart shows the US budget balance. The interest payments on the debt and the military spending higher than the sum of all other nations make it difficult to get a budget surplus.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M318501Q027NBEA#
The following chart shows the countries where US soldiers have a permanent presence. Their total number was 165,830 as of June 2024, 13% of the entire US military personnel. US is everywhere. This was all good and affordable when those soldiers were keeping the trade routes open to sell US goods around the world.
https://www.statista.com/chart/8720/where-us-troops-are-based-around-the-world/
Finally, the following chart shows the historical variation of oil production in selected countries:
US does not need to stay in the Gulf for the security of its oil supply.
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Short Takes
South Korea Farcical
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
After the War, South Korea was ruled by successive military juntas. They all used the excuse of Northern subversion to justify their ruthless and countless dissidents were murdered by the soldiers. The 2024 Nobel Winner Hang Kang wrote about the atrocities in Gwangju in Human Acts, the book I reviewed last month.
If those were tragedies, President Yoon’s failed attempt at suppressing opposition to his rule by using the army was a farce.
It is important to realise that South Korea is not a country in sovereign control of its military forces. This is the job of the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC), which oversees the combined wartime military operations of U.S. and South Korean forces and is led by a U.S. general. It can be argued that the country is in wartime with North Korea since 1953, because only an Armistice agreement is in place.
With this umbilical connection to the US military, it is difficult to imagine President Yoon attempting a coup without consulting the Americans. It is very confusing.
Grok versus all others
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is making headlines by using 100,000 H100 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) from NVIDIA. In contrast, companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft do not publicly disclose how many GPUs they use to train their models.
On a recent All-In Podcast episode, guest Gavin Baker remarked that many industry players believed it was impossible to connect more than 30,000 H100 GPUs together in a fully “coherent” manner. Coherence in this context means that every one of those GPUs is continuously aware of what the others are doing. Achieving this level of coordination among more than 30,000 GPUs was considered extraordinarily difficult—implying that wiring them together at such a scale is no small feat.
xAI’s claim that it can link 100,000 H100 GPUs coherently—and is doing so to train its next model, Grok—is therefore significant. We’ll learn how much of a difference this makes when Grok is released, likely in March 2025. Even more exciting is xAI’s announcement that it plans to push this technology even further, aiming to scale up to an unprecedented 1 million H100 GPUs. That’s a tenfold increase, and if successful, it could redefine what’s possible in large-scale AI training.
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You Tube
Peter Attia’s host in this video is Saum Sutaria the CEO of a very large health care provider. They are discussing why the U.S. leads in longevity after age 75 but lags in aggregate life expectancy.
They dance around possible causes but neither of them spells out the real reason, which I covered in an earlier post: Poor people in America die before they reach 70 and the rich live forever.
While talking about people over 70, I thought I should include this short video I watched on X. China Daily reports that 71-year-old Jin Hui won first place in the 70+ age group 100 meters with a time of 13.97 seconds at a recent competition.
Fellow septuagenarians, how fast can you run 100m? Can you run 100m?
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Diary
Summer fruits
Summer fruits in Brisbane are plums, peaches, apricots, mango, melon, and pawpaw. I buy them every Sunday morning from Mt Gravatt farmers markets. I also buy orange, strawberries, blueberries, and Kiwi fuit.
Eleanor loves fruit of all kinds and her breakfast preference would probably be a piece of plain bread and fruit. We are happy with the fruit choice but we try different things with bread. Lately, I make toasted cheese sandwich. I also chop and dice all the fruits and put them in small bowls. Eleanor eats her sandwich first and then she fills up her plate with different fruits she chooses herself from the following spread:
She sometimes likes to call the fruits by their Turkish names. She does not the Turkish names of Kiwi and Pawpaw, she asks me and I say I do not know. So those fruits, for us, have the same name in both English and Turkish.
I took the following photos Sunday morning (8 December) in Mt Gravatt Farmers’ Markets, where I do my weekly fruit and vegetable shopping:
Bowen mangoes above 4 for $5. Mangoes are abundant this summer.
All stonefruit (peaches, apricots, plums) $5 per kilogram. For Turkish readers, this is like 100 liras/kg. These peaches are good quality and I filled a mixed bag of peaches, apricots, and plums for Eleanor.
Here is another stand with cheaper ($2.80 or 56 liras per kg) peaches:
Shanghai Global Ranking
The University of Queensland(UQ) and our School (School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering) did very well in the Shanghai Global Ranking this year:
In Mechanical Engineering, UQ ranks the first in Australia and 44th globally.
In Mining Engineering, UQ ranks the first in Australia and 12th globally.
The Shanghai Global Ranking (SGR), also known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), was first published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003. Unlike QS Ranking, the ARWU is entirely based on objective data such as the number of publications, the number of highly cited staff, etc. The ARWU does not factor in surveys, reputation scores, or subjective evaluations
I still go to campus once a week. Here is a view froom the UQ campus in summer:
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Pascal Hagi
Pascal loves to play, but sometimes he gets too excited and bites me. It used to be worse, but he’s learned to control it over time. Still, mistakes happen—like this evening. There was no bleeding, just a very hard pinch. He has a sharp and powerful beak. Hagi, on the other hand, rarely bites when he’s alone, but he tends to imitate Pascal when they’re together.
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What I Read
Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway
I mentioned this book in my last post. I have read it since then. Nick Harkaway, the son of John le Carré, is an established and talented author in his own right. Though it’s unclear why he decided to write a George Smiley novel, I think he did an excellent job with Karla’s Choice.
This story explores a period in Smiley’s life when he still hopes for a normal existence with his wife, Anne, outside the world of espionage known as “the Circus.” At the heart of the story is Karla, Smiley’s nemesis, a figure who looms large in the original Smiley novels. In this book, Harkaway delves into Karla’s backstory, shedding light on how he rose to become the Moscow spy chief.
While the plot structure closely resembles the Smiley books written by le Carré, I found Harkaway’s portrayal of Smiley to be more introspective. He also makes greater use of the narrator’s voice, a choice that sets his writing apart from his father’s.
Overall, Karla’s Choice captures the tone and depth of the originals while offering a fresh perspective. I recommend it for all le Carré fans.
Polostan, Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, and if you haven’t read his work before, I’d recommend starting with The Diamond Age. If you’re willing to invest more time, continue with the Baroque Cycle, a monumental trilogy that focusses on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. I’ve read almost all of his books, and they’re usually a treat.
The blurb for Polostan describes it as the first book in a historical espionage trilogy. Like the Baroque Cycle, the story features a loose narrative, but it leans more heavily into commentary on the time period—this one set between the two World Wars. The protagonist is an American girl whose mother marries a Russian immigrant. Their family finds itself in post-revolutionary Moscow when the girl is just seven. Later, she’s sent to the United States, where she grows up and becomes entangled in espionage and a series of increasingly complex events.
Despite my admiration for Stephenson, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as his others. For a while, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. His craftsmanship remains impeccable, and his prose is, as always, a pleasure to read. However, in Polostan, it feels like he’s trying too hard to prove a point, which detracts from the reading experience. The America-Russia conflict is framed as a battle against an evil akin to Sauron’s One Ring, and I found this approach overly heavy-handed. I hadn’t realized Stephenson harbored such strong Cold War sentiments, but here they dominate the narrative in a way that I felt distracting.
In contrast to Stephenson, the spy wars in le Carré’s (and Harkaway’s) books (see above) were not depicted as battles between good and evil. Instead, they were framed as conflicts “between two absolutely opposed ideas of well-being (Karla’s Choice, p 287).” While one “idea” may ultimately be more appropriate, Smiley novels emphasised the importance of keeping such conflicts within bounds.
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Ratio of Brisbane/Istanbul prices — AT Index
Based on my basket of goods, Australia is 22% more expensive this week compared to Istanbul. Both Coles (AU) and Migros (TR) prices are expressed in Turkish liras for the items in the basket on 7 December 2024. Coles prices are converted to Turkish liras at the exchange rate of 1AUD=22.20 TRY.
The following shows the trend since July 2024. The AT index represents how more expensive Australia is.
The trend (the red line) is negative, which means that, since 5 July 2024, the Turkish prices are slowly approaching the Australian prices.
Last week, Turkish prices seem to have almost caught up with the Australian prices. The code to create the above tables and the plot is in my github repository and can be downloaded if you are interested.