Eastern Turkey was the key to Erdogan’s electoral victories — one current problem for him is that a chunk of that support is Alawite, and they all turned on him when he dumped Assad. The entire Turkish protest movement arose due to the Syrian civil war, and it is going to get worse. And Erdogan (despite what all of us, including me, say around here) is seen as too much of a moderate by the rest of the Islamofascists within Turkey.
Erdogan has maneuvered Turkey into a situation where it has no allies, literally — the only ally Turkey had in the entire region was Israel, and he went to a lot of trouble to nuke that. His moves to make Turkey the crossroads of Near East trade via a new economic community including Syria, Iran, and neighboring states in the Balkans fell to pieces. Iran played him but good.
Egypt has been headed for civil war since the protests against Mubarak. The rise of Morsi was a respite. The Saudis were caught flatfooted, and Mubarak’s fall can be seen as the trigger for everything that has happened since in the region. Multiple factions are struggling for power, and sometimes work together, and other times work against each other.
And ditto what infowarrior notes — the Egyptian military doesn’t want a war with Israel. Besides the vulnerability of a country that is only a few miles wide — meaning Egypt, which still crowds along the Nile — and has one of the largest artificial lakes in the world just uphill, the local politics are so volatile that the army wouldn’t dare to leave town to fight a foreign enemy. That’s been the case since Sadat was assassinated.
If the Egyptian military does not want a war with Israel, then why are/were they just fine with the “Masri” people chanting “To Jerusalem we go; martyrs in the millions” in Tahrir Square?
Thanks for your comment. I watch and read about the Middle East and just wish that Islamists would go strap their bomb vests on and all kill each other. Leaving the non-Islamists free to believe that they want.