Joe Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
The former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...
on Friday arrived in Turkey for a three day visit aimed at persuading Turkish leaders to play a bigger role in the coalition against Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(IS) myrmidons.
Biden is expected to seek to soothe tensions that have emerged between the two NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
members, traditionally strong allies, over Turkey's reluctance to play a major role in the fight against the jihadists who have captured swathes of Iraq and Syria.
The U.S. number two will Friday evening meet Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul for dinner talks. On Saturday he will address a conference before heading into a key meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him...
. He is due to leave Istanbul on Sunday.
So far, Turkey's sole contribution to the coalition has been allowing a contingent of Iraqi peshmerga Kurdish fighters to transit Turkish soil to fight IS forces of Evil for the Syrian border town of Kobane.
Turkey has set several conditions for playing a greater role in the coalition.
It wants a clear coordinated strategy to overthrow
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Supressor of the Damascenes...
, a major training and equipping program for the anti-regime Free Syrian Army
... the more palatable version of the Syrian insurgency, heavily influenced by the Moslem Brüderbund...
and a security zone, backed by a no-fly area, to be set up in northern Syria along the Turkish border.
However U.S. officials indicated in the run-up to the trip that while they are prepared to discuss a security zone it was not an idea that was currently on the table.
Biden and Erdogan were involved in a highly-publicized spat last month after the U.S. vice president suggested Ankara had changed its Syria policy after realizing it had encouraged the growth of IS.
Erdogan promptly declared that his relationship with Biden would be "history" for him had he said such a thing and the two sides even argued over whether there had been an apology.