The article nails very little . The thorn in the side of US policy over the last 18 months has been Turkey.
The map contained in the article is excellent. I would certainly like to see the US occupy the small piece of land on the Turkish Syrian Border (Bab) with the dotted line around it. It is the so called safe zone and it is the key conduit of supply from Turkey to ISIS. Should Turkey get there first Turkey will 1) re-populate the area with Sunni Arab families and 2) retain a military presence there for the next 50 years and 3) organise a rebranding of radical Islamist militias under a differnent name.
The crux of the crisis (for the moment) is that the US favours the more secular Kurds while Turkey favours the Islamist forces and will do anything to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state along its Southern border. In truth, such a State would have to behave in line with international conventions and if anything it would strengthen national cohesion within Turkey. The idiots that run the current Turkish regime don't see it that way and for the moment I don't know what the Turkish Generals are thinking or planning. For the moment they are all shooting themselves (ant their national cohesion) in the foot on a daily basis withyoutube video of dead kurds being dragged through the streets behind Police vehicles being just the tip of the ice berg. The PKK behaves just as badly of course.
So what the US says and what it actually favours may not be in alighment due to the balancing act that is currently in play. The US is (I suspect) attempting to retain the cooperation of NATO oriented Generals and as such has distanced itself from the PYD/YPG while filling some of the gap with allied forces such as the RAAF. The US doen't really have an alternative, Russia knows it and at the end of the day the US would IMHO be happy to see a 2 or 3 way partition of the country. Strategically they may even be quite happy for Russia and Iran to secure Alawite areas .... so that they (the US) don't have to. Putin knows this as well. Rehetoric aside, there may actually be an alignment of interests in this space.
My hazy guess is that we will see more of the same until the the next phase of the Turkish elections is completed. One reason behind Erdogan's reignition of the civil war within Turkey is of course to prevent voting in predominantly Kurdish areas.
