tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1113959807375631712024-03-18T16:37:27.929-07:00WAR TARD"War is merely politics by other means"War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-78836685664351899042023-01-29T05:18:00.092-08:002024-01-11T22:43:20.594-08:00NATO v Russia: WWIII Part II. Tactical Battlefield 15 kiloton nukes.<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz5I_pY2nxZ-zIEhHJCeO0o0-g4zc4jf0zGGPTCdjO8Rkk9BtJAjKUb5fLQDyLJRRLURz8zrl86j61WNJ-6sErFe3zBf77hIO8D0CsVbyYffQAyaf5QWr0p_6BrTH0t6Egvtx2IBmv-cFaxiRRLJHdBHSRXEqhYQMlVjl6U2H30InLMv0tg0V1PaRaEQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz5I_pY2nxZ-zIEhHJCeO0o0-g4zc4jf0zGGPTCdjO8Rkk9BtJAjKUb5fLQDyLJRRLURz8zrl86j61WNJ-6sErFe3zBf77hIO8D0CsVbyYffQAyaf5QWr0p_6BrTH0t6Egvtx2IBmv-cFaxiRRLJHdBHSRXEqhYQMlVjl6U2H30InLMv0tg0V1PaRaEQ=w640-h320" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> In my last post over New Years', I honestly tried to make a case that this war must end, a peace deal must be had or the danger of contagion and escalation is too great to allow this war to continue. Guess what, <u><a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2023/01/nato-v-russia-via-ukraine-does-this-war.html" target="_blank">nobody read it</a>.</u> A border dispute between two neighboring countries has engulfed the planet, drawn factions, split alliances and is on its way to places I can't imagine. I became politically aware in the late '80s and even I knew as a kid that the Berlin Wall crumbling was something. I grew up in a time where nukes were a very real and ever present possibility. And today, the chances of such a war are higher than ever and the kids don't care. Because they don't know. So, since a call for peace gets me nowhere, let me show you war.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> For those of you with a distaste for horror, close this article now because I'm going to show some sick shit just to know what your taxes are paying for. If peace doesn't sell, then at least know what you are buying.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> First off, let's analyze the war. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Let me show you your death.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Or your children's death. These are the weapons in play...</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="396" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FptBJ_Q47kc" width="551" youtube-src-id="FptBJ_Q47kc"></iframe></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Russia should have won it in six months. The feint toward Kiev from the north was supposed to induce a surrender. The other attacks from Sumy, south of Kharkov, north from Crimea and the main armored thrust to the vital rail hub at Mariupol was supposed to overwhelm the Ukrainians. A peace deal then would have ended it. Donbass and Luhansk go to Russia since that's what the people who live there want. Bring in the UN and hold a vote. Ukraine cannot join NATO would be Russia's only stipulation because such a measure puts short range nukes within 200 miles of Moscow. And allows NATO to put bases miles from Moscow which are simply untenable and unfair after the tacit post war agreement that was made by Clinton after the collapse of the Soviet Union; NATO would not encroach on former territories and place once governed by the Soviets. (Cuban missile crisis all over again). In fact, what need of NATO in 1991 since the Warsaw Pact had dissolved? It's whole reason for being had evaporated. If this take makes me a Russian shill go make a case in the comments. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Power once accumulated never dissolves by itself. (NATO) It only gets destroyed by a greater power.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Yes, the Russians have nukes but so do the US and the idea was lets work together to stop their proliferation and reduce our stockpiles. That was a fair deal in 1997. We we're on the cusp of a new age. Each country-built modules for the International Space Station and it all worked. And look where we are now? Closer to nuclear war than in all of history. Check the <a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/" target="_blank">Doomsday Clock</a>. Think about that? How did humanity degrade intellectually and morally and let that happen?</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjdBxaQvRGdwh-V5LW3M2NTy7nlMU0THCUHwy1V6N9sx5paQoOIhsQzmlCDd1r8l6Yt1-shld7Bd0H-zcf7DGx2VmnE4Kzt4a7uhhqEQ4ZXM3YWvSNVQ5FOqwHsnXDNz2M_FO79uNvw3ChX7yqBpPhG-5qcru_3Cam9Aa7lJzIbao3yTI_meEJxbKXSIA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1190" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjdBxaQvRGdwh-V5LW3M2NTy7nlMU0THCUHwy1V6N9sx5paQoOIhsQzmlCDd1r8l6Yt1-shld7Bd0H-zcf7DGx2VmnE4Kzt4a7uhhqEQ4ZXM3YWvSNVQ5FOqwHsnXDNz2M_FO79uNvw3ChX7yqBpPhG-5qcru_3Cam9Aa7lJzIbao3yTI_meEJxbKXSIA=w640-h380" width="640" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> But that's a philosophical question right?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> I'm here to talk raw war and what's coming will come while you sleep unless something drastically changes.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> The West has gone from sending money, taxpayer money, most of it laundered back to US defense contractors (through Ukrainian banks) and back to US political campaigns to keep the extraction of the work and daily grind of the US and European people as a source of income that can be skimmed and the use of it in the building of a massive security and surveillance state. The rest is being sold off as soon as if arrives in Lviv. Shoulder mounted missiles that can shoot down a civilian airliner are being sold on the Dark Web as as I type. All of them supplied to Ukraine officials via the US and EU. Assange is still in jail for saying exactly this. With proof.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="396" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_IGU_7alJ80" width="476" youtube-src-id="_IGU_7alJ80"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Now swap Afghanistan for Ukraine. It's a money laundering operation.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;"> "<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;">The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Russia or China, but to keep the very structure of society intact."</span></span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"> </i><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #181818;"> With NATO pushing this war beyond what is necessary or logical, sending tanks, artillery, satellite intelligence, targeting information, advanced missiles, advanced jamming tech, high tech radar; at what point does Russia, whose population now see this war, for good or ill, as an existential war for survival, accept a loss?</span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> Let me give you a battlefield example.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> Let's take the city of Bakhmut. It's a major transport hub with what used to have 70k people living in it. It's the administrative capital of a an Oblast(State) in Donbass.. The Ukrainians have poured at best reckoning 50k troops into defending it. It's a built up area so a nightmare for the Russians to clear building by building without incurring terrible losses against defenders in prepared positions.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxerA4eJGaFGLMxgpnaOIxTeYn8DT7Z17bkFYD9TiBQurFf8-8YU2UKJtw9dVMw79BuicxcSbqjBWqoxLnbsDWx_rBoObXklLZmw9rlVDBUXmtmA8q7oUv-2RR1ysDkM581RJqshB2dJz9t0_rvURY1pNc8G8nC9owpZTcVOTDZwUwOAMd314Fhf-dlw" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1440" height="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjxerA4eJGaFGLMxgpnaOIxTeYn8DT7Z17bkFYD9TiBQurFf8-8YU2UKJtw9dVMw79BuicxcSbqjBWqoxLnbsDWx_rBoObXklLZmw9rlVDBUXmtmA8q7oUv-2RR1ysDkM581RJqshB2dJz9t0_rvURY1pNc8G8nC9owpZTcVOTDZwUwOAMd314Fhf-dlw=w640-h353" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the interest of neutrality, the red circle shows what the Russians captured last week. Bakhmut, is in danger of encirclement. I rarely show maps on this blog because due to the fog of war, I believe both sides are lying but people I know and trust say it's true.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> Bakhmut is now "operationally surrounded". That means the Russians have the town of Soledar to the North (circled), Wagner forces are in possession of the road and rail from the South West and the only road in from larger towns to the East like Kramatorsk which is a conurbation ( of over 200k people mostly evacuated) along with a string of other towns in token amounts that form a defensive line 40 miles to Bakhmut's rear. There are by NATO estimates 50,00 Ukrainian, Polish, mercenary troops in Bakhmut. That road from Kramatorsk is useless because even though the Russians do not hold it, they can lay down artillery and destroy anything that attempts to move along that road. So Bakhmut is effectively caught in what the Russians call a cauldron and western military call surrounded in effect..</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> So here's your horror story.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> The Ukrainians do not surrender. They sit on half rations and wait from a NATO armored brigade to break through and rescue 50,000 Ukrainian troops from a otherwise Russian war winning scenario.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> Is it possible?</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> I don't think so. But if the Russians saw that a hard fought war winning end to fighting in Donbass and if foreign forces were rescued by a NATO armored division, would not the temptation be to launch a battlefield small 15 kiloton yield nuke into Bakhmut and airburst it over the town hall and at least fry half the the enemy? After all, the object of war is to win. And since Russia is a a country if 130 million people under attack now by NATO, a billion people, why would they not feel justified in using such a weapon? I am not saying they would be right, I'm saying they could be pushed into a corner where they say, if we go down, then you go down. It is not a moral argument. It is an emotional one. If I were to list the amount of battles fought and lost on emotion, I think I could go 40%<br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial;"> This is the danger the world is playing with. Worse, a few people are playing with.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="424" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/goMNAxFqGbk" width="509" youtube-src-id="goMNAxFqGbk"></iframe> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">This was in the 1950s. Just imagine what they have now. Limited, battlefield nuclear ordinance. Airburst, minimal fallout, follow up attack by armored vehicles. It's coming while you sleep and worry about the gas bill and sausages.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"> WWIII is in full effect. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday. Now.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"> It's just the average person doesn't even know it yet beyond the cost of heating his home, eggs are expensive and good luck finding a steak you can afford. I don't know what to say but the people in charge lied to you about a bug no more dangerous than the flu and they are lying to you now. Ukraine could surrender in the morning and keep three quarters of its land area. A deal could be made. But it cannot be allowed.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"> The West's goal is to attrite Russia because of her vast raw material wealth. Her existence has become too dangerous. Her alliance with China is even more terrifying. This has all been known for a decade. It's a belt and road initiative the US has no answer for. The danger is in the unity of the Eurasian landmass that puts the US an island an isolated block in the sea.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIzV0zSDOGRbkyE8iTMVfBDmQo0FtqZAVW7nMWzRSCbQJmUuW_EnyvLSXYgu1JjtDcKnLN35N10MuxTw7_0elzEv3z8ZtwWqdwyEEzIUKdMxQTvxhWmmGf7s4V9Jch4wDSL8HsQfV36CWBBd8oSnIkaj7fFbn8B8miTY23fk-39ClTBhSw6jeQVkYCeA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIzV0zSDOGRbkyE8iTMVfBDmQo0FtqZAVW7nMWzRSCbQJmUuW_EnyvLSXYgu1JjtDcKnLN35N10MuxTw7_0elzEv3z8ZtwWqdwyEEzIUKdMxQTvxhWmmGf7s4V9Jch4wDSL8HsQfV36CWBBd8oSnIkaj7fFbn8B8miTY23fk-39ClTBhSw6jeQVkYCeA=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"> But now we are on the edge of a hot war.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"> And very few, least of all the politicians providing these weapons, know the heat of the fire they are playing with. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="325" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-GHJVPXn81g" width="511" youtube-src-id="-GHJVPXn81g"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> If we are to die in a war like this, then let us deserve it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> But not like this. Not in our name. Otherwise, let's stop it. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="328" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f0o7XyzNdvw" width="513" youtube-src-id="f0o7XyzNdvw"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> This war is over. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> NATO can throw in some vehicles to prolong it a few months. But Ukraine is done. The only question left is how much does Russia want? Donbass will crush the Ukrainian Army. That's already happening.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> In my opinion, the Russian capture of Odessa would destroy Ukraine forever. No access to the sea, I believe the Russians will call a halt here and take the win. They will leave Kiev to the Europeans, a black hole of corruption, money laundering and theft. Let them pour billions into keeping it running.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Meanwhile, the Russians will relax on the beach and get there sunburn from the sun or the sun NATO fission detonates out of frustration</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Either way, this is the most bloody and brutal war since Korea.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> It affects us all and leaves us all, whether we are involed directly or tacitly; we are accepting this human meat grinder live on our TV/whatever media; we are all involved as human beings no matter where we live and if we like it or not.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> In many quiet ways, we all have blood on our hands.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><p></p>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com232tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-75151445756863808672023-01-06T13:44:00.012-08:002023-01-07T01:48:41.175-08:00NATO v RUSSIA via Ukraine: Does this war end or do we all die?<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhumAnzuA9YpWUeSsEl433Th-OAHI2CjYN437SDH8d6RX5fd7gPwO9KiPOpkfBT-blYtfNzJ-oZbn7C_z6Wwp-oeb89EO98gSsVeHW8Gv9iHMQm4Oov_AEuD62c3wSp2idN597xmgTF9715BjbENvu6q8X_jqdpLSVohsymYk64SDSxJcsyf1oLRP8yGQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="600" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhumAnzuA9YpWUeSsEl433Th-OAHI2CjYN437SDH8d6RX5fd7gPwO9KiPOpkfBT-blYtfNzJ-oZbn7C_z6Wwp-oeb89EO98gSsVeHW8Gv9iHMQm4Oov_AEuD62c3wSp2idN597xmgTF9715BjbENvu6q8X_jqdpLSVohsymYk64SDSxJcsyf1oLRP8yGQ=w464-h384" width="464" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> I get it. This war is getting awful. Christmas is over. The war is a mess but I'm John Lennon level naïve. And I am about to make a prediction. And making any prediction in this Russia v Ukraine war is pure folly. But I'm going to do it anyway. Hold my beer, but I think this war has to end and will end geopolitically but it also <i>must</i> end militarily. Unfortunately, however, to get to a place of no more shooting, there's going to have to be a whole lot more shooting. Because the risk of contagion and the fear of it is growing. This war ends this year. It has to. Screenshot this. I'm not wrong. If Russia and Ukraine are battling it out a year from now, then I'm the idiot. But I'm calling an end to this war. It is simply not sustainable. And if it is, then God help us all.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> And here's why.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> The US (irresponsibly but by some measure tactically) and its vassal state the EU have provided enough weaponry and cash to Ukraine that has tilted the war. Putin made a mistake; he thought a show of force would win this war back in March. A quick Ukrainian surrender, like he wanted but did not get. That Russian convoy South toward Kiev in March, and the attacks south from Sumy did not work. Let's face it, the Russians thought they could win this war on the cheap (160,00 men and 50k obsolete Soviet tanks and APCs).</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> I am going to have to give the Ukrainians credit here, what a defense!</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> It's been interesting to watch this war. It's my favorite kind of war, if one can have a favorite kind of war. Some like Issus. Others Waterloo. But I like tanks, artillery, modern missile tech, total air defense to the point that grounds enemy air forces, mechanized infantry all rolling across green mottled forested terrain. We haven't seen war like this since the Wehrmacht made a bid for Stalingrad.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" class="placeholder" id="34dfa585edae6" src="https://www.blogger.com/img/transparent.gif" style="background-color: #d8d8d8; background-image: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/i/materialiconsextended/insert_photo/v6/grey600-24dp/1x/baseline_insert_photo_grey600_24dp.png'); background-position: 50% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat; opacity: 0.6;" /></div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLSxEf4z6B5OYgV7TMjHfgEmJN3CNAz6iIXBkpqTBNfSrkXbsDwJlxqYlGxu2ikToiSIXKncTyvXWWMbHjlYOtzuAzQX_ZwzwiCEpO7gr6AHyoUNYyTVqdF3guPtSa645r0GcQ6DU6sphevLCzMuktux86-0_3aZ09-UjFt-PFPSjxmu6UYRLXm0EW6w/s2560/Tank.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2560" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLSxEf4z6B5OYgV7TMjHfgEmJN3CNAz6iIXBkpqTBNfSrkXbsDwJlxqYlGxu2ikToiSIXKncTyvXWWMbHjlYOtzuAzQX_ZwzwiCEpO7gr6AHyoUNYyTVqdF3guPtSa645r0GcQ6DU6sphevLCzMuktux86-0_3aZ09-UjFt-PFPSjxmu6UYRLXm0EW6w/w594-h355/Tank.jpg" width="594" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Ukrainian T-90 with full reactive armor/explosive defense package. The real gear.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Let's face it, nobody called this war correctly back in February.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Myself included. I believed the Russians would win this war in six months. In fact, I called out The New York Times and other publications when they claimed this war would be over in a month. But the thing I love about military history is that nobody gets it right, not mainstream publications and not even the Field Marshalls. War is too fluid, too reliant on the whims of chance, equipment, morale, readiness, terrain, numerical strength... and the weather.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> So, where do we </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">stand?</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Russia has military problems and Europe has serious energy problems. And the US, despite inflation and fuel costs is not too worried. The US can just print more paper. But there is darkness behind all of this. Russia cannot be backed into a corner. Russia cannot lose this war if only for dignity's sake. Russia has nukes and any country with nukes shall not subject herself to humiliation or defeat. And the Russian people, despite what you may hear are behind this war.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> And this is why a peace deal is an opportunity now. If the Ukrainians were actually running this war, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;">I'd smell a peace </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;">deal over</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"> the Eastern Orthodox Christmas ceasefire. The US are watching the Russians via satellite. And the Russians are watching NATO via satellite. The US and its serious military agencies like the Pentagon have signaled that a major Russian offensive is coming. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> But the crowd in Washington, who were young men at the height of the Cold War and never served in the military have never gotten over the "Russians are the bad guys" thing. My detractors say I'm in the Russian camp. Nope, sorry. I'm in the realism business and the US State Department and Biden's cabinet are living a boyhood fantasy. They're playing toy soldiers with someone else's soldiers. That's stone cold cynical if you ask me. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgtCMwbqyAvevNyHex6E_nsXNm_KRqvuiNks9g33arh6Vdd6LXSW3j-ebfeUdZsCUJK9m6x1ohlYL1_ruZbdFNs1Sc9b-4gxBKh-igVkLN_z7EYk92vLI1uwOjdnFIEeO_JWeSe75jimoHfoyYVubk3sxNscl_cC4xiZiwO-u_ScM9rcmnK5x4lFNHbww" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1472" data-original-width="1500" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgtCMwbqyAvevNyHex6E_nsXNm_KRqvuiNks9g33arh6Vdd6LXSW3j-ebfeUdZsCUJK9m6x1ohlYL1_ruZbdFNs1Sc9b-4gxBKh-igVkLN_z7EYk92vLI1uwOjdnFIEeO_JWeSe75jimoHfoyYVubk3sxNscl_cC4xiZiwO-u_ScM9rcmnK5x4lFNHbww=w640-h470" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span>Maybe the civilians at the US State Department got the wrong toy set when they were kids?</span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: arial;">Just look at this kids war pack above available on Amazon right now for 135 billion dollars. It's a shitshow. You've got an F-117 stealth fighter doing close air support around a base that hasn't even erected any concrete T-wall barriers. Meanwhile, you've got a runway down the middle of the field with an F-15 and an F-16 pointing at each like they're playing a game of chicken in the middle of a firefight while the flight boss is losing his shit standing on a gantry dodging sniper fire. Worst of all, some fucknut decided to build a ski jump ramp from the Command Center directly onto the runway just in case Maverick dodges Iceman on takeoff. And finally, the chow tent is in the middle of the boondocks. But hey, at least the M1-Abrahms is making a run unsupported at the enemy infantry.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> What's the end game here?</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> I mean in the Ukraine playset.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> The longer this war goes on, the greater the chances of contagion grow. Poland in particular is itching for a fight. They are in the <a href="https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/09/up-to-200000-poles-to-be-called-up-for-military-training-next-year/" target="_blank">process of mobilizing 200,000 men</a>. Who knows what Romania is putting together. The propaganda is so thick that everyone smells blood in the water. The US and Europe think Russia can be beaten. As if the Russians, under attack from all the countries to her West will go down without falling back on her nuclear arsenal. She'll nuke from orbit and make sure.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfZNbNlRsHf2WV3LzAH_VEPq98akbaTRihzSrFLHt-44a8EjKbCcVahd76YCvtEylIa8BcmWb9g7RF6EveW1IBDhaDI_e0LGwbCHJFqn6BsnUHfrfsTJ3Jvfpg2Tq0-RPirpXqfr0IXWl-Kf3q6kpbPPRqrtJpLgKYCyBLvcJRgE3jmjD5HlbU7OqPWA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1200" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjfZNbNlRsHf2WV3LzAH_VEPq98akbaTRihzSrFLHt-44a8EjKbCcVahd76YCvtEylIa8BcmWb9g7RF6EveW1IBDhaDI_e0LGwbCHJFqn6BsnUHfrfsTJ3Jvfpg2Tq0-RPirpXqfr0IXWl-Kf3q6kpbPPRqrtJpLgKYCyBLvcJRgE3jmjD5HlbU7OqPWA=w640-h384" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Poles and Romanians are already in Ukraine as mercs as are the US, UK and the rest operating the weaponry it would take six months to train the Ukrainians to use.</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> The only off ramp I see here is someone's got to make a deal.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;">The Russians have Mariupol and a land bridge to Crimea. Hard won. And there is no way they are giving it back. Putin can sell this as a victory to his Russian population and NATO can sell Ukraine as a war won because they stopped the 'evil' Russians crossing the Dnieper and capturing Kiev. In a mass media, 24hr news environment where everything is lies, it just might work. Ukraine keeps Odessa and her access to the Black Sea and Russia has 'liberated' its Russian speaking population. International inspectors come in and conduct elections in the captured provinces and all parties agree by the result. Nobody wins. Nobody loses. (Or gets annihilated). The wins and losses are accepted as a point of war. (Screencap this prediction).</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"> If not, 2023 is going to be a very bad year.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> The Russians are amassing troops and from my sources it is 300k+ and they are breaking out their top equipment. Maybe it's all a bluff. Half of this force is sitting in Belorussia. Either as an army in waiting, or merely an army whose only purpose is to exist as a possible attack vector; and as much as I hate to use a Trumpism, this force in Belarus could be 4d chess. Either way, the Russians are not going to stop. Just like NATO didn't stop in Iraq, took 20 years to stop fighting goat herders in Afghanistan, obliterated Libya and would have obliterated Syria if the Russians hadn't intervened because they wanted their base at Tartus.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> If it's true what Ursula van der Leyen let slip that the Ukrainians have lost 100,000 men and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in a recent leaked memo said 35,000 men "are missing" (that conveniently means no widow's pension or payout to families). And just imagine the costs of rebuilding Ukraine not only now but after a Russian full multi-pronged assault?</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> The Ukrainians under Nuland and the CIA installed that Ukrainian government in 2014, shot protesters in the streets, broke the Minsk Agreements, and shelled Donbass for 8 years. There's only so long you can poke a bear.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="318" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wJH4Y8ZTrBo" width="472" youtube-src-id="wJH4Y8ZTrBo"></iframe></div><br /><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> But remember, who's the big winner in all of this. The US and Saudi Arabia and petrodollar stability. Germany, Europe's biggest exported by far and the power behind the value of the Euro watches as its industry implodes without cheap Russian energy. Was that the real target or just a bonus? Saudi Arabia sure wins. Now Europe buys gas at triple the price on floating Hiroshima's. Ten Iranian speedboats rush one of those with anti-ship missiles while it's docked in Hamburg and we're looking at the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history. And with all the black-market weaponry spewing out of Ukraine at the moment, this is not beyond the realm of possibility.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgu5GVivTvjMx6gr8Zn1IK5pai2bgx4djhJq2djvAdCOnf1OYk26lx-VhvZ7Gq4uNNDppkHuP9ir5Hxp4t_rZiLkD0TgSm0vhiJphk9knKE5-_Wff-Bhzm8bGTtTCHkChQrqd8a5PQs01v7UicYD-5bKZBsoa_WIJQo1do4k5mgVIwRoK5nVAdSpsoBdw"><img alt="" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="940" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgu5GVivTvjMx6gr8Zn1IK5pai2bgx4djhJq2djvAdCOnf1OYk26lx-VhvZ7Gq4uNNDppkHuP9ir5Hxp4t_rZiLkD0TgSm0vhiJphk9knKE5-_Wff-Bhzm8bGTtTCHkChQrqd8a5PQs01v7UicYD-5bKZBsoa_WIJQo1do4k5mgVIwRoK5nVAdSpsoBdw=w400-h266" width="400" /></a></div></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div>Why have a </span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">pipeline when you can have a ship 3 weeks slower with gas 5 times the cost</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">from a country that beheads women in public stadiums for the crime of adultery?</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> What if a side benefit of all this is the destruction of Europe, a "great reset" as our latest Dr Strangelove named his book. Are we all to be made <strike>poor</strike> carbon zero, massively surveilled and limited to electric cars and tear the Earth to shreds mining Lithium for batteries and hoping the wind blows or the sun shines so we can have a warm shower?</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuy5sPk67Dg78mnO4baFYJvyBfdiPPDQ0tv-myx5vgjaq-uiNssxNRrKp7RXOl1S-52y0Ark4746Ud69OaCsjjyZq87Bg0oBKQrZyqq128HiFMGjDMuNlUEHPPW6Fy6lRCDyZqD7yJY_Tilonu71qLDdKq0PQvMoahIHX514ACyDWA4sxL2QpVQcDNkQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuy5sPk67Dg78mnO4baFYJvyBfdiPPDQ0tv-myx5vgjaq-uiNssxNRrKp7RXOl1S-52y0Ark4746Ud69OaCsjjyZq87Bg0oBKQrZyqq128HiFMGjDMuNlUEHPPW6Fy6lRCDyZqD7yJY_Tilonu71qLDdKq0PQvMoahIHX514ACyDWA4sxL2QpVQcDNkQ=w555-h640" width="555" /></a></div><br /><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> How the mighty have fallen.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"> Maybe that nuke mightn't be so bad after all. Because it's never going to be 2019 ever again.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="343" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jH3iGOPNCiM" width="561" youtube-src-id="jH3iGOPNCiM"></iframe></div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></div></span></div></div></div><p></p>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-34466543007388693312022-10-31T10:06:00.003-07:002023-01-22T07:58:33.025-08:00NATO v RUSSIA via Ukraine: The Impossible War<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhvunlo20dA3AEIzeNN4-f9E-q64-h-01gAbVlzk2Spw_UOLeUVXELSPdkfavaEx-HTrEHMZBG5Ouh4dkK8OXh2qgBBCsP3z0AeCUIzJ2-Z7OaA2tOkdQIf4NOHCo3r5sVVHS0Zp_496bw-DsDVDXMaZeoSH_Cl-yQhZyiqaHcW8sz3Wx7KEyWuv6vkmw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1008" height="459" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhvunlo20dA3AEIzeNN4-f9E-q64-h-01gAbVlzk2Spw_UOLeUVXELSPdkfavaEx-HTrEHMZBG5Ouh4dkK8OXh2qgBBCsP3z0AeCUIzJ2-Z7OaA2tOkdQIf4NOHCo3r5sVVHS0Zp_496bw-DsDVDXMaZeoSH_Cl-yQhZyiqaHcW8sz3Wx7KEyWuv6vkmw=w738-h459" width="738" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Who ever said war was a truthful environment? </span></p><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Of course, nobody. </span></p><p> <span style="font-family: arial;"> That old aphorism of "truth being the first casualty of war" seems quaint in the modern-day environment post WWII. If only they could have imagined it back in 1943. Modern communications, 24hr news and the Internet. They could have thrown reality out the window. With this power, they could have made war anything they wanted it to be and convinced a population to kill. This has been done throughout history and this is where we are now. But on steroids.</span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> The current enemy is Russia. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Maybe I could go hard with facts (and I will soon) but what I really want to know is why the US and EU have disrupted energy markets, destroyed Germany and the EU's natural gas supply all for a border dispute on Russia's border with Ukraine. It's nobody's business outside of the interested parties.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> I made a prediction that Russia could not win this war in a month. But that they would win this war eventually. I stick by that. That was back in March when Western media was salivating that Russia had already failed. In my previous posts, I got most of it right and some of it wrong. Nobody got this war right. Because this war has changed from an initial border dispute between a minor power versus a larger power which Russia should have won in a month and did not and has now transformed into a conflict involving Western Civilization versus the rise of the East (China + vassal states) and the energy Russia can supply to it overland negating China's weakness.... sea power.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> <span> In simpler terms, a clash of civilizations is being forced.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEioDLcHemkx6N2auXRMPuWa4XwcH3moWjI0YPAw247lu5COFvduhawGFXgXrorgneGuso-KMn0cENfCECvpV61GvuFEkkwlh7pMuyVIlUfCwQd8rM9azHsG3rlSceixVwo0LJuCcHMncCQSmnHvmWjlaqIlUA-2h2JFpdvYcmBK8utcS8R2QMSi0UwNxQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="818" data-original-width="1249" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEioDLcHemkx6N2auXRMPuWa4XwcH3moWjI0YPAw247lu5COFvduhawGFXgXrorgneGuso-KMn0cENfCECvpV61GvuFEkkwlh7pMuyVIlUfCwQd8rM9azHsG3rlSceixVwo0LJuCcHMncCQSmnHvmWjlaqIlUA-2h2JFpdvYcmBK8utcS8R2QMSi0UwNxQ=w669-h478" width="669" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span> Eurasia is a land power. But it is too huge to ever be a unit. Right?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span> The idea that China via Russia could build a high-speed Silk Road highway to Europe is terrifying to US strategic planning. If it were ever complete, if you could drive or take a high-speed train from Paris to Beijing, then the US becomes an island far from commerce. This is not the reason for the war in Ukraine, but it is a major geopolitical concern.</span></span></p><p> <span style="font-family: arial;"> Ukraine is a battlefield.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> It is the open ground where greater powers choose to do battle.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> This war began as Russia v Ukraine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> And Russia believed they could win quickly. They drove South and reached the outskirts of Kiev. They drove East and captured Mariupol. That alone would be an armistice option. "Let's make a deal". And any logical deal that does not involve losing your own territory is a good deal. But the Ukrainians did not make it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> Why?</span></p><p> <span style="font-family: arial;">Because the Ukrainians are not running this war, NATO is. The orders, the money and the weapons are coming from the West. Because the West is afraid. The West is not afraid of the Russian military. The West is afraid of the challenge to their global hegemony via the petrodollar currency. And their governments are willing to blame their rampant inflation and failing economies on a border dispute in Eastern Europe that most citizens could not even point out on a map. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> There are many reasons why the West has inflated its currency, but they are beyond the scope of this article.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> With this background, let's talk war. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgY6J8-A5hlrJE6iOqvES1ugJ1jigIBJ0V-zBpH43CTx2EHPbA798OTxOnNemA42-zeFsfG9jWunFDTh_PVX5fcFPAAkiYzt5Rc_orS9559hRg3u3E5pjIKFDTPBCvwnops38VinzgdvERwtpopXWmiJS93vh0c-leVXABZH3fZPRfALfQnvEbIlU1jZw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="864" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgY6J8-A5hlrJE6iOqvES1ugJ1jigIBJ0V-zBpH43CTx2EHPbA798OTxOnNemA42-zeFsfG9jWunFDTh_PVX5fcFPAAkiYzt5Rc_orS9559hRg3u3E5pjIKFDTPBCvwnops38VinzgdvERwtpopXWmiJS93vh0c-leVXABZH3fZPRfALfQnvEbIlU1jZw=w633-h356" width="633" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> "War is a racket," said </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">Smedley Butler</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> and he was not wrong. What defies logic is that the United States has sent 100 billion dollars to keep Ukraine afloat while its own homeless population is in the millions and dollar inflation defies logic. For what reason? After invading Iraq on a fake premise and abandoning Afghanistan on a whim, there is no moral authority here; so, what is this obsession with a border dispute in Europe? It's hard to believe I wrote about it <a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2014/03/russia-v-nato-ukraine-crimea-and-new.html" target="_blank">eight years ago</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> It is a geopolitical move to prevent a symbiotic relationship between the Europeans and the Russians based on energy exchange (oil and gas) in exchange for access to the vast EU service economy. With the sabotage of both Nordstream I and II Baltic pipelines by 'mystery actors' (this stuff reads like a cheap spy novel where you already know the culprit after the first chapter).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> So, the question remains... who is winning the Impossible War?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> According to Western media, Ukraine is smashing the Russian Army. Since, I've got no dog in this fight, I'd like it to be true because I love the underdog in every sport or war. But unfortunately, this war is a disaster for Ukraine. NATO is running the war and that means satellite intelligence, logistic support, training of Ukrainian troops by foreign countries, mass conscription (fifth round), 18–50-year Olds and throwing these men into a fodder line. This is good for spotting weaknesses in the Russian line and successful attacks have been made south of Kharkov. But these successes were orchestrated to make your tax dollars feel like they are achieving something.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> I hate maps of war. Especially while a war is ongoing. But I'll go with the Swiss Map. The Swiss are neutral right? They got away with that in WWII so why not now?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> https://uawardata.com/</span></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj6PV5HZRtsyoJCVHMJLkwijqiD2ZDye-3y8yHW0CXaDysziAlVt3-6dSy0XnbLWhdJCdD5vklaWViUdU9plfyW_5Ki-2tfA60Nk1wHee4YY5cD3mtqtyy9zu0vAe_rkWc0BmuQvW1QdkeF3MlQUcQBB5WLPHyTeb3EyrMuA0Tki8BMs8M8hwRZ3Prclg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="1280" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj6PV5HZRtsyoJCVHMJLkwijqiD2ZDye-3y8yHW0CXaDysziAlVt3-6dSy0XnbLWhdJCdD5vklaWViUdU9plfyW_5Ki-2tfA60Nk1wHee4YY5cD3mtqtyy9zu0vAe_rkWc0BmuQvW1QdkeF3MlQUcQBB5WLPHyTeb3EyrMuA0Tki8BMs8M8hwRZ3Prclg=w721-h427" width="721" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Odessa must be had.</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;"> <br /></span><p></p><p> I don't think the Russians will stop until they take Odessa. Not only is Odessa a city by the sea beloved of many Russians, but most of the people who live there despite the Ukrainian Government banning the Russian language in 2014 in the city and since the CIA coup under Nuland in 2014, it exists, despite the apartheid as a Russian city.</p><p> Militarily, it will be a difficult advance. But the Russians have mobilized 300,000 men. The Russian public wants this. Apart from the difficult advance, Odessa's capture will cut Ukraine off from the sea and render it a non-viable state. It must be had.</p><p> War is merciless but never impossible.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="339" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d4yt16j-Ah8" width="591" youtube-src-id="d4yt16j-Ah8"></iframe></div><p style="text-align: center;">This just keeps getting more insane.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> <b> Addendum</b>: I'll add to the following to clarify things. I am not a supporter of Russia or Ukraine. I pick no sides. I view what can be seen. War in its naked interest via </span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;">Western media already includes enough uncritical propaganda for Ukraine. What is of interest is the geopolitics, motivations, resources and constraints of the prime movers fueling this clusterfuck.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444;">Zelensky himself has thus far done a brilliant job in his presidential and ambassadorial role maintaining western political support, and the Ukranian army are legendary heroes for holding out against Russia with all of their clumsy bludgeoning firepower. Ukraine's savior was both NATO assistance and the halting of modern Russia's military reforms.</span></span></span><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #444444;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">1) I believe Russia made a global INTEL mistake by invading with insufficient data. Who could have known back in February that the US would throw 80 billion dollars into Ukraine's defense and persuade its NATO allies (EU vassal states) to throw in $20 billion more.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;">2) I think it is clear now what Russia's initial gambit was. Throw 160,000 troops at the Ukrainians, drive a convoy at Kiev and hope that a minimal use of regular army troops could trigger a surrender achieved by a simple demonstration of force. This was a gross miscalculation and did not happen mainly because US war planners took over this war with the full capabilities of NATO satellite intelligence, weapons imports and raw cash injections which basically keeps the Ukrainian civil service and government alive and on a payroll.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;">3) The US government has gone off reservation. With the sabotaging of the undersea Nord Stream pipelines, it has made sure that there is no profit for the EU (and especially Germany) if they choose detente with Russia either through the realpolitik of dependence on Russian energy supply for their industry or when the riots start in Europe due to cost of living increases. We can already see this as European currencies nosedive while the dollar increases in value despite the fact that 40% of dollars in circulation were printed in the last two years.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;">4) The game is more now dangerous than ever. With Russia changing its stance to a war footing and the US and its EU vassal states (which Putin correctly pointed out in his speech; the EU is a vassal state of the US since the Post WWII Marshall Plan) persisting in attritional type warfare using the men of Ukraine as pawns in a proxy war versus Russia, supplied and armed and trained by NATO, we are entering new territory.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;">5) Conclusion: For the first time since the post war Bretton Woods accord, the US is not being viewed as a rational actor by those who should (China, India, Malaysia, SE Asia). Its actions scream of desperation and maintaining dollar reserve status. Also, Russia has not thought out its actions and seriously underestimated the West's response. The price of this miscalculation will echo down the decades. Russia has now permanently married itself to the East and will be gobbled up for its energy by China. It's passing grade in the war has not helped it. The EU is not a serious entity. It's encroaching bureaucracy, insane energy policies and embrace of globalism and mass emigration has weakened it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;"> So here we are. Peace seems impossible. The New Cold War I predicted in 2019 is in full effect. And I take no pleasure in this.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;"> We sit and we watch and witness.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444;"> An impossible war. </span></span></span><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p> </p></div></div>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com94tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-2114969234292936512022-03-07T11:32:00.005-08:002022-10-05T05:07:46.964-07:00Russia v Ukraine: Who is winning this mess of a war?<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtFozBjlRylHI7MCbngPvjM0LtMN7HNMfrNMz2NWRtUQRYj1eiZRwSXxm-_BAOkNSyYu3CQb8D2pN-ucXwJmU2nqs6P_wT24jzHIfWibNvamE2vIL8P3Ed622QYa_DWpk4P7ZyjauotaFT0e5an5v5hgJ_i0L8U3xXBwXaVLR1uyLMNDqQv4rx-pdO-w=s599" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="453" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhtFozBjlRylHI7MCbngPvjM0LtMN7HNMfrNMz2NWRtUQRYj1eiZRwSXxm-_BAOkNSyYu3CQb8D2pN-ucXwJmU2nqs6P_wT24jzHIfWibNvamE2vIL8P3Ed622QYa_DWpk4P7ZyjauotaFT0e5an5v5hgJ_i0L8U3xXBwXaVLR1uyLMNDqQv4rx-pdO-w=w485-h640" width="485" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Russia on Mexico's border would be unacceptable. When the Warsaw Pact<br /> tried it in Cuba, it almost led to a nuclear war (Plan A) below.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /> <p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> This war is entering a new phase.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> Russia</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">really wants to avoid the bloody, high casualty infrastructure destruction type of warfare that would make Ukraine a post war rubble pile failed state (almost as bad as having NATO on your border). I</span><span style="font-size: large;">nstead, the invasion seeks to "reshape" the country to Russia's liking, getting rid of the Nazi militias, inflicting as little civilian casualties as possible (hence the ceasefires and opening of humanitarian corridors). Putin has lost the war perceptually in the West but he must have been prepared for the massive 24/7 propaganda campaign run against him in Western media him before he invaded; just like the one ran against him when Putin bailed out Assad in Syria. Only, this time far bigger and more hysterical.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b><span>Militarily, the war is going as Russia planned<b>. </b></span><span>It is a shame that NATO countries are sending weapons to Ukraine urging them to fight a war they cannot win and by fighting can only prolong it and lead to more death and destruction. Every Javelin anti-tank shoulder mounted weapon NATO ship to Ukraine, the further it increases the likelihood of prolonged battle and civilian casualties in a military war that cannot be won. It seems the Russians may be forced, as a Roman general once said, "To create a desert and call it peace".</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> This is definitely something Putin does not want and will try everything to avoid. Russia ultimately would like to negotiate a peace with a government ideally recognized by the rest of the world and you can't do that if the country is in ruins or you've murdered millions of civilians. Hence, the opening of humanitarian corridors from every besieged city.</span></p><p> <span style="font-size: large;"> However,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> there is the lingering question, and it's hard for me to even comprehend this but it is being asked, which is, does this thing go nuclear? A 2019 Princeton University simulation on the escalation to nuclear war called Plan A, chillingly started out as conflict in Eastern Europe. And with the hysteria being whipped up in the Western media and talks of a Western no fly zone even being discussed, one wonders if the post Covid public are being battered to demand something like this from a deranged media apparatus, which is insane unless you love dying in nuclear fire.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="329" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2jy3JU-ORpo" width="602" youtube-src-id="2jy3JU-ORpo"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> This will not happen since the military part of the war is winding down.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> One large area of discussion in Western media is why it is taking so long for the Russians to capture Kiev or create a cauldron/total encirclement of the Ukrainian forces in Donbass. Let's take a look at the numbers. I don't see the slowness Western media is championing as proof that Russia is losing this war or even suffering unexpected losses.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> By the numbers...</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Russia has allegedly committed 234,000 ground troops versus Ukraine's 125,000 troops. Russia has allegedly amassed 1,200 tanks of various types, mainly T-72s and T-90s in unknown proportions. And 1500 APCs and uncountable numbers of Ural supply trucks. Against all this, Ukraine fields 620 T-64s, 100TBM Bulat's, 133 T-72s (all of it old Warsaw pact equipment) which is not going to cut it as this conflict resolves. Ukraine's air force was wiped out in the first 48 hrs. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Also, remember, Ukraine in area is 233,000 square miles. In Gulf War II, it took the US and its coalition partners 41 days to capture Iraq (a country of 169,000 square miles) and six days to capture Baghdad against far lesser trained troops and an obsolete army with no NATO supplied state-of-the-art ATGMs or Stinger AA missiles. And neither were the Iraqis being supplied with satellite data as I'm sure NATO is providing the Ukrainian high command. And neither did the coalition care so much about civilian casualties. So, we could only possibly call the Russian advance slow if Ukraine hasn't surrendered by sometime in mid-April.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The Russians have used their older equipment first as a kind of cannon fodder to probe Ukrainian positions and hardpoints with the Ukrainians claiming outrageous Russian losses, like 5000 Russian troops killed. This just does not pass the smell test. For comparison, on D-Day on June 6th,1944 to 25 days later, when the Allies had fought their way off those bloody Normandy beaches and driven inland in horrible bocage country ideal for German defenders, the Allies lost a total of 2,811 men. How the Russians could have lost twice that many in one third of that time simply cannot be true. It would be impossible to hide losses of that scale in an era of camera phones and satellite monitoring. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: large;">Actual Russian losses are probably high by Western standards, but Russia always fights its wars with a high threshold for losses that would make Western populations riot. That was one lesson the US took away from Vietnam and rectified in Gulf War I and II. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> In an era of camera phones, one mutilated soldier posted on the Internet can go viral and sway an entire country's thirst for war. Add a few photos of dead babies on 24hrs news channels and you can turn a sizeable portion of your population into attack dogs baying for "justice". War is a fickle and dangerous thing. The first casualty is truth. The second casualty is reason. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Remember the picture on the below left? That boy is Omran Daqneesh, who appeared on the front page of every Western newspaper in 2016 supposedly pulled from the rubble of a Russian air strike in Syria. It allowed NATO to launch 200 cruise missiles at Syria and Assad. Turns out, the entire thing was staged, the dust and blood were all fake and there he is fine with his dad in 2017 explaining how the Syrian "rebels" forced him to do it.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimFmmq-QcnIXFuy3tu0OMqCvuGHUIlXMMMiOEIAObywephD5LasrwxwIwW-unQtTej0fkg9Bld5KXdYCrq4wpK5jiv4t6-IkMfX1ov4wMnroUBz13bthmv_4q2JoHLG_bUVHahUfjao6oWcMwCGrLIOgL3I6zAdhslAoL5I_R7H6l_6kiqnaCQSsQ78A=s1966" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1108" data-original-width="1966" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimFmmq-QcnIXFuy3tu0OMqCvuGHUIlXMMMiOEIAObywephD5LasrwxwIwW-unQtTej0fkg9Bld5KXdYCrq4wpK5jiv4t6-IkMfX1ov4wMnroUBz13bthmv_4q2JoHLG_bUVHahUfjao6oWcMwCGrLIOgL3I6zAdhslAoL5I_R7H6l_6kiqnaCQSsQ78A=w640-h360" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Media manipulation is disgusting and it gets people killed. It's a psy-op on one's own citizens.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Russia has already lost the media war in Western countries in a huge way. But that is more testimony to the overwhelming power of mass media and its manipulation of the average man on the street in the West. Russia is holding its own in China and India. Both countries abstained to condemn the Russian attack at the UN Security Council. They want Russian oil and gas and have the luxury of sitting back and watching Europe implode and wait for the post war Russians to come ready to make cheap new energy deals with them.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Russia knew the cost of taking Ukraine in advance. The US probably did too. You've got to give US intelligence credit when they predicted the attack in the weeks before. Biden may be an empty suit but the vast web of entrenched power behind him (no matter who they push in front of the cameras) was right. The US has no particular interest in fighting this war besides its weakening of Russia and its separation from Europe. A united Eurasia is always a danger to US hegemony in the West and increasing economic ties with Russia were mutually beneficial for Europe. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> This war has now sunk the Nordstream II energy pipeline and condemned the Europeans to import the 25% of its oil and 40% of its natural gas it had been buying from Russia. Now that must come by sea from the lovely head chopping off misogynist Arabian Sheiks at a higher price and, crucially, be paid for in dollars which suits the US just fine. The US is okay with sitting back, watching the carnage and supplying some weaponry so the whole macabre show can go on longer.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Russia has adapted its military strategy on the fly. </span><span style="font-size: large;">The opening of the humanitarian corridors is another wise move. Remember, here is a map of the languages spoken in Ukraine.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjLsevaYnEojmtWAHTyG8CNnC8eVc5nsnlIZWyJal6BUMrDOwqY2oC9JJ5vxsWWhx2daTs47zVFPgJ2NFqNJ_8SSiqF0THa4m9n08FtWeRKaiNEDvIzgtRnBIyIjodIL57pL0NSrHSpXfBlJV_88ktJP8ncolays3dtbDSysDUtQkYX416h8Qjo2cI-qQ=s1000" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="1000" height="446" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjLsevaYnEojmtWAHTyG8CNnC8eVc5nsnlIZWyJal6BUMrDOwqY2oC9JJ5vxsWWhx2daTs47zVFPgJ2NFqNJ_8SSiqF0THa4m9n08FtWeRKaiNEDvIzgtRnBIyIjodIL57pL0NSrHSpXfBlJV_88ktJP8ncolays3dtbDSysDUtQkYX416h8Qjo2cI-qQ=w640-h446" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Notice anything?</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Remarkable isn't it, how closely this map matches up with the territory in Ukraine almost now captured by the Russians? As we know Russia has conducted few major airstrikes on Kiev. They could easily have destroyed the government buildings were Zelensky is supposedly holed up like the way the US did in Iraq in 2003 when it shock-and-awed all of Saddam Hussein's palaces, blew up all power generation, cut off communications</span><span style="font-size: large;"> and squashed the city into darkness. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Not so in Kiev. Nope, the lights are still on, you can still walk to the supermarket and buy bread; that's if you can avoid the fighting gangster mobs who Zelensky handed thousands of AK rifles to who now seem more intent on using them to settle internecine old scores amongst each other than waste ammo using them to fight Russians.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The humanitarian corridor and evacuation at Mariupol is being hampered by the Ukrainian Neo Nazi Azov divisions who need the 95% Russian speaking population there as human shields in case the Russians resort to artillery or bombing. These groups are funded by shady foreign money and ex oligarchs, still pissed at Putin for ending their asset stripping of the Soviet Union after its fall and lack of leadership under permanently inebriated Yeltsin during the 1990s. </span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgh9EEZ0NwJz87JEG-KFhJ6P82wS7382XBN63otD2JOUvgAD8hafkaBdPWOD_8b3LsH7o5ib2i4RtMi_TrDPVfhPvG1gAtinGF_JHVH1lQB45bpXR1PPf2-qpsWXzSt25NwlSiip849kGr4b28_g0C35VVqHsYnXkaIR7JWsyRW4VC2RpDK9370aM7eLw=s768" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="768" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgh9EEZ0NwJz87JEG-KFhJ6P82wS7382XBN63otD2JOUvgAD8hafkaBdPWOD_8b3LsH7o5ib2i4RtMi_TrDPVfhPvG1gAtinGF_JHVH1lQB45bpXR1PPf2-qpsWXzSt25NwlSiip849kGr4b28_g0C35VVqHsYnXkaIR7JWsyRW4VC2RpDK9370aM7eLw=w640-h380" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ukrainian Azov Division. A lovely group of Nazis according to Western Media.<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ironically, it was NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 which ultimately brought Putin to power. The Russian people had had just about enough of Western style "democracy" by then and Putin stepped in and was elected soon after. Sure, I'm not going to say Putin is a saint; very far from it. But neither is George Bush the Younger or Tony Blair who killed or starved a million Iraqi's and they're free men who lied their countries into a war. One now paints bad portraits on his ranch, the other made a few hundred million in backroom deals and 'speaking fees' and regularly appears on TV pushing the globalist agenda. Where were the screaming crowds or calls for assassinations of Western leaders when NATO did this to Belgrade in 1999?</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOEdsGMO6ij-qWujuSD1YiY3bpBo9h-Zkrhgneedt3okeQsEpnkdAj1ape2X8n82FG_6iLQ6A7KFXEO3fN0cTaya_DZFpGsIxv6AfPyMyxk-TZnEAGcpfkzWXi7bsoWuieJabb6CCfmT7B5JWBcbV7NidammIq4T7Sr7xBr8Wjkj12r8SWCPw6gzDtow=s640" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOEdsGMO6ij-qWujuSD1YiY3bpBo9h-Zkrhgneedt3okeQsEpnkdAj1ape2X8n82FG_6iLQ6A7KFXEO3fN0cTaya_DZFpGsIxv6AfPyMyxk-TZnEAGcpfkzWXi7bsoWuieJabb6CCfmT7B5JWBcbV7NidammIq4T7Sr7xBr8Wjkj12r8SWCPw6gzDtow=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Belgrade 1999. Not a holiday destination.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">When the West starts a war, it's sex.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> When Russia does it, it's rape.</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The Russian strategy of humanitarian corridors has multiple purposes beyond the one's already stated. It does allow the Russians to consolidate its logistics issues. But more importantly, Russia want's to de-Nazify the hard core Neo Nazi groups sprinkled around the country. The Ukrainian air force has been wiped out, their missile systems are neutralized and the remaining ground troops are scattered and entrenched in cities where removing them will be impossible without massive civilian casualties and infrastructure damage.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: large;">Allowing these large humanitarian convoys from all major cities means that the Russians consider the major tactical part of this war over, with fierce mopping up operations as the only task left. If the Ukrainians had any credible military command and control structure left, why not knock out that 40-mile-long convoy of sitting duck Russian fuel, food and ammunition trucks north of Kiev? The reason is because they can't. To the extent the Ukrainian's have a strategy, I guess it is to drag the war on for as long as possible while hoping to get other countries involved.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The Russian's strategy will remain much the same. I would imagine they will surround the cities, sit in Forward Operating Bases in artillery range of cities, allow civilians to leave hoping that the Ukrainian military and Azov divisions leave for the West of Ukraine which is primarily Ukrainian speaking, has not been attacked and can be a buffer zone of sorts. This is the same strategy the Russians used in Syria, using the Syrian Army to surround cities but not storm them allowing ISIS to trickle out to the north around Idlib province where they have more or less wilted or at least been isolated and contained. By no means am I saying this plan will work or saying I'm sure this is even the Russian plan, but it is how the Russians handled things in Syria and it worked there. Either way, the main country v country part of this war is over. The Russians have won militarily however long the fighting drags on.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> It's ugly but there's no turning back at this point.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> In the medium to long term, I would imagine a slow civilian return to their homes and some kind of internationally observed election process or, if this fails, a possible division of the country with Russian annexation of the Black Sea coast cities and all territory east of the Dnieper and Kiev. The Ukrainians may have to settle for the former Polish city of Lviv as a capital of "New Ukraine". (Of course, this is pure speculation on my part). The Russians may just take it all.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ugly, messy and horrific but go ahead and name a "nice war".</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> As far as winners go, well it certainly isn't Russia in the short term, and it certainly isn't Ukraine. Russia will win militarily but Russian citizens will suffer from sanctions for the foreseeable future. Will this weaken Putin's control? That we cannot yet know. It will be interesting to see if business with China can make up shortfalls in consumer goods and banking and help Putin maintain public support as they weather the Western blockade. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Russia will now switch all of its diplomatic relations to the East, the new emerging centers of global finance, growth, manufacturing and open new pipelines for it's oil and gas to India and China and Asia in a relationship which could be mutually beneficial; Russian oil can solve China's huge weakness, it's reliance on energy imports via sea lanes which the US Blue Water Navy can blockade at any time.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjO3-pwHC-BPu_20ZiOFzCboou-Ng1K-q0Krt1mBi0kh9tBVI3ZO5su91GFWfs43QMKpzNQYW9b8_U3a7mLzFntHJbeLAdvhZqGOaTTqwpObmGhQmjMCywfHwKGRLZp-siVo2jRCfU2rVQquW23DoPOxhJsZKOb_m4IMaPFuOPKOULeJosY7lVdQE1Q2g=s602" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="602" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjO3-pwHC-BPu_20ZiOFzCboou-Ng1K-q0Krt1mBi0kh9tBVI3ZO5su91GFWfs43QMKpzNQYW9b8_U3a7mLzFntHJbeLAdvhZqGOaTTqwpObmGhQmjMCywfHwKGRLZp-siVo2jRCfU2rVQquW23DoPOxhJsZKOb_m4IMaPFuOPKOULeJosY7lVdQE1Q2g=w640-h456" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Expect more pipelines East in the coming years.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The US wins the war in the short term but they will have to consider fracking and going energy independent again in the medium term to control their own energy prices and their inflationary problems. An Iran nuclear deal, could allow Iranian oil back on world markets which would make up shortfalls. As would sanctioned Venezuelan oil. There are only so many countries you can sanction and not destroy yourself in the process.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Europe, on the other hand, suffers another huge refugee crisis it cannot afford, massive energy inflation which results in cost-of-living expenses in an EU block already suffering vast Covid disruptions, massive pension obligations, and growing public dissatisfaction even before this war started. The ECB is not in a healthy position. Brexit and the yellow vest movement in France have shown that an EU dominated by Germany is unstable. Couple that with dissatisfaction and lower standards of living in countries like Spain, Italy and Greece and Europe will take a further blow by this war.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: large;">In the end, the future is unsustainable.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> In the end, we all lose.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> And as we lose, expect more war.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com205tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-49260753422504209072022-02-28T05:19:00.000-08:002022-02-28T05:19:04.573-08:00Russia v Ukraine: Day 6<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdGc7HdTKLFilglf_K_U4bXlMxwmknA681jU5ih5rKUXP0dGxqrIPLpI_cGeNz7vHe8up690gZuUHr35XoIcamslpTUFg9AE1uGYoGc8CR07IheWEOX0xAVJ2TdTKWc0wiAGH59uwXMFFEluKtAyoP6JCCc4Oq1WggqZq1DRBwbKkBFx9NgjZ3sAv05w=s684" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="480" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdGc7HdTKLFilglf_K_U4bXlMxwmknA681jU5ih5rKUXP0dGxqrIPLpI_cGeNz7vHe8up690gZuUHr35XoIcamslpTUFg9AE1uGYoGc8CR07IheWEOX0xAVJ2TdTKWc0wiAGH59uwXMFFEluKtAyoP6JCCc4Oq1WggqZq1DRBwbKkBFx9NgjZ3sAv05w=w432-h640" width="432" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Western media guide to tanks.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">If you've been watching this conflict through the eyes of Western media</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> you would be forgiven for thinking that the plucky Ukrainian Army was holding its own or even winning this war and that the Russian Army was getting owned, making little progress or surprised at the level of resistance. I've got no dog in this fight except the truth itself; not something in high demand these days but still worth mentioning. For what it's worth and due to the Fog of War, <a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2014/03/russia-v-nato-ukraine-crimea-and-new.html" target="_blank">media frenzy</a>, hyperbole, fake footage, footage from years ago and footage from the ARMA 3 PC war simulator game, I agree it's all bad. It's just impossible for the average citizen to know what's really happening in the world or in the war.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> I will try here to paint a picture of what an invasion of a country the size of Ukraine should look like, seems to look like and what we can infer through the fog because in truth, most Ukrainians in Ukraine don't even know the condition of this war/invasion once they turn off their TV.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Before I start, there are some very striking observations to be had from watching footage that can at least be verified and that is that the Russians seem to be using a lot of their older equipment in their initial attack. I mean we're talking T-72s both A and B (which at best is 1980s tech), most upgraded with add on reactive armor, side and rear mounter cages (to defeat shaped charged shells) and makeshift tank turret roof armor consisting of cages covered in sandbags to possibly defeat the Javelin anti-tank missile every NATO country seems to be sending to Ukraine. One thing is for sure, the Russians are holding their elite divisions in reserve. It seems in the initial attack; they're using up their vast collection of Cold War machinery which was gathering rust and not viable on the export market anymore. (Except maybe in Syria where the T-72's low-tech diesel engines make them remarkably easy to repair in the field for anyone useful with a wrench). But that's a whole <a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-syrian-civil-war-is-over-now.html" target="_blank">other story</a></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYyljNEszZzYRiRkegcUvfcbTx6YPlLo8_TaHVgVOVKtOIMZf2zRSWvQuoMVgntgFj0M1RMSMd07nI0m2D32gGX-R6yT8YE3lZJArlraA9-SUERASfTo7Xi-7yeIya2k3N7rCjJV_ZDsVSkuistE1tbpIoPvKXmVJ4cqiwbS_VI0RnrhKRVp0Q6aykwQ=s850" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="850" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYyljNEszZzYRiRkegcUvfcbTx6YPlLo8_TaHVgVOVKtOIMZf2zRSWvQuoMVgntgFj0M1RMSMd07nI0m2D32gGX-R6yT8YE3lZJArlraA9-SUERASfTo7Xi-7yeIya2k3N7rCjJV_ZDsVSkuistE1tbpIoPvKXmVJ4cqiwbS_VI0RnrhKRVp0Q6aykwQ=w640-h448" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looks like near encirclement of the main Ukrainian army facing Donbass<br />and Russian probing forces to the North and West of Kiev.<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> 1) <b>The Kiev Attack.</b> Russian forces are reported to be in control of the main highway North from Kiev and are conducting probing and reconnaissance attacks to the west to attempt to seal off the Western highway. Reports of Ukrainian civilians at the border of Poland (which are certain and measurable) indicate a 20-42 hour waiting time to be processed to cross the border for people in cars, and 12-18 hours for people on foot). That's certainly horrible and a humanitarian tragedy but there are no nice military invasions. Russian forces did enter Kiev on the Western bank of the Dnieper but retreated. (Obviously a probing attack to reveal local concentrations of Ukrainian Army hardpoints). </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Remember, the Russians have spy satellites over the entire theater as do the US who are undoubtedly feeding this information to the Ukrainian high command, but its usefulness is peripheral for the defender. There is a curfew in Kiev which means nobody on the streets, but the Russians have not cut off power, water or even Internet to the city which they could easily do via bombing. It is quite clear that they have no interest in destroying the city. In fact, five days in, I can't remember such a large war with such a minimal civilian body count. When the Western Powers invaded Iraq, they began bombing Baghdad on the first night in a "shock and awe" campaign that killed one million people when it was all over. Ultimately, the Russians will be waiting for the rapidly advancing Crimean force from the South and the North Westerly force via Chernihiv to complete the encirclement of the city. This is probably hours away. Their plan is a peaceful surrender of Ukraine via gun to Zelensky's head which will look good in the modern-day PR/social media war.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> 2) <b>The Northeast Axis. </b>The Russians here invaded on a broad front with the ultimate aim of capturing Kharkov, the second most populated city in Ukraine, the site of a legendary battle via Germany in WWII and mostly a Russian speaking city (although speaking Russian is officially banned in Ukraine by the central government as of the coup in 2014). Kharkov has been surrounded and Russian troops have reached the city center, have met fierce resistance and retreated. Kharkov it seems will just have to remain surrounded to release the main Russian forces to advance on Kiev. Taking Kharkov by military force, leveling the city with artillery is not the Russian goal. The Russians are selling this invasion to their own people as not a Slav-on-Slav war. And with 73% of Russians supporting the invasion (who knows if such stats are true) would it matter anyway? One million people demonstrated in London against the Iraq War and the people in power took no notice. And that was in a democracy which Russia certainly is not.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ukrainian Army reports have confirmed that the Russian 1st Guard Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army make up the bulk of the Northeast attack and are moving westward toward Kiev. Ukrainian Army defenders did capture elements of the Russian 2nd Tank Division and 138th Motor Rifle Brigade during the probing attack into Kharkov. For now, I see the Russians content to lay siege and prevent Ukrainian Army units in Kharkov from threatening the flank or rear on the main thrust on Kiev.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCK3g38QHnqOLV7nuiSyTNn1Vqd46-xbPIGE-VrlharkJ0oGduYM0kci4yMgT8PZy-iaLAp4UeRx1sxjrfJByfIEzEOeE4D7P48GZenjsUBaAefoUISf_mAPmFsYfqF9XQcJngGCfnh0hkVcNPImh-m0L9Tgu5c2ZJYg08-cdlFahvJ8yyQ8DsodWd0w=s640" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCK3g38QHnqOLV7nuiSyTNn1Vqd46-xbPIGE-VrlharkJ0oGduYM0kci4yMgT8PZy-iaLAp4UeRx1sxjrfJByfIEzEOeE4D7P48GZenjsUBaAefoUISf_mAPmFsYfqF9XQcJngGCfnh0hkVcNPImh-m0L9Tgu5c2ZJYg08-cdlFahvJ8yyQ8DsodWd0w=w640-h360" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When will we learn?</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">3) <b>Donbass Axis: </b>This isn't complicated. The Russians are content to pin Ukrainian forces here without attacking the Ukrainian well-fortified multi echeloned defense system here. The Russians are using their well supplied battle-hardened separatist militia to keep pressure here while the Russian Army attempts to encircle them from the North and South. Again, the sheer logistics of this encirclement is probably causing the Russians problems due to logistics, supply and fuel. I would not expect anything less. Rome did not fall in a day. Western media are making this out to be some kind of failure. The military part of this attack will take some time.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">4) <b>Crimea Axis: </b>The attack from the South is undoubtably the Russian's most </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">successful in terms of territory quickly gained. They encountered a thin line of resistance and then broke through into open ground following the Dnieper North and East and bridging it to the West but not seeming particularly interested in moving north on the west side of the great river. West of the Dnieper of course is where Ukrainian is spoken along with Polish and Bulgarian. Not friendly country. That is not to say that anywhere in Ukraine is necessarily friendly country outside of Donetsk and Luhansk but there are shades of grey and nuance that media tends to ignore.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"> A break off force of mechanized infantry is rapidly advancing and will capture or has captured Mariupol (linking Crimea with the Russian mainland via land bridge). Also, Russian forces opened the canal the Ukrainians had blocked to deny Crimea fresh water after the Russian annexation in 2014 negating the desalination plant that was hurriedly built and grossly inefficient to provide Crimeans with drinking water.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The main force will push north and attempt to finish the complete the encirclement of Kiev from the south. The Russians are obviously hoping for a surrender once this is completed. If the Ukrainians refuse, then war just becomes diplomacy by other means.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">5) <b>Belarus Attack: </b>The Russians have amassed a force in Belarus which is directly north of Western Ukraine. This force would drive south and likely be used to cut off shipments of arms and supplies through Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. It would also attack the city of Lviv with little restraint if surrender does not come in the next two weeks.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Things to note as you watch or read Western media is that the Russians have released only a fraction of their conventional forces to achieve the gains they have made. The civilian body count is miniscule in an invasion of this magnitude.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Finally, I would like to address the West's hysterical response. Obviously, there would be sanctions. But Russia has been sanctioned since the Crimean Annexation, so they are used to it. But now, the US and the Europeans (under pressure from the US) has attacked the Russian Central Bank, seizing all Russian assets and reserves in foreign banks in Western countries. In the modern world and global economy, this is about as far as you can go without using military force. Even Russia's exclusion from the SWIFT interbank payment system can be weathered. But this action by the Biden administration borders on hysteria. Even the US Federal Reserve advised the White House not to do it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEggkCBtqCBY0WtaCpWffMUCudAg7BzduHcn4Az5pkfSlbn6GMZO0-UDufD5RucdSezEiNdEM5wx8LgfUiEZk1zdMfcKXaP1D6eLvBCeQ6OmXN41O_-7L6XRD0_TgcMVV3zMCwmi7KDCp2VWJu_yVvNEI2dTnWcTMkAUClQtVj4QhUvKqyYAaMwEXoLA_w=s250" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="197" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEggkCBtqCBY0WtaCpWffMUCudAg7BzduHcn4Az5pkfSlbn6GMZO0-UDufD5RucdSezEiNdEM5wx8LgfUiEZk1zdMfcKXaP1D6eLvBCeQ6OmXN41O_-7L6XRD0_TgcMVV3zMCwmi7KDCp2VWJu_yVvNEI2dTnWcTMkAUClQtVj4QhUvKqyYAaMwEXoLA_w=w504-h640" width="504" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Why?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Because with the backing of China, Russia can probably weather it and the ongoing attack on the Russian Ruble which means it'll be worth pennies versus the dollar this week doesn't mean much for the average Russian. Russia is self-sufficient in oil and gas and food. Sure, the average Russian won't be able to holiday in Ibiza, but I hear Crimea has sun baked beaches in the summer. Western hysteria is throwing the kitchen sink diplomacy; this is betting your house on a two pair in poker. The West has already done this to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea etc but never to a G20 country. It's new territory. Russia has already cut off all flights over its mainland by Western airlines in response but not Asian or Indian airlines. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEieHdnOrg1dAj6ITNWpMrXTrR1FKN6YfVD_RuB1USy8n_yvc0H3uIDdYM11hs7s5tW1lZRqmbghpZx070jucXyyKj_iY7hWNpqAHe2592lwC_8g0XOq_Y_tcDsXxUm-rCDIW9F_cvEwQ2bzPDOwfhNU_H9cyCtyTW444cbmffdbx6DnXCKeIHHcSkPUfw=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="921" data-original-width="1280" height="461" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEieHdnOrg1dAj6ITNWpMrXTrR1FKN6YfVD_RuB1USy8n_yvc0H3uIDdYM11hs7s5tW1lZRqmbghpZx070jucXyyKj_iY7hWNpqAHe2592lwC_8g0XOq_Y_tcDsXxUm-rCDIW9F_cvEwQ2bzPDOwfhNU_H9cyCtyTW444cbmffdbx6DnXCKeIHHcSkPUfw=w640-h461" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This kills European airlines.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The biggest loser (apart from Ukraine) in all of this is the EU and especially Germany. The Nordstream II gas pipeline is gone as are all pipelines of natural gas through Ukraine to the EU (40% of which comes from Russia) and 25% of the EU's oil from Russia just went bust. In the massive inflationary environment post Covid, this war was played shrewdly but riskily by Putin as NATO crept up to his border. He attacked now or never. History will tell if it was a good move on the grand chessboard.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The danger of the monetary attack on Russia is the signal it sends out to countries like China, Brazil and even India. "What if I don't play ball, can the West kill my economy?" That is why the Wall Street Bankers advised against this financial attack because it encourages the creation of a non-dollar-based world economy. It breaks the Bretton Woods post WWII neoliberal/globalist agreement.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> What the bankers fear is that such action encourages a parallel system of payments without the dollar. China will gladly buy Russian oil and gas. So will others. Sanctions have not crippled Iran; in fact, they've made the population rally around its dysfunctional theocratic government.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> A lot of people have asked me, "will China attack Taiwan now?" and I'll give a tentative no. Why would they? They are the biggest winners of this war by far. The EU are commiting suicide for ideology (wouldn't be the first time) killing their economy to kill Russia's, the US has revealed itself as a paper tiger, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and total failure in Iraq being the most obvious examples but also its internal strife, riots, wealth inequality and rule by oligarchs and corporations.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> In all war games, the best move is not to play right? But as of this writing, the best outcome is peace talks as the Ukrainians realize they have no stack left at the poker table and make a deal, giving up Eastern Russian speaking Ukraine and an accord not to join NATO in exchange for non-total annihilation. There are talks scheduled in Belarus hours after this writing. The fate of at least 50,000 military men surrounded in the Donbass pocket rests on the deliberations of modern diplomats who are a bureaucrat gang that has never seen or experienced war. The President of Ukraine is a former standup comedian. I wish I was joking.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> The West and NATO have played all their cards. To a serious extent, the Russians have too. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> And like the casino the world has become, nobody knows where the chips will fall.</span></div></div><p></p>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-22915007091905132182022-02-24T19:00:00.000-08:002022-02-24T19:01:43.074-08:00Russia v Ukraine: Day 1<p> </p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Obviously, I am working on an article on the origin, lead up and implications of this war. But for now, I'll just give some updates on what is likely happening. Due to the Fog of War, mass propaganda in Western nations and by Russia itself, it is impossible to verify most information. However, there is no doubt that Russia will win this war, the only question is how much resistance the Ukrainians are prepared to mount. Russia is targeting military installations at the moment, has achieved air superiority and the attack is not limited to the Donbass but Kiev also (which means everything east of the Dnieper but possibly all of Ukraine.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> It is quite clear that NATO will do nothing militarily to stop this.</span></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiyJlz0fwvt3yIWajjv76lUCb5Av9JXzxK2-5HzTbGF3gzJdc-vPumn_l62g1SXROGrSUwy7D7dX0HmWTTNC4l5VbZyGvlcvlZK9ftOLq9F1jzYDS6tAGoSKpQQLN81JpsvUJbpYPtS91Uep08xcnv-Vw-Nku0HGB-zKpfRbGfXj61gEQJE3Y8WXmgzyg=s714" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="714" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiyJlz0fwvt3yIWajjv76lUCb5Av9JXzxK2-5HzTbGF3gzJdc-vPumn_l62g1SXROGrSUwy7D7dX0HmWTTNC4l5VbZyGvlcvlZK9ftOLq9F1jzYDS6tAGoSKpQQLN81JpsvUJbpYPtS91Uep08xcnv-Vw-Nku0HGB-zKpfRbGfXj61gEQJE3Y8WXmgzyg=w552-h381" width="552" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Probable Russian gains after Day One.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p> <span style="font-size: medium;">The following assessment is by Strelkov Igor Ivanovich, who is a Russian Army artillery officer who has fought in Ukraine and is an expert. Obviously. This information is to be taken with a grain of salt. (Italics are mine)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">1) Southern Offensive: Russian Armed Forces launched an offensive north from the Crimean isthmuses, supporting it with a naval landing near Genichesk and tactical helicopter landings on Kherson and Novaya Kakhovka. The AFU front collapsed and allowed the Russians to break through into open ground, reaching the lower course of the river Dnieper. (<i>This would be a significant advance, but I would be amazed if the Russians had made the crossing as shown in the map</i>) The river crossing has been reached and bridgeheads have been created on the east bank for further advancement Attempts by Ukrainian General Ukrov to rally troops and create a front were thwarted by air strikes. By nightfall. Russian troops reached outskirts of Melitopol from the south (probable). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The prospects:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It seems the main strike groups at night and tomorrow will continue their offensive along both banks of the Dnieper to the north - to Zapororzhye and Dnepropetrovsk and also thrust westerly - to Nikolaev and in the northeast - the rear of the Ukrainian army defending the Donbass. (<i>This all sounds perfectly reasonable as far as Russian planning goes. The main Ukrainian force of 60,000 men is located here and encirclement may lead to a quick surrender and less loss of life. Again, get out your saltshaker)</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEinsT2M--HWCo5LRhc-vc6MTG-lAXliZL8zuXBSAl-5NwFTOoxzeoL_Q0wFyGitPX7t5FZ6MQ-H_xsw4d7B6AK2Z9lfIf5qasHJp-ieoarTpgFzIchFwR59giUDUpC-QKqHEC5Ckh-I8397CGxU_OpEUGcb4B0STBt3xZxzwcqdpIgZXVxs0cKC9t0LBA=s1300" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1300" data-original-width="1083" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEinsT2M--HWCo5LRhc-vc6MTG-lAXliZL8zuXBSAl-5NwFTOoxzeoL_Q0wFyGitPX7t5FZ6MQ-H_xsw4d7B6AK2Z9lfIf5qasHJp-ieoarTpgFzIchFwR59giUDUpC-QKqHEC5Ckh-I8397CGxU_OpEUGcb4B0STBt3xZxzwcqdpIgZXVxs0cKC9t0LBA=w314-h364" width="314" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><i><br /></i></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>2)</i> Donetsk Frontal attack: The fighting here is "emphatically "chilling" in nature. (<i>I presume this is a Russian's way of saying that the Ukrainians are putting up stiff resistance and inflicting casualties on the Russians here.</i>) A limited offensive on Volnovakha is designed to pose a threat to Mariupol (in fact, its capture now has no strategic significance, since it will almost certainly surrender when troops from the 1st theater reach Berdyansk and Zaporozhye (<i>speculation</i>), but more importantly, a breakthrough here will allow a rapid advance to link up with the Crimean forces rapidly advancing from the west. This threat will prevent the Ukrainian forces from releasing troops that would otherwise be thrown at the advancing "Crimean front". (<i>This is logical but again, impossible to confirm if these Russian objectives are being achieved. However, it does indicate that the Russians do intend encirclement of the main Ukrainian Army and cutting it off from Kiev.</i>)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Similarly, attacks from the territory of Luhansk to the north (through the Seversky Donets), which have no strategic prospects look the same, their task is to bind the Ukrainian Forces and prevent them from being sent north to blockade and defend Kharkov. (<i>Kharkov being a major Russian speaking city and the site a a very bloody battle v the Germans in WWII. This also confirms the Russians, if we didn't already know it, to take everything east of the Dnieper</i>) And also to detain them until the "big cauldron" to the west closes somewhere in the Dnepropetrovsk area. According to the fierceness of the fighting and losses, this is the bloodiest direction right now (<i>this is undoubtedly an admission of significant losses on both sides</i>) since the enemy is defending a deep-echeloned and fortified strip where its most combat ready and experienced units are located (<i>another admission of probable significant Russian casualties</i>). Tomorrow, the fighting will continue with the main task: not to all the enemy to remove or transfer and unit to the west (<i>i.e. thus preventing encirclement</i>).</span></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgW57TlB2sp-IZT6JbXdJNl8x1sUuQTffZu9-V74JASQ99uvqm8VQG-WIH7ufFwKQkNhMwTnFRIgwbAQw4GCrHGKcC7jRe2FlVIbtcSbUKc-I5DHvFXOfk3SFlyA7_5TVpsesJkBEBU9YWLV3KrfIso5mEdNTWXsYz1zqXpwUCDe6njVyN_nOfo89itkA=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgW57TlB2sp-IZT6JbXdJNl8x1sUuQTffZu9-V74JASQ99uvqm8VQG-WIH7ufFwKQkNhMwTnFRIgwbAQw4GCrHGKcC7jRe2FlVIbtcSbUKc-I5DHvFXOfk3SFlyA7_5TVpsesJkBEBU9YWLV3KrfIso5mEdNTWXsYz1zqXpwUCDe6njVyN_nOfo89itkA=w442-h228" width="442" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chernihiv region top center.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">3) The third strategic theater: the front from the northern part of the LPR to the Chernihiv region. The greatest success was achieved in what was assumed to be the least promising theater, the northern sector, where the Ukrainian Army either did not intend to defend at all or had insufficient forces. Sumy, Konotop, almost the entire Sumy region have been taken with no resistance. There is some progress in the Chernihiv region. It is assumed the Ukrainian Army will put up stiff resistance with "chilling battles" here (<i>another tacit admission the Russians are experiencing difficulty here which is logical as this would delay any advance on the capital Kiev</i>). </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> The main reserves are concentrated here. At the same time, the deeper Russian troops advance, the stubbornly resistance around Kharkov falls into "operational shadow" (<i>an interesting term</i>), which was expecting a strike and is well equipped with well-trained troops. In turn, Russian Federation troops cannot advance and leave Kharkov and Chuguev not taken to the rear (an honest admission) both for logistical reasons and "left alone" Ukrainian troops may try to deliver counter strikes to the flank and rear of the units advancing on Kiev and may even strike into Russia itself which does not pose any military danger but is unacceptable for political reasons. (<i>I find this a remarkable admission and makes the account all the more plausible strategic wise although all gains are to be again treated as "possible" only). </i>Therefore, fierce battles will continue tomorrow in the Kharkov Region with the aim of speedy capture of the city. (<i>I find it highly optimistic for the Russians to capture a city the size of Kharkov if it has significant Ukrainian troops entrenched in the city. This is where I could see a large civilian body count although the Russians will be reluctant to bomb it or use artillery on a city that was Russian 31 years ago and is full of ethnic Russians</i>)</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> In further news it is generally being reported by mainstream news that the Russians have captured Chernobyl (lol) and Pripyat which must be like a game of Stalker. Pripyat two has been taken. The significance of this besides the radiation is that puts a medium sized force 100 miles north of Kiev. All airports have been bombed or been subject to missile attack.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> One thing I cannot confirm as of this writing is the airborne assault on Kiev airport. It seems like it was attempted but is a tough hold for light infantry. Both sides are claiming victory here, so the truth is somewhere in the middle. If the Russians have made the gains as depicted in map 1, then much will depend on the speed and availability of pushing in reserves which will be needed to secure the territory captured.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: medium;">It seems the Russians are playing a somewhat risky gambit here which involves encircling the main Ukrainian army fronted at Luhansk and Donetsk and capturing Kiev (a huge psychological target for both sides). The Russians are counting on a capture of Kiev resulting in mass surrender of the Ukranian troops. The Azov divisions probably will not surrender as if they are captured the Russians will probably mass execute them (de Nazification) as Putin put it in his speech just two days ago.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: medium;">This is certainly the most interesting war in my lifetime but most definitely, this war is a decisive turn in the global order and sets a new course for the 21st century.</span></p>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-24972072097017298442021-08-31T09:25:00.033-07:002021-10-02T01:37:45.776-07:00 Afghanistan: The necessary defeat?<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0DxvRhvNt6AqsGD2lRRFYKz7a7TuKNYWwei6NwvioAuvW2pKaDktUOAQY2kw6pfwcXISo2Zn6wWct42HhibwEnigANiL8aBsWimfxN-yZtvyIRIz3d65UxuLa5Dl56z7RqeqW9wi2YO5/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1169" data-original-width="1280" height="439" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0DxvRhvNt6AqsGD2lRRFYKz7a7TuKNYWwei6NwvioAuvW2pKaDktUOAQY2kw6pfwcXISo2Zn6wWct42HhibwEnigANiL8aBsWimfxN-yZtvyIRIz3d65UxuLa5Dl56z7RqeqW9wi2YO5/w549-h439/image.png" width="549" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Your tax dollars at work.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><h1 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Who won this war? The longest war the US has ever fought on paper (20 years). It even beats out Vietnam for long drawn out attrition against an enemy, despite modern weaponry, against an enemy that resisted defeat. For the Taliban 'resist' is the operative word. Hide. Use forbidding terrain. Manipulate the local population. It was a very Viet Cong and NVA strategy and it somehow worked in the rocky moonscape desert of Afghanistan just as successfully as the jungles of South East Asia. All that 5th generation drone tech, satellite surveillance, state of the the art air support did not win the war for US forces.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> And now the retreat is humiliating not because The United States military displays weakness to its enemies but because the US has now demonstrated weakness to its friends. A defeat and a surrender (which in good faith Trump signed in February in 2020 in Doha) was at least an end to conflict. A conflict that could not be won. Biden tore it up.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Yet this is not a red v blue situation. The US government is a monolith. Voting is a nice idea for the plebs but if it ever changed anything then they'd... do something else so long as it was saleable as "freedom". And when there is only one opinion you fall into a black hole of opinion...</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">A) Because the cost of such a victory was too high for the attacking force.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">B) There was no support from the indigenous population.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">C) In warfare, time is as valuable as weaponry, and if your side has time and no weaponry, you wait. </span></li></ul><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> Probably with an agenda in mind, the craven US media accidently conducted a recent interview with a Taliban spokesman. One look in his eyes and you could see that this person was a high IQ individual and the US interviewer a mere shill for AP and Reuters news wires. But his answers and demeanor spoke volumes for those with eyes to see.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SgHLkhZf1SA" width="320" youtube-src-id="SgHLkhZf1SA"></iframe></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>That look in his eyes when Bin Laden was mentioned.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div></div><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">What he knows and the world knows is that Bin Laden was a CIA Asset working with the CIA and the Mujahedeen against the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan is the 1980s. He was their boy. Like Colonel Trautman in First Blood, the local police in the hick town didn't know what they were dealing with. In warfare, I'm a big believer in leaving people the fuck alone. Even if they treat their women like shit and throw gays off whatever their version of the Tarpeian Rock is; at the end of the day, it's none of the West's business. I'm sorry you were born in a shithole but sometimes, you've got to play the hand you get dealt.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg06gLtzR2roHP1Ch1XNqVoJqXUrpkclO2Iant4Mdf9siOHl-hr2n544Ugljg3iijGvq8_7Qs3Dnnys8Og95_WnufknQNHMHDUebWt05Pzc5Tttryn0o4H18hsBa8aam0Zn_9vwghxsHxya/s1024/1481559880152.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="1024" height="499" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg06gLtzR2roHP1Ch1XNqVoJqXUrpkclO2Iant4Mdf9siOHl-hr2n544Ugljg3iijGvq8_7Qs3Dnnys8Og95_WnufknQNHMHDUebWt05Pzc5Tttryn0o4H18hsBa8aam0Zn_9vwghxsHxya/w668-h499/1481559880152.jpg" width="668" /></a></div><br /><i>Bin Laden was a CIA asset. This is known.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i> How it became the West's business was in the wake of 9/11 when US neocons were given <i>carte blanche</i> to do whatever they wanted is interesting. And boy, did they want a lot. Here we are twenty years later and still watching a shit show that should have ended by January 2002 after a few million tonnes of B-52 payload. But it didn't happen that way. The opium trade was just too juicy for black ops cash. Next time you're in the ER after breaking your arm watching Porn Hub, just know that pain shot came from the miserable moonscape of Afghanistan. And yet 2 trillion dollars later and 4000 US soldiers lost and who knows how many Afghan's dead, what has been gained? The problem with fighting in "the gravetard of empires" is that it continues to be, no matter how much tech you throw at it, a graveyard of empires. The Russians tried it in the 1980s and left with a very bloody nose that soon later lead to collapse of the USSR. The British tried it and failed as Kipling said not so eloquently in a poem more than one hundred years ago...</div><div style="text-align: center;"><pre style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; text-align: start;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And the women come out to cut up what remains,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> Go, go, go like a soldier,</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i>But really that's not the point anymore is it? You can read this opinion in just about every US </div><div style="text-align: left;">newspaper op-ed piece in the country. If there were a real media apparatus in the US, or in fact, if there</div><div style="text-align: left;">a media apparatus at all anywhere in what's left of Western Civilization, there would be honest reporting </div><div style="text-align: left;">on what is really happening in the world. My favorite line of bullshit was the complete failure to evacuate</div><div style="text-align: left;">Kabul and Bagram Airbase. I'm no fan of authorities left or right but Trump did at least project a kind of </div><div style="text-align: left;">will to power. Not that he understands Nietzsche or anything so profound but through his mouth and </div><div style="text-align: left;">narcissism, through his bravado naivety and hard capitalism, he was willing to make a deal. And as </div><div style="text-align: left;">simplistic as it sounds, he made that deal. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Trump was always an idiot and accidental genius at the same time. He was a type of phenomenon </div><div style="text-align: left;">that divided the US so spectacularly that the audience lost a view of the big picture. And for all his failings,</div><div style="text-align: left;">he did make a deal. A deal with the enemy. And deals are how wars end. Of course the newspapers went </div><div style="text-align: left;">insane but fortunately nobody reads them anymore.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Either way, the new geriatric in chief tore it all up.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Not because it was bad but because the orange man had negotiated it. I am no fan of either but you know </div><div style="text-align: left;">what I am a fan of? </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Pragmatism.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Watching the politicians holding and passing the bag for the whole debacle is probably worth a cable TV</div><div style="text-align: left;">subscription but I've endured enough CNN in airport bars to last a lifetime. So I'll stick to clips on</div><div style="text-align: left;">YouTube. And by god were they selling the general public a narrative. After the truck bomb and by the </div><div style="text-align: left;">sudden entrance of Player 3, named ISIS K you knew US foreign policy had fully decoupled from reality.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The new enemy sounded like a Covid Variant in keeping with the Zeitgeist and was so stage managed that</div><div style="text-align: left;">any thinking person was reaching for the drinks cabinet even if they didn't have one.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Just imagine if you're the Taliban sitting back and watching America via satellite TV. They are not even </div><div style="text-align: left;">laughing because humor requires a degree or irony and tact. Major Steuber in the following vid means the</div><div style="text-align: left;"> US tried to "nation build" but it local reality's could never be overcome. Especially the kid fucking.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ja5Q75hf6QI" width="451" youtube-src-id="Ja5Q75hf6QI"></iframe></div><span style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Google fu has hit this link. Drag the timer to 23:55 to meet Major Steuber.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div>Do I have to quote Sun Tzu here? Maybe I do.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Country in which there are precipitous cliffs with torrents running between,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>deep natural hollows, confined places, tangled thickets, quagmires and crevasses,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>should be left with all possible speed and no approach. </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw3IMUK-j85f5cFB9thCcqQQhW7iSTEwfZu8_bWkwMltHPn_jCw0uUOLrK5fV6NmA5iGBz6dcVG-6mQk4rn7hHwObfT_PhJZhI7dL_8S4DbnaBeB0BaJi0PyL9at7evhydbj_DC6bOqSI9/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="927" data-original-width="1400" height="479" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw3IMUK-j85f5cFB9thCcqQQhW7iSTEwfZu8_bWkwMltHPn_jCw0uUOLrK5fV6NmA5iGBz6dcVG-6mQk4rn7hHwObfT_PhJZhI7dL_8S4DbnaBeB0BaJi0PyL9at7evhydbj_DC6bOqSI9/w658-h479/image.png" width="658" /></a></div><br /><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"> The real question is, what's next geopolitically now that the US has lost Afghanistan and Bagram AFB </div><div style="text-align: left;">which was there ostensibly to threaten Iran? There is the obvious loss of international prestige but not a loss</div><div style="text-align: left;">of military dominance. But, the Taliban have proven just like the Viet Cong before them, that disparate </div><div style="text-align: left;">forces armed with small arms, RPGs and roadside bombs can win. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> All you need is intent, balls and patience.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> China has already made a deal with the Taliban. (Not officially but you know it is in place).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Their belt and road initiative (with the evacuation of the Americans) just opened a fresh square on the </div><div style="text-align: left;">chessboard that they will fill or have already filled. The Chinese aim is to recreate the Silk Road </div><div style="text-align: left;">(the most profitable trade route in history) but this time with two lane highways in each direction and </div><div style="text-align: left;">high speed rail.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> We're talking something US military planners have feared for at least a century.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2EqDhXyAf87zJnwz_FhpbGKv3Dt-Yyz1PQMDPTMP1ViuVpBk2Pi2SrRdN80ALJVN0HQlyg2MH_QRZriYKVN90Yn6Hg4fsXMXuhhz6DhIjpmRPy_btCb8w4io3ysLsEMC4KwhUVEgfcqJs/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Never fight a land war in Asia" data-original-height="842" data-original-width="1000" height="521" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2EqDhXyAf87zJnwz_FhpbGKv3Dt-Yyz1PQMDPTMP1ViuVpBk2Pi2SrRdN80ALJVN0HQlyg2MH_QRZriYKVN90Yn6Hg4fsXMXuhhz6DhIjpmRPy_btCb8w4io3ysLsEMC4KwhUVEgfcqJs/w617-h521/image.png" width="617" /></a></div><i>Never fight a land war in Asia...</i><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> The unity of the European and Asian (and African) landmass in one continuous travel route.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> When China's belt and road initiative is complete, you'll be able to drive from Paris to Beijing so long as</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> you've got enough meth to stay awake. And this highlights the difference between US and China's foreign </div><div style="text-align: justify;">policy. The Chinese are mercantile. They see the world as a transaction. If they want a road through </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Afghanistan, they're just going to pay the Taliban 20 billion dollars not to fuck with it. The US could make the </div><div style="text-align: justify;">same deal but their home population would riot for making a deal with the bad guys who make women</div><div style="text-align: justify;">wash dishes and throw gays off mountains. The Chinese don't give a fuck so long as they get their road. The</div><div style="text-align: justify;">US, on the other hand, is zip tied by "democracy".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> And because of this, the US and the Europeans who spawned it, are in decline.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> The belt and road initiative makes the US an island on the fringe of a world economy where dollar</div><div style="text-align: justify;">hegemony is gone. The question is, "is this the necessary defeat" to set US foreign strategic policy on a new </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>realpolitick </i>based track? Just by the blow back alone the US public, both left and right, are so against the </div><div style="text-align: justify;">idea of foreign desert excursions, or foreign intervention of any kind, that it leaves neocons and hawks</div><div style="text-align: justify;">in a tough position as far as their geopolitical aims are concerned. Does it mean a step backward for</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Western power in terms a force projection? Are we entering the multi polar world beyond the dual</div><div style="text-align: justify;">superpower paradigm that lasted until 1990 and, for the last thirty years has been a litany of made up bad</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> guys, amorphous terrorists somewhere in a desert and dictators that don't like Israel and ISIS "K".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> For this writer, this black eye to US force projection, inflicted by goat herders in a formidable land is a</div><div style="text-align: justify;">defeat no matter how you frame it. The question now is... what happens next?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> And just like the insanity of the last 18 months, like most, I have no answer. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Usually I can sift through the geopolitical bullshit and spot the shot. But this time, I got nothing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> All I got is that Afghanistan is not the loss of American Empire but it is a major breach in the wall.</div></pre></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p></div>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-43215184551514637232020-04-21T06:52:00.000-07:002020-05-12T04:10:44.403-07:00The Virus: It is not the Sickness you should be afraid of. It is the Cure.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I ended my last post on this blog on December 22, 2019 with the following paragraph.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">"What we're confronted with now as a species is an overpopulated world, approaching 8 billion with mass flora and fauna extinction. And none of it is global warming or a globalist funded war against the environment Greta Thunberg can win.</span><br />
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The darkest dark for this writer about war is that conflict itself may not kill us.The darkest dark is that someday soon this planet's biosphere combined with species extinction and bio weapons may finally have enough of us. And that is a war and battle even Alexander the Great could not win."</div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> And now here we are four months later.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> I am not the type to say I told you so, I just got "lucky" on the timing.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> I am not so worried about the virus. Sure, it's a highly contagious flu, virulent for certain demographics and fatal for an unknown segment of the population for reasons we haven't discovered yet. What I am afraid of is the hysteria, tenuous supply chains of global commerce, the thin thread by which supermarkets stock shelves, the fact that oil is now cheaper than Evian water and the world wide geopolitical implications of that. Futures markets, commodities, Forex markets all in free fall. Yet the effects of all this are still months away.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> What we're dealing with immediately is basically medical martial law in all western countries. If I had suggested this a year ago you would have laughed at me. No, our technological phantasmagoria, our science, our first world medical infrastructure and our smart phones would make such things impossible outside an alien invasion.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Well, we have been invaded by aliens.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> It's just the aliens are very very small.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> And they've changed the world. And our perception of the world. Isn't it funny and morbidly cruel that if you run a slow collapse (the archetypal boil a frog slowly analogy), people will adjust and not see what is on obvious display. All you have to do is tell them new words and reframe them. This is how I imagine they persuaded a million men to die on the Somme.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">In the mean time we've got the US government printing 10 TRILLION dollars to try to keep the system afloat. That's Weimar Germany levels of money printing or as the Feds like to call it now "quantitative easing". But this time on crack. In 2008, they printed 7 billion dollars to rescue the banks from bad mortgage loans so they could keep the Iraq war costs off the balance sheets. But ten trillion is not a number that can be absorbed into an economy without inflation.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"> I have no doubt this virus will dissipate. The masks I see everyone wearing will go away despite their placebo reassuring useless effect. If someone coughs in your face, the virus droplets go straight into your body though your eyeballs. The masks, the hand washing, the social isolation, the six feet rule may have some minor benefit; but it is not their purpose.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> The purpose of these rules is fear.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> And people living in fear are malleable, impressionable and open to any authority that can deliver them from fear. This is not to say the virus is not real and that </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">there is no reason for fear. This is to say that no government, monarchy, ruler or tyrant ever let a good crisis go to waste.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><b><u> Over 80,000 Americans Died of Flu Last Winter 2018, Highest Toll in Year. </u></b><br />
<i style="color: #333333; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Among the dead were 180 babies and teenagers, more than in any year since the C.D.C. </span></i><i style="color: #333333; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">began tracking pediatric deaths.</span></i></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="A surge tent was set up outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa., to receive flu patients in January." height="258" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/07/science/02SCI-GLOBAL/merlin_133134186_d4d894e5-7552-4896-bb2a-0977a11c9ccb-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine.html</a></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">I am not minimizing this disease. It's essential you understand this to understand my point. For those who have had loved ones been affected by this there are no words that I can type to beguile you from your grief.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> But now to the darkness.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> The aftermath. When we're all "healed" and the fear is over and we can all literally breath again.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> This aftermath is the new world we will be entering and anyone who thinks it will be unchanged is a fool. In this author's opinion, this out break and the mass media reaction to it is the most significant human action since WWII. Not because of the death toll. Which will be small compared to war. Anyone who studies military history and conflict knows life is cheap. But the death toll is never the issue is it? Only when it impacts the outcome. No, we're talking bigger things here and now, greater than any single man or group of men. We are positing the future course of human history itself post virus.We are talking a post war environment.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> We are never going back to a world pre 2020.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> All those music festivals you loved, or stadiums you filled and all those random strangers you banged at the cruise ship bar after a five minute conversation over a Gin and Tonic; well that's all gone for the next 5 years. Why? Because the authorities will say so. Because it's "dangerous" and poses an immunity risk. Of course it'll all be presented as a protection measure to serve in your best interest.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Instead, you'll be subject to a multitude of new laws that will seem reasonable but in time be realized as Draconian when the "fear" has passed. Just the way the Patriot Act was passed to protect us from "terror" post 9/11 and is now used to arrest citizens without due process or even warrants; post Covid-19 world will require proof of vaccination to obtain basic government services like a passport, or drivers license or state benefits.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> The Corona World order has arrived.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> And just like the Patriot Act, it's never going away. But unlike the Patriot Act it's going to be instituted worldwide not just in the US. Welcome to the new normal. </span><span style="background-color: #f2f3f5; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">This is the dystopia humanity chose.Orwell said we would be forced into a police state via force. Huxley said we would be lulled into a police state via pleasure. It seems neither were right. Both authors couldn't have imagined a populace so dumbed down by TV and information overload, that they'd sleep walk into their own prison cell and call it freedom.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3PRaXdJ4WtzBVPBEgW1WBqXw9O5VfoCqnoZ9xL_CXe7ARvApRRDVON6XM6wx2l6vn2bFb5a0K07alXgIzOXgvUoM_M_xMHAFYwwo_ZcvlgiCNOZF6xceBGRgcNZnBk_d8r2rrMmsy5Uzl/s1600/orwell+v+huxley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="893" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3PRaXdJ4WtzBVPBEgW1WBqXw9O5VfoCqnoZ9xL_CXe7ARvApRRDVON6XM6wx2l6vn2bFb5a0K07alXgIzOXgvUoM_M_xMHAFYwwo_ZcvlgiCNOZF6xceBGRgcNZnBk_d8r2rrMmsy5Uzl/s640/orwell+v+huxley.jpg" width="356" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">The next question is will they get rid of cash?</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Conveniently, they have been wanting to do this for years. They say the virus can spread on paper. So let's switch to digital money, RFID chips and an endless record of what you buy and sell. Once every transaction is</span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> digital, every purchase can be traced to you and if you fuck up according to the rules of the rulers, they'll turn off your money at the flick of a switch and there will be no paper stuffed under your mattress to save you.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> But never mind that, in my ten years of writing about war, geopolitics and man's inhumanity to man I have never witnessed something like this. Mass population control, fear, distrust, loneliness, the old and the weak affected most and a cynical elite barely able to hold it together.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Now I understand the destruction of Libya and Syria. It was done by mediocre men dressed in suits put in front of cameras to deliver the orders of those you will never see.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> I have no fear of the virus.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> But I am terrified of the societal cure they will concoct.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Stay safe my friends and ride the tiger. He cannot bite you while you grip his back.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> Hold Fast!</span></div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com46tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-69901218377918304362019-12-22T04:42:00.000-08:002020-04-15T00:18:13.324-07:00The Syrian Civil War is Over: Now welcome to the 2020s. The decade of decline in the West and the rise of the East.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"They created a desert and called it victory."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's easily my favorite quote from antiquity. It's by the Roman writer Tacitus quoting a defeated general at the hands of the legions 2000 years ago. And look how nothing has changed. The point being that even when you win the war, often you lose the things you fought for. Nothing has changed in the modern war fighting environment. Many times all that's left is rubble and sand. And because nukes are in play, there's a limit to how much of the desert the big players can take. Back in the day, you could marshal superior forces and take what could be taken. Land, resources, cities. Alexander did it. Caesar did it. Khan did it. The strong will take from the weak and that is the truth of warfare going all the way back to the Stone Age tribe when those with the longest spears ran off their rivals from the nearest watering hole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of course it's harder to do that these days because plutonium packs a bigger punch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So proxy wars it must be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And surely <a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-syrian-civil-war-air-power-can-win.html" target="_blank">Syria</a> is the nexus of all proxy wars. It was the necessary domino to fall before Iran, the ultimate target of all of this Middle Eastern mess. Syria had to be tackled on the march to Mesopotamian hegemony. With the US/Israeli/Saudi failure to topple Assad, the Middle East has been tossed into disarray like has never been before. Assad held on because those who could obviously see an aggressive move played against him by foreign forces became his allies and rushed to his defense. Not because those allies are the good guys but precisely because those forces that came to his defense know that nobody is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Who are the good or bad guys in any war?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's for the victors to write.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For now, all nations act in self interest. Like they have done for all time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Russia could not allow Damascus to fall and lose their Mediterranean naval base at Tartus. More importantly, they could not allow a natural gas pipeline from the Persian Gulf through Syria to the Mediterranean which would kill <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/why-world-worries-about-russia-s-natural-gas-pipeline-quicktake" target="_blank">their whole pipeline to the EU</a> that will bring in billions a month from Germany to everywhere in the EU where it gets cold... (meaning all of it in winter). So, to protect Nord Stream 2, Russia equipped Damascus with the means to defend itself. That has resulted in the world's third most defended airspace thanks to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-200_(missile)" target="_blank">Russian S-200 S-300,</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system" target="_blank">Pantsir S-1</a> and a lot more other toys the Russians have provided secretly. The Israelis are testing these defenses every night with drones and US provided stealth F -35s. They've been getting a 50% attrition rate on drone strikes launches and they did lose a pilot already when they tried the low level ground hugging under radar fighter attack probably with late generation F-16s. There are rumors that the Russians are deploying their latest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system" target="_blank">S-500 system</a> as a test bed around Damascus which they hope to sell to Turkey and possibly China. The hype says it can detect stealth aircraft; it's proven that it can shoot down LEO satellites (a must for future WWIII) and it's an all around monster AA system to compliment the <a href="https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/heres-russias-s-400-missile-system-in-action-and-heres-1746490022" target="_blank">S-400 platform</a> which is more concerned with local (250km) ranged targets.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But none of this military tech porn is really the point is it?</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKOFn7rU19U1xHHdLcx3Ng6I5Q8BCsYVjDg91BpUzc9LpnKkSF2NKJ5rIee0X0gGS_RiSkC7XJ9XSx3YbP8S5Cuit9y8XZLhQdhzZwAORkP-jAc_W-BHYPPewJmPMrQudq4QvHrD6ZMY1H/s1600/Before+it+was+ruined.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKOFn7rU19U1xHHdLcx3Ng6I5Q8BCsYVjDg91BpUzc9LpnKkSF2NKJ5rIee0X0gGS_RiSkC7XJ9XSx3YbP8S5Cuit9y8XZLhQdhzZwAORkP-jAc_W-BHYPPewJmPMrQudq4QvHrD6ZMY1H/s640/Before+it+was+ruined.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The geopolitical failure of Syria to fall to the "Arab Spring" was a major blow to Western neoliberal power. Was the Arab Spring ever real or just a psy-op? To question it is almost a conspiracy theory. "Conspiracy theory" these days meaning anything not on TV and something you watched on a YouTube channel that has been strangely banned off the platform for spouting crazy talk. In Roman and Medieval times the town loony was left to his own devices because everyone knew he spouted crazy talk. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Locking up the town loony and silencing him meant he was hovering somewhere over the target. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By this action, leaders do not win victory over truth. For those with eyes to see, by their imprisonment of the town loony; they reveal the truth of his argument.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Western powers and their compliant states in Arabia broadcast the "Arab Spring" and 'freedom' on satellite television to the Arabs (who all have satellite dishes these days) and quietly under-reported the massacre in Tripoli and dismembered Gaddafi just before they called it victory. In fact, they stopped calling it anything once the result of the action in Libya found its way to its present state which is open air slave markets and a population terrified to go to the store for food lest they be targeted by roving marauders in Toyotas with opiate addicted lunatics manning 20mm cannon from a truck bed. Of course, this has all disappeared down the Western media memory hole quicker than a billionaire who ran a child fucking ring on a private island and recorded world leaders and influencers doing the same; for leverage and blackmail.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We live in a fucked up reality.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But it's been this way for a while now. Since WWII we've had 70 years of not total death; just acceptable continuous low level death that most people can live with. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As the whole "Arab Spring" narrative went south, it became harder and harder to say who the good guys were. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">2000 years ago, Tacitus would have laughed and cried.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Violence is the main motive force in history; once you unleash it, he would say be careful. K</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">illing changes things. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From teenage shooters to world leaders, killing is what gets things done. The difference between Bush/Obama/Trump or similar world leaders and some disenfranchised school shooter is not the body count. The state can kill a million in Iraq; the other at best killed fifty. Yet it's never a matter of degree; it's a matter of how you define what murder is when you hold the power.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>They admitted it before they even </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>did it.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When you hold power, you get to say who gets killed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Syria is a wasteland now but Assad is still there. Let's face it, it's a major achievement that he held on. If Assad were a soccer team, he'd be Jamaica winning the World Cup. Anyone left today who thinks ISIS were some kind of organic Sunni Arab people's movement has been watching too much corporate news media. Yes, ISIS were a bunch of lowlife drug addicted thugs funded by "front corporations". The conquest of Libya made its Mediterranean ports ripe for weapons exportation to Syria on ships with zero manifest and no obligation to report. In other words, a captured square on a world chess board. All of that Arab Spring stuff was media fog to keep the consumerist masses placated and continue buying shit. And worse still, they got to feel their governments were "good" and doing their best to fix the chaos in the desert.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The lies today abound and the media is in league with power. Its job of questioning it is over.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The riches of Araby (oil, natural gas, fell into the fists of the elite while European and American populations looked the other way not because they did not care but because they had no say in the matter. Democracy today has become a word repeated through media to make populations feel they have a say when they do not. Yet b</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">lood leaves a stain and even when you're not directly responsible for the bomb; you paid the taxes and your politicians have used your labor and twisted the blade so none of our hands can be clean. They did it in your name.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this </span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">blood</span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"> clean from my </span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">hand</span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">? No, this my </span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">hand</span><span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" data-darkreader-inline-color="" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"> will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."</span></b></span><br />
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<span data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor="" style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: left;">Libya is history now. War has a habit of memory holing even the most egregious acts. Especially these days. We all remember WWI. But who remembers Sudan?. Ask the average person and they couldn't point Sudan out on a map and yet two million died and where was the outrage? The 2020s will be more of the same but the decline of the West to police it and the rise of the East, China, not to give a fuck as they ruthlessly extract resources from Africa to South America. (More on that in Part II). </span></div>
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<b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">"I like the desert... because it is clean" T.E Lawrence.</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Assad has won this war.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And that is quite a thing for a mild mannered eye doctor never groomed by his father to rule. But he didn't really win did he? Syria isn't really even a country in the modern sense. It was just an offshoot of the post WWI Sykes-Picot agreement. And that's been the problem since 1916. It's a piece of desert foreign powers get to play with. And once the Arab Spring happened all bets were off and Syria became the next bull's eye for Western avarice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> It was low hanging fruit and the nexus of oil and gas pipeline routes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The only thing that stood in the way was Assad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> When Libya evaporated and Gaddafi melted so easily on your TV screen, the French, the British, the US and with the tacit approval of the EU, all saw Syria was ripe to fall. Through shell corporations and dodgy warehouses, a wrecked, bombed and failed state like Libya would be the perfect place along the Mediterranean to ship some state of the art weaponry (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW" target="_blank">TOW wire guided anti tank missiles</a>) perfect for taking out Assad's tanks. Such an easy shipping point without oversight once you've created a failed state. And Libya today is surely a failed state if you consider open <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42038451" target="_blank">air slave markets</a> as an example of anything failed. For a million dollars a pop, which is peanuts for state actors who print the paper in the first place; you can buy or transport anything.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Yes, the darkness is that dark.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">As much as war and the casualties of it are damaging; staging suffering is almost worse than the real thing.<br />
It's calculated to create more.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">The Wikileaks Hillary Clinton email leaks prove all this to be true. That's why Assange will be in jail forever. He lifted the lid on the cauldron and showed everyone the fire inside. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So all those ISIS beheading videos they blurred on network TV but not on Liveleak were supposed to tell you who the bad guys were. And we believed it in 2016. Hell, they even gave an Oscar to some guys called the White Helmets supposedly helping children out of the big bad Syrian rubble. Oh yeah, and then there was the "gas". US and European media pushed the gas angle because in the European psyche gas is bad because Auschwitz. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I know war and many veterans of it and I can I promise you an artillery barrage kills more people via ball bearings travelling at Mach 5 then a dissipating cloud of gas </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ever can. WWI trench lines proved this a century ago but modern audiences fall for "the gas" angle because for some reason it seems unfair. Blow my arms and legs off via bomb and let me bleed out seems fair, but suffocate me and make my lungs stop working via nerve agent is just plain unfair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> This is the logic of Western liberal democracy. It's absurd, but it works.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And for those who rule and make war the view is... if it works; it ain't stupid.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Syria will attempt to rebuild now and Turkey will empty it's refugee camps now that ISIS are wrecked. The pocket of ISIS around the Idlib region will be wiped out in the spring. Going all the way back to Caesar, no one fights in winter unless they have to. And in Syria no one has to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The Syrian Civil War, whatever the historians or Wikipedia writes about is a lie of epic proportions in the popular imagination, but then again, isn't that all wars and most history. The victors writing the truth is a cliche but like most cliches it also happens to be true. No one who studies human conflict is standing on solid ground.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">RUSSIA</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Russia wiping out ISIS via air power was a no brainer from their strategic point of view but it was done so efficiently that it left Western media in a conundrum. Why couldn't we do that?NATO claimed to be doing it (fighting the bad guy ISIS "terrorists" that chopped peoples heads off on the Internet) but that was just the gore they ran on US and Euro TV so their domestic populations didn't get upset about blasting desert people. However, once Russia got involved in the air war and actually became effective killing the well supplied Toyota driving madmen (who supplied ISIS with all those brand new Toyota trucks by the way?) bad guys, Western media changed tack. Ammo dumps, staging areas, supply routes, everything a modern militia needs started falling apart via precision bombing and Assad's forces and Tiger divisions started knifing their way into the rubble taking zero prisoners. All it took was a little satellite intel, some SIGINT and ISIS began falling apart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All of which makes you wonder. Who was funding these savages in the desert in the first place?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Russia's interest in the 2020s is to get rich via its vast oil and mineral wealth. Its arms industry too is potent. Its social problems are rife. Wealth distribution is at Victorian levels of justness and oligarchs run the country. (The West is headed in that same direction but the techno entertainment complex they've created hides it better).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Russia's aims are to contain the EU, resist NATO encroachment in Ukraine, develop weaponry that can counter US naval power and hamper US machinations as the frays develop on the post WWII Western hegemony that has endured. As the dollar weakens, Putin and the great Bear will be watching and not leaving the chessboard anytime soon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><b>IRAN</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">And here we come to the crux of the matter. The Persians</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">This is the war the Israelis and Saudis fear and want. It might be unwinnable but it is sure to throw the world into chaos in the 2020s and sometimes chaos is an end in itself. Iran is a country of 82 million people, dwarfing the populations of Israel and Saudi Arabia. They control all of southern Iraq (thanks America for killing Saddam for us), they run supply lines across Syria, have ousted the Kurds from the oilfields of Kirkuk, and are in an alliance with Assad. The weapon and supply run to Hezbelloh in Lebanon is open and the trucks full of anti tank/ anti air shoulder mounted weaponry are flowing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong. Try being a transgender in Iran and see what happens to your dick. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yes, it's not a perfect society in a liberal democracy type of way but who said the world has to be the same?. Isn't that the whole idea behind diversity? People get to live how they want even if others oppose it? Well the Saudis and Israelis certainly oppose the Iranian oil and natural gas fields. With sanctions in affect (and lets face it sanctions are just a kinder word for a blockade which last time I checked in every history book I ever read is in act of war). Cutting off a country from international trade is war. But the Persians are the bad guys because they refuse to become behest to the international banking system. SWIFT payments have been cut off, inflation is rampant and the CIA and Mossad are encouraging the kids to wear green and get themselves shot in street protests so the TV screens in Europe and the US can say Ayatollah man bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You know what it's all really about?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The straits of Hormuz.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The bottleneck the Iranians control by geography alone.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Forget the logistics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Saudi Arabia, despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars Trump and Obama has been dumping into their military, the Saudis couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Still, in war as in life, if you can't win it, you can't have it and Saudi Arabia will not have their Yemen southern oil exporting terminal unless the US comes to the rescue. And the US, quiet rightly, no longer has the stomach for it. Fracking alone has made the US self sufficient in oil. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">McCain the patriot hero</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/try-as-he-may-john-mccain-cant-shake-falsehoods-about-ties-to-isis.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/try-as-he-may-john-mccain-cant-shake-falsehoods-about-ties-to-isis.html</span></a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and the NYT are merely the US elite consensus view hand fed to you and you're job is to consume it and worse still, agree with it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The entire US military complex is basically a taxpayer subsidy to Israel and Saudi Arabia in a reciprocal dollar cycle where Saudi Arabia swaps oil for military tech and Israel swaps... not much other than the fact that they own the US government through money power.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The whole aim is to stop an Iranian nuke.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Forget the numbers. Saudi Arabia despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory. Who in the Saudi military has an</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><i style="font-size: large;">espirit de corps </i><span style="font-size: medium;">when you're fighting for a paycheck so a bunch of hooded Saudi royal billionaires can fuck supermodels on yachts in Monte Carlo? The reason the whole Yemen war is happening is that the Saudi Sheiks are trying to cut their way to the ocean and bypass Hormuz which is the choke point their oil exports are constrained by Iranian proximity and power. But the Saudi's are failing miserably. Equipped with the best military tech that money can buy at some arms dealer comic con in Jordan and Trump's idiocy, their troops keep getting wrecked by lads in the hills with AT and AA shoulder mounted weaponry (supplied by Iran via Russia and China of course).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">So like all armies, the Saudis went for the soft targets, famine and children. Sure to win right?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Reality is about as real as living in a world where you believe Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in a jail cell on suicide watch. The point being, everything on TV is bullshit and it isn't even funny anymore. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">If they can kill/silence one man in a maximum security prison because he might name names ; just imagine what the can do and have done to millions in far flung countries. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What we're confronted with now as a species is an overpopulated world, approaching 8 billion with mass flora and fauna extinction. And none of it is global warming or a globalist funded war against the environment Greta Thunberg can win.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The darkest dark for this writer about war is that conflict itself may not kill us.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The darkest dark is that someday soon this planet's biosphere combined with species extinction and bio weapons may finally have enough of us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And that is a battle even Alexander the Great couldn't win.</span></div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-80759706148375804162018-09-17T10:20:00.000-07:002018-10-20T10:46:51.342-07:00The Syrian Civil War: Air Power Can Win! If you want it. (Part I)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> A few years back, I wrote a piece about the Syrian Civil War titled <a href="https://wartard.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-west-v-isis-air-strikes-just-mean_6.html" target="_blank">"The West v ISIS: Air strikes just means endless war minus victory"</a>. That now seems, in hindsight, not only trite but embarrassingly off the mark. Some could say that I failed utterly as an analyst because look what the Russians did in Syria with a few planes and some Spetsnaz forward observers. They literally wiped the rebel forces arrayed against Assad (termed by Western media as ISIS) off the map. And they did it with so few aircraft, many of them aging, some third and fourth generation planes but nothing compared to NATO's overpriced "fifth generation" stealth fleet; all of which makes you wonder if it was NATO's or the Western powers intention to ever defeat ISIS at all?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And here we come to what I'll call "the darkness".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The darkness you will never see on any news channel or media outlet in any country under the umbrella of the post WWII globalist order. And by that I mean every English speaking country's news channels, including mainland Europe's, Israel's, South Korea's and Japan's. Whatever language is spoken, this post WWII order has held on but is now descending into a kind of darkness. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This darkness is first and foremost the idea and the fact that the corporate media and the entire political establishment is lying to you. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> That's fact one and certainly dark. But the darkness I am positing rocks the foundations of my belief in the post WWII Western order I grew up in which primarily meant that the victors of WWII were the "good guys". Maybe I was that naive. Or more likely a kid. But twenty year old me could be forgiven for that. Because how many twenty year olds know much about anything other than mating rituals and having a laugh?</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The question I find myself asking today, twenty years on as I note the state of the darkness, is a question idealistic 12 year old me asks from his dreams...</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> "Are we in the West the bad guys now?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> For anyone who reads this blog, this may not be new information. But let's indulge in a game. Let's talk about the Syrian Civil War now. Now that it is almost over, let's uncover from the rubble and the darkness some truth that war makes the first casualty of. The average person in Western <a href="https://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/list-oecd-member-countries.htm" target="_blank">OECD</a> countries is busy making a living and feeding their family. It's difficult to be too much concerned with what your tax money is paying for. For instance, a Tomahawk missile costs 1.2 million dollars. And 300 million worth were launched against Syria because of some bullshit gas story pushed by the media in April. Gas is indiscriminate and horrible but it also has some especially evil connotation in the minds of the public who have never been near a war zone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gas in war drives foreign civilian populations insane. It's a trigger word. And the media knows this. If your child in a war zone dies by air burst artillery (a common occurrence in Aleppo or Damascus or Gaza) that means such munitions pepper your child with ball bearings travelling at Mach 3. Fucking horrible and unthinkable. You'd think. But let an enemy open a barrel (allegedly) that spreads some weaponized chlorine/sarin for at best a square block and now you've got an international <i>casus belli</i> on your hands. </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But any soldier will tell you artillery is far worse and more terrifying then some dissipating cloud you have a small but possible fighting chance at running from. What's worse is the media pushing the public into outrage using gaseous fear and demanding intervention in a desert war thousands of miles away from the average taxpayer doing his best to feed his family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The famous Churchill quote "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at to no result." is probably true. How about gassing people? He would know. How about bombing people and killing them via kinetic blast energy? Is that more evil then gas? </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">In 2001, as we all know, 19 Saudis flew two planes and took down three buildings in New York, wrecked a wing of the Pentagon with another plane and nose dived a fourth into a field because of the heroism of the passengers. Officially. That was quite a feat in a country with a military larger than the next ten country's military's combined. Try anything like that today near Damascus and your plane isn't even going to make it over land from the Mediterranean. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We're talking about a city with the 4th most sophisticated anti aircraft defense network on the planet. That's why the Israelis launch their AGMs at Syria from F-16s from their airspace or Jordanian airspace. The Syrians could take a shot at them but they don't exactly need another next door neighbor flinging more shit over the garden fence at them right now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The point being?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Syrian airspace became impregnable and that was the beginning of the turning of the tide in favor of Assad. Russian intervention we'll talk about in Part II but for now let's stick to how we got to where we are today. How did we get to the Syrian Civil War?</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Russians like their naval base at Tartus. And why wouldn't they? Geopolitics is a chessboard, why give up a square?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> How did we get to a place where bombing wins a war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I mean this figuratively of course, bombing wins wars but only as a component of a combined ground strategy and other factors. The Syrian Civil War is unique in the sense that never have so few aircraft done so much to change a major war. There's a Churchill Battle of Britain quote in there but I'm not using it because it's just too obvious.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> To begin talking about Syria, we're going to have to go all the way back to 2010. Remember that thing called the "Arab Spring"? Western media touted it on your TV screen. Maybe you do, maybe you don't but let's do a quick primer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> It's possible it was a genius destabilizing operation run by Western intelligence agencies but there was an organic nature to it too. Since all Western media is a propaganda operation {and not just the news), I mean all of it. From the Kardashians to the Walking Dead and all the commercials in between, it's all a kind of mind control telling you what to aspire to, what to fear, what is good or bad in life and in our case, who the bad guys are. It's all controlled opposition aimed at priming the public. The Arab Spring story went something like this. Some Tunisian bazaar merchant set himself on fire due to some injustice. A local authority figure made him buy a permit to continue selling whatever bullshit a street vendor in Tunisia would sell to tourists. Who knows why? But some local official took away his livelihood and he lost his mind. That I can understand. Any man can. But setting yourself on fire to make a point is a drastic maneuver and does tend toward making the man with the match a martyr for a cause. And that's exactly what happened. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> For many reasons, this act of self-immolation led to a wave of popular uprisings that destabilized every country in North Africa but especially Egypt. That was the biggest domino to fall but surely an unintended target. Israel and the US liked Mubarak but not his people, the Egyptians. Sinai is a hard, calcine forbidden desert but it is a point of contention. The Americans were paying Mubarak a billion a year to keep his population under control and not cause trouble for the Israelis. The most important thing for them was his zealous efforts to police the border with Gaza and make sure other Arab nations or shady arms dealers could not funnel weapons into Gaza, especially not shoulder mounted AA weapons that could challenge Israeli air superiority every time they bombed a hospital they claimed had a bottle rocket in the basement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Nobody expected the Arab Spring to get out of the control. Sure the CIA, Mossad, MI5 and whatever the French call their intelligence agencies took advantage. Maybe they poured fuel on the fire. The point being, the Arab Spring spiraled out of control. It wasn't exactly engineered but it wasn't organic either. Egypt got destabilized simply by the fact that every house in North Africa and the Middle East by 2010 had a satellite dish on their roof. And the population were not swallowing the local line of bullshit their media propaganda were pumping out. They could see the world outside and realize they were getting fucked over big time. So there were riots. Tanks on the streets did nothing, not even bullets could quell the uprising in Cairo.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Mubarak, the man on the Western payroll had nowhere to run and had to stand trial. Suddenly he got sick. Seriously, this shit reads like a bad novel. The revolutionaries put him on trial and first fined him 33 million dollars and locked him up in a jail cell where he suddenly had a heart attack (who wouldn't)? It's possible that a bunch a hard hitting Bedouin motherfuckers went medieval on his ass, but either way, Egyptian prison didn't agree with him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Interestingly, the Israeli's offered him asylum (he was, after all, on their payroll via the US anyway) but the Egyptian courts put him on trial again anyway and grabbed another 22 million from his bank accounts before things started going to absolute shit on the streets of Cairo again. This was almost certainly funded by foreign money (the usual suspects), but even so, it turned out that just because the Muslim Brotherhood might be good at praising Allah and fooling some of the people all of the time didn't mean they were any good at running a bus line to the Pyramids never mind running a whole fucking country. Egypt went to shit and Mubarak got free, ran for the hills and is still alive somewhere living far better than you or me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But lets slow this story down a bit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The Arab Spring was getting out of hand. With Mubarak gone and the Muslim Brotherhood taking control of Egypt that made Israel's strategic position precarious. Every AIPAC activist was funneling millions to every US Congressman and Senator's re election campaign. Something had to be done to stop this threat to Israel's southern border and the Gazan/Egyptian tunnel network infiltration points</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And so Western nations arrived at the usual answer when tact is difficult and bombs are cheap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> "They started blowing the shit out of everything in North Africa."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But especially Libya because they were the target in the cross hairs of Western avarice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> The second richest country in Africa, run by a dictator and strongman, Gaddafi. (go ahead and tell me a Middle East country that isn't run by a strongman) and for that matter, go ahead and tell me any country not run by a person with a motivation that Nietzsche called the "will-to-power.". Democracy these days is just something to make you feel good; like you have some say in the ways of the world as you deposit your voting slip. Meanwhile, we're all run by strongmen or these days, strong women. Who cares who fronts the organization, man or woman, what matters is the power behind the person in the suit they push in front of the TV cameras.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> But I've digressed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Libya.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Here's who attacked. For no reason other than to destroy an oil rich success story on the Mediterranean. This is your tax money at work.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28yU38GA44n-Vh7I-WasTXSQ0if_NRYM62_a7ZyyvLR-iZTbzn16EOfQgLDIFLE7nahEsZFRrBjrILB4BHtwZXXsbmuE-vl9KANQn4q2L0r0oK35GR5MbADA5zCMUOpk1xOEQaniGqZi3/s1600/Libya_Coalition_Sorties1200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="1200" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28yU38GA44n-Vh7I-WasTXSQ0if_NRYM62_a7ZyyvLR-iZTbzn16EOfQgLDIFLE7nahEsZFRrBjrILB4BHtwZXXsbmuE-vl9KANQn4q2L0r0oK35GR5MbADA5zCMUOpk1xOEQaniGqZi3/s640/Libya_Coalition_Sorties1200.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What did Libya do to deserve this international coalition of death via air power?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Now we must enter more darkness and things they'll never tell you on TV.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Libya, committed the crime of going against the international system. They hoarded gold and exported oil. Sure, Gaddafi got rich and let's face the man was no saint. But every Libyan newlywed got a house. Gaddafi used Libya's oil wealth to pipe aquifers and turn the desert into farmland. Libya had the highest literacy rate in Africa and free education; free education to the point that any gifted Libyan could get their university fees paid even in foreign universities like Oxford or Harvard. Think about that while you're paying off your student loan for the next 20 years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Gaddafi was even floating the idea of an African investment bank, and a gold backed currency, that meant oil sales for gold instead of paper and that's the kind of talk that gets you killed real quick.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL9QIjYu_AFnLXVurikLAUgYkQ0Hx7zzgW86Z5ODkF5leMGSV6yna4xT0bS2dXV7PjTViTMQtExM0yBV9wje9crLa4WNEYDpC5b47ycjIkXwbfQXcgsAm08YJMUeuw-cve-_7I8QR_noQn/s1600/libya-oil-map1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="512" height="572" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL9QIjYu_AFnLXVurikLAUgYkQ0Hx7zzgW86Z5ODkF5leMGSV6yna4xT0bS2dXV7PjTViTMQtExM0yBV9wje9crLa4WNEYDpC5b47ycjIkXwbfQXcgsAm08YJMUeuw-cve-_7I8QR_noQn/s640/libya-oil-map1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> What is Libya today?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> A nightmarescape worse then South Chicago with open air slave markets and rival rebel factions roaming the streets in pick-up trucks brandishing heavy machine guns and battling rival gangs for local control from Tripoli to Benghazi. Meanwhile the population hide in their houses. Thanks Obama. Thanks Hillary Clinton. Thanks Sarkozy. International criminality hide behind these leaders they fund, dress in suits and have their bought and paid for media industrial complex friends paint these leaders as "nice people" projected into the public consciousness via TV camera reading bullshit off a teleprompter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> That's the absolute state of modern "democracy".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Far, far from the ideals of the ancient Athenians.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"> The Syrian Civil War started out as an opportunistic attempt by Western powers to get rid of Assad. Since Libya went down so easily, foreign think-tanks and NGOs got high on the idea that if you pump enough bullshit into a satellite dish and funnel enough arms to a hired local militia, (ISIS, AL Nusra, Al-Qaida) whatever; and then feed your home population a series of gruesome beheading vids just to make sure they know who the bad guys are; you can take over a whole country for less cash than the daily profits of Google or Apple.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> With total media control, you've got an enemy your domestic population hates while at the same time a private army you can use to run roughshod all over the Middle East. Also, you've got a bunch of crazies who'll eviscerate and mow down hundreds in Paris, stab their way across London, mow down hundreds with trucks in France and Germany and generally keep the public focused on who the bad guys are before they wheel out the piano guy who sings "Imagine" at the candlelit vigil while the citizenry holds flowers and gets misty eyed while doing absolutely fucking nothing about their own government causing all this mayhem in the first place.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnqcifxaYgXzGKJsk-1mcsTGlu1yBUeZ4Z3MAlxuIAmuJa2BB_fXfkZZaaaAz1RFEdJSlMWmPMS1veIvUc2vjBBE6N19DIQ8gs-keRJXwDNqwvtMkqwkzZko9zrXYNkbo8w0hFndetQKHZ/s1600/war+is+over.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="793" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnqcifxaYgXzGKJsk-1mcsTGlu1yBUeZ4Z3MAlxuIAmuJa2BB_fXfkZZaaaAz1RFEdJSlMWmPMS1veIvUc2vjBBE6N19DIQ8gs-keRJXwDNqwvtMkqwkzZko9zrXYNkbo8w0hFndetQKHZ/s640/war+is+over.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If only human nature could be this simple... then perhaps John and Yoko would be right.<br />
<b>If you want it.</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: justify;"> And paradoxically, this ISIS outfit were the very forces Assad was fighting in Syria. Nobody ever said war is a logical endeavor but some internal consistency on who the bad guys are would be nice, right?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> Anyway, the Syrian Civil War started out as a foreign funded protest movement in Deraa. And by foreign funded I mean container loads of weapons shipped from the newly failed state of Libya. That's the fun thing about chaos and failed states.. Anyone can do anything and not only avoid scrutiny but straight up commit every crime imaginable and have no authority bat an eyelid. Because there is no authority.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's what chaos is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">No authority.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;">And chaos was coming to Syria...</span></div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com85tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-110879011606628402016-01-18T07:04:00.000-08:002016-01-18T07:28:01.193-08:00The Geopolitics of 2016: Oil, War, Chaos and Pathological Altruism.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mySzzdmMprN_cs-3n0Ok3qJGnwPx103f1sw9zu49aQyAM9UwqTzS3KuD-Qjy-FFQabyecEObXub092BBojqfO7riwKNNP9WYzK08udTSYYfElYNFVC1uXBEHh6NWDCn2_AP220yM6l6u/s1600/encirclement_0_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mySzzdmMprN_cs-3n0Ok3qJGnwPx103f1sw9zu49aQyAM9UwqTzS3KuD-Qjy-FFQabyecEObXub092BBojqfO7riwKNNP9WYzK08udTSYYfElYNFVC1uXBEHh6NWDCn2_AP220yM6l6u/s640/encirclement_0_3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Word on the ground at the Pentagon is that the Obama Administration's foreign policy is viewed as so inept, directionless and without clear objective that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have had to step in behind the scenes and offer tacit assistance to Assad in Syria to help him shore up his defensive line before the whole Middle East goes to shit. Based on pragmatism alone, any combat theater that puts US, French, UK, Turkish, Israeli, Syrian and Russian combat aircraft together in the same war fighting environment demands from an Administration, at the very least, delicacy and tact, but even more importantly, leadership and craft. The current US Administration's policy on Syria exhibits none of these qualities to its allies, but far worse than this, it exhibits none of these qualities to its enemies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> War will always be the extension of politics by other means. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"> That's why every time Obama deploys one of his cloned spokeswomen wearing the "problem glasses" to a White House press briefing, I cringe as they tell Russia how very concerned the Administration is with all that nasty interventional bombing stuff going on in Syria. Putin and his cronies must be playing that drinking game in the Kremlin where you have to take a vodka shot every time the problem chick says trigger words like "counterproductive" or "indiscriminate bombing" and you must double shot when the term "civilian casualties" gets used. The truth is, US foreign policy is chaos and reeks of hypocrisy and the rest of the world knows it. And its presentation is even worse. Say what you will about the tenets of Bush-era neocon aggression and naked Cheney Halliburton rapine, <i>but at least it was an ethos dude</i>.</span></div>
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And this very lack of a coherent American foreign policy over the last two years is having all kinds of unintended consequences across the globe. When the Russians took what could be taken (Crimea) in what in hindsight remains a brilliant strategic maneuver – bloodless – (well, you know what I mean, a few people burned to death here, some more maimed and vaporized there) but in the grand scheme of things the Crimean annexation was something any general in any time would call a <i>cheap</i> victory. Either way, NATO was caught flat-footed, responded only after much chin scratching and imposed its sanctions rather limply at first, making attempts to freeze up all that sleazy Russian oligarch money in foreign banks. When that didn't hurt enough, the US turned on the fracking spigot, squeezing once-dead wells into gushers and suddenly the US became the world's largest oil producer again. Along with Canadian shale oil, 'they' flooded the US market with so much cheap crude that every Texan with a Hummer or Escalade to feed began praising Jesus before ordering a hooker.</div>
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Oil's precipitous decline on world markets during 2015 was a marvel to watch.</div>
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If only it was cooking oil, I could've made more popcorn.</div>
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The whole Russian economy is a one trick pony that needs $110 a barrel oil as a base price just to keep up Moscow's balance of payments. Putin's drinking game crashed up against a raging hangover when Russia went into recession and the ruble began to shed value as oil plummeted. That's how wars begin of course. They slow boil for years and are waged economically first before any shooting starts. But who's going to start a shooting war in a post-nuclear world with Russia? Still, it's worth remembering Japan had been under a US oil embargo for years before they 'suddenly' attacked Pearl Harbor in '41. </div>
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Low oil prices have had all kinds of domino effects that complicate the global chessboard.</div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> For one thing, Saudi Aramco (basically the House of Saud's personal corporation) and the largest company on earth with yearly earnings three times that of the GDP of the UK, does not particularly like low oil prices either. Go figure. Just like Russia, they too like it when oil prices are in the hundred dollar a barrel range because a new Ferrari a week per obscure Saudi prince is seen as a divine right and cheap oil tends to make the royals skimp on the options package. Also, the Wahhabi ruling class in Saudi Arabia need a constant stream of cash to buy off their captive population of restless sex-starved street racing youth who, without regular pay offs, might get all romantic and rebellious and wonder if ISIS could help them revolt and get their hands on all those sweet sweet spice exporting terminals the princes own and grab all of that for themselves. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice is always a temptation for revolt as is access to 72 virgins but in this life </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">before you die</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">. Due to the crash in oil prices, the ruling Saudi royals are having to dip into their savings accounts. Deep though they may be, paying off their population with the usual stream of benefits does not come cheap because no matter how you cut it, you can behead only so many people before your Bastille gets stormed.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"> In chaos and war, it always comes down to the money. But more on oil prices later.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: start;"> One major interesting Obama Administration foreign policy maneuver in 2015 was the nuclear deal signed with Iran. Now that was popcorn-worthy. It was worth it just to watch the Israelis squirm. The Zionists are so used to running American foreign policy for their own benefit and having the US Army take care of their enemies for them (Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad etc) that it was hilarious to watch Netanyahu throw a shit fit in the US Congress against the Iranian deal. It was so tasty to watch that I bought some kosher popcorn, sprinkled it with bacon fat and almost put it in the blender so I could drink it through a straw like a freedom smoothie. Standing up to AIPAC and the Zionist lobby is the single jewel I can admire in the Obama Administration's non illustrious crown. As to the grand chessboard of the Middle East, it's now hard to see Israel making a move on Natanz or the other Iranian nuclear facilities. Not only because of their lack of long range refueling tankers and need for US logistic support, but mainly because the worldwide blowback that would ensue would be a PR shit storm too much even for the Israelis to endure.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq25TFMRpy7s3tE4d71caZ1a5NsFb9LajKwV3mA1lkyg_DD5MqEpaKPIfj0F8wlLLASCiciszPlZq31l8DJqMbeUa2FEYl4wEe6CGaZTCZgYNnnPisB9LJ0noY0iSqsASWDhyMYc2-nOLi/s1600/popcorn-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq25TFMRpy7s3tE4d71caZ1a5NsFb9LajKwV3mA1lkyg_DD5MqEpaKPIfj0F8wlLLASCiciszPlZq31l8DJqMbeUa2FEYl4wEe6CGaZTCZgYNnnPisB9LJ0noY0iSqsASWDhyMYc2-nOLi/s320/popcorn-1.jpg" width="261" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; text-align: start;"> As to Syria, </span><a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-syria-matters-sunni-oil-versus-shia.html" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;" target="_blank">as I've written before</a><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">, it is just the current year in the wider Sunni v Shia regional proxy war. But here's the fun part. With sanctions about to be lifted on Iran, that means their oil can come to market. The Iranians, in need of hard foreign currency, will begin pumping immediately. Right now, the Saudis have continued pumping oil despite the low price, not just because they can, but because they want to punish US and Canadian shale oil producers who desperately need high oil prices to function simply due to their high costs of extraction. Saudi Aramco would very much like these competitors knocked out of business, workers laid off and all investments in energy self-sufficiency go belly up before the Sheikhs turn down the flow rate on the spigot. Oil is a dirty business because the profits are so huge and men will kill and die for it. Yet the sleazy template always remains the same. First neutralize the competition because the Saudis can pump cheap. Next, let all those bloated storage terminals and offshore tankers unload the glut of contango oil to Gulf refineries. Pump nothing. Wait for prices to climb steadily as shortage inflates prices just before the summer driving season. Hey presto, a Saudi prince just earned himself a new Ferrari because he woke up in the morning.</span></span></div>
<br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> This is basically the Saudi economy in a nutshell. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> But here's the fun part.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> This dollar harvest is going to be harder to farm now that Iran is waiting in the wings ready to pick up any slack in supply. Hungry for hard currency, the Iranians will pump for any price, killing Saudi ambitions to get back to mythical 2007 money. That is one reason why the Shia v Sunni proxy war in Syria is fought also in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan and Bahrain, all of these countries being about as politically stable as a waste water containment tank at Fukushima. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> It's Sunni oil versus Shia oil and most people in the West with a vehicle don't care.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib-Y8y2ZXH5pZ2HC5XWzkay6jULf1s0MPzOovWhPcCbZGUqkEeyoplrdyyU5PtXLFN__gasJqfX1b05FV4FJxqp5yXmucDkqCVZNMRpvTN7pxoaAE0fS5VlR-a_yu2B4DwNAHKiHQ1UNu7/s1600/shiavsunnimap.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib-Y8y2ZXH5pZ2HC5XWzkay6jULf1s0MPzOovWhPcCbZGUqkEeyoplrdyyU5PtXLFN__gasJqfX1b05FV4FJxqp5yXmucDkqCVZNMRpvTN7pxoaAE0fS5VlR-a_yu2B4DwNAHKiHQ1UNu7/s640/shiavsunnimap.gif" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> The irony here is that Israel is now Saudi Arabia's new best friend. True, their interests have been aligned for years based on that old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" maxim, but still, it's interesting. Both of them have excellent US supplied air forces, overwhelming when compared to the Iranians’ Shah-era F-14s. But the latest word on the international arms market is that the Russians have cleared their long standing deal with the Iranians and will begin delivery of the promised state of the art S-300 air defense system by the end of 2016. This would make any attack on Iranian facilities by air orders of magnitude more costly to any aggressor outside of stealth aircraft. And even then, who knows? The Serbs shot down a stealth fighter during the Kosovo war back in the ‘90s and gave the wreckage to the Chinese whose embassy in Belgrade got 'accidentally bombed' by the US days later. Still, you can make a safe bet that if some NATO anti-tank weaponry just happened to fall off the back of a truck in Eastern Ukraine any time soon, then I'd bet that Iran would have a Russian S-300 anti-aircraft dome deployed over Tehran the very next day.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsMYVxTZGJ7XIAUh-2Zyu_fyH_zQMUmR5TvI5QNjzPykUlS3o0kBhfl_chnXFBn_HS9O33UJBx6Ffox7duG6ldcrzqY7THHb7ZZV3Ma32TLTerjeFz4FzK4-DnOQOb4ON3kMm67Pg26Wd/s1600/SS300.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsMYVxTZGJ7XIAUh-2Zyu_fyH_zQMUmR5TvI5QNjzPykUlS3o0kBhfl_chnXFBn_HS9O33UJBx6Ffox7duG6ldcrzqY7THHb7ZZV3Ma32TLTerjeFz4FzK4-DnOQOb4ON3kMm67Pg26Wd/s640/SS300.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> The chessboard in 2016 is complicated my friends.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> No discussion of the price of oil and US foreign policy would be complete without mentioning the dollar or, more precisely, the <i>petrodollar</i>. Yeah, I know, every guy on the Internet has a Ph.D in this theory but, if all oil must be bought in dollars then this artificial demand for dollars means that, from Russia and China's point of view, they are indirectly funding America's foreign wars every time they buy or sell a barrel of crude. Putin has signaled he wants to create an oil index and buy oil in rubles. Sure, it’s a farfetched idea right now considering the ruble makes up only about one percent of the FOREX market but it is also the kind of idea that can get you killed, or start a war, just ask Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi... <i>oh wait</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> They already tried it and they're dead.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Europeans can and should rightly lay some blame at the door of the Obama Administration for its current influx woes. Buying oil in dollars means that European nations are indirectly paying for the very US machinations in Syria that have flooded their own countries with a million ‘refugees’ in a single year. The Obama Administration's total ineptitude when it came to handling post-war Iraq, leaving the field by some arbitrary date as a campaign promise just to woo the young Starbucks-drinking urban hipster vote left a power vacuum in Iraq into which ISIS flowed. Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were mind-blown by the stupidity. Sure, the Bush neocons broke the vase and did all the damage in the first place, but walking away and leaving the pieces broken was as short-sighted as it was politically expedient for re-election purposes.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> As Churchill liked to say, "The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Now, after the atrocities, the burnings in cages, the medieval barbarity on the nightly news, this same Administration wants to go after the last dictator left in the Middle East, Assad, the last man standing, he who is holding back the tide. Say what you will about Gaddafi or Hussein. They were dictators, killers and brutal, but you have to be brutal in tribal lands just to keep order. Factional desert people just don't do voting booths and a polite letter to their Congressman. Arabian concepts of grievance are that when there's a problem they grab an AK and march their way towards the problem until the problem owns a tank and then they shut the fuck up and go home.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Tribal politics are based on power and this economy of power has existed in Arabia for a thousand years. That power trickles down from a leader in a hierarchal pyramid much like the one printed on the back of every dollar bill. The West, terrified by the upheaval brought about by the ‘Arab Spring’ sided with the mob and those at the bottom of the pyramid in the name of ‘democracy’.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Yeah, I don't swallow that one either, but it's what they printed in the newspapers and said on TV so it must be true. Right?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Either way, with the tacit and logistic support of the US, the French and British air forces took out Gaddafi's armor and military infrastructure and now there's a boat leaving from the Libyan coast to Europe every day just like Gaddafi had warned; boats and rafts filled with the dregs of humanity from backward shit holes like Eritrea, Yemen, Somalia; places so far removed from any concept of European civilization that it boggles the mind that these people show up as refugees in cities from Cologne to Stockholm and have to be given classes on how not to rape women in skirts because Europe, contrary to their belief system, is not an ongoing live action roleplaying porno movie.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Miss us yet?</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> The hordes pouring out of Syria are unwelcome in every other Middle Eastern country outside of Jordan because even their fellow Arabs do not want them around and see fractious Syrian ethnic Druze, Alawites, Sunni Arabs, Turkmen etc as a destabilizing force. The Israelis on the Syrian border accept zero refugees. Funny how Zionists promote multiculturalism in every country except their own. Funny too how over 80% of the migrants are military aged men and a million alone entered Europe in 2015 with a million more to come in 2016. The Battle of Vienna was fought in 1683 at the gates of Western Civilization to keep out the Ottoman Turks. This current migrant crisis is not immigration; it's a fucking invasion. How many of these men are veteran militia fighters, cells waiting to be activated to wage the same war they've fought in Damascus and Dara'a on the streets of Cologne, London or Stockholm?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Or like Paris recently, link up with their homegrown brethren for more asymmetrical warfare.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> European citizenry, or at the very least the officials they elect, are suffering from some kind of post WWII abhorrence to violence that borders on self destruction. Decades of plenty has given rise to a pathological altruism among European populations that would shock their world conquering ancestors. WWII has left such an indelible mark on the mainland European psyche and created a mythical egalitarianism where populations believe every foe can be defeated if only you just love them enough. It's like Jesus on steroids except they're all atheists. For the Germans, they seem to have this need to prove to the world they're not Nazis anymore and think Angela Merkel can accomplish some kind of sainthood by flooding quaint German villages with peoples from foreign deserts who have no wish to assimilate, no love for their new land, worship a strange god and see everything European civilization has produced as worthless blasphemy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Think of it this way. If one percent of the refugees entering Europe in 2015 are veteran militia fighters (a conservative number) that means 10,000 men operating behind enemy lines. No European country since the fall of Rome would have allowed foreign infiltration on this scale without conflict or confrontation. And yet today, a million people have walked into Europe and to even raise the question as to why this is so and who they are means you're a racist and a bigot. Such is the power of media driven thought control and political correctness.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> This is the power of pathological altruism.</span></div>
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Oil funds it.</div>
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War fuels it.</div>
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Chaos enjoys it.</div>
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And so welcome to 2016.</div>
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Quite possibly the most interesting year to be alive ever so long as you've got popcorn.</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com113tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-12751664519862040112014-10-06T07:54:00.000-07:002014-10-17T02:30:27.648-07:00The West v ISIS: Air strikes just mean endless war minus victory.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5oSDuGzCH9cgJ-1ZCxUsBAdC51ZXlGyLR-qGWD1Kf1zuCgwAs-T9vWs1GLGjyGSYq0BrNLRBktMKqVRdm-9gZDKdjt2FFViUZfnCQHY6f7a04LYlS3fsGxPK-DgRGCvwbWIBl2xKlRVvQ/s1600/B-2_spirit_bombing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5oSDuGzCH9cgJ-1ZCxUsBAdC51ZXlGyLR-qGWD1Kf1zuCgwAs-T9vWs1GLGjyGSYq0BrNLRBktMKqVRdm-9gZDKdjt2FFViUZfnCQHY6f7a04LYlS3fsGxPK-DgRGCvwbWIBl2xKlRVvQ/s1600/B-2_spirit_bombing.jpg" height="640" width="512" /></a></div>
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So there's a US led war party in the desert and every Euro country with an F-16 to spare is piling in to the fray just so they don't miss their chance to get a swing in at the bad guys. Even Belgium rustled up a squadron. It's popcorn material for sure but it's also just an air offensive which means, for Western nations, you've just subjected yourself to never winning a war but continuing it indefinitely. Everyone with a TV or web connection already knows ISIS are the bad guys. Populations hate them. And the ISIS media wing loves this and drinks foreign civilian tears like it's freedom fuel. ISIS have been beheading people on video for a reason. They want attention. The interesting game at work here is the weight of military history working against the idea that air strikes ever won a war. Strategic bombing is nice WWII style but that only works when the enemy have factories to bomb. ISIS have none of that. They've got a loose social network, a hostage civilian population, some stolen Hum Vees and no production capacity of any kind. So where is the win here via JDAM?<br />
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ISIS picked this fight once they started beheading people on your TV screen and nobody nowhere ever picked a fight they believed they could not win. And that's remarkable for what it reveals about ISIS command ideology.</div>
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They really believe they can win this war.</div>
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ISIS have taken a leaf from the 9/11 playbook. A lot of empty places and Iraq got carpet bombed in the wake of the twin towers coming down. But, let's face it, the terrorists won that war a long time ago. If the goal of 9/11 was to damage, degrade and destroy the freedom of Western democracy then 19 religious nuts pulled it off. We're a police state now. In 1970s America you could get on a plane to Vegas just by rolling absently up to the check in counter and claiming you're the guy whose name was printed on the ticket. In 21st century America, your toddler's genitals get felt up by a government agent and the parents say yes sir, diddle my kid, this is acceptable because Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and we need to be protected from the bad guys who fuel our cars. Let's face it, al-Qaeda won the war on terrorism a very long time ago.</div>
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ISIS, new kids on the block, believe they can top that because they're banking on the fact that we're that stupid.</div>
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One of the strengths of any guerrilla army throughout history is knowing when to stand your ground and when to run like fuck. ISIS will know how to run like fuck. They'll blend away once the rain of US and Euro JDAMs reach a crescendo. But their media wing won't. And that's why I've got serious reservations about 21st century warfare waged the way Western governments are waging it versus ISIS. If you're like me and have been hitting up LiveLeak all week to get some behind the scenes footage beneath the sanitized cool explosions Western news networks have been showing on TV, where the enemy dies clean and there is no unsightly limb separation or agonizing slow death under rubble, then I see an opening for the bad guys. This is where the ISIS media wing will gain some traction through social media. With a proper supply of dead baby footage, they stand a serious chance of enacting some counter narrative of their own.</div>
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Why?</div>
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Because air campaigns don't do shit v militias.</div>
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Never. Nowhere. Ever in time. </div>
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Air power is an awesome tool but nobody ever won a war from 20,000 feet.</div>
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Let's talk West Point 101. When you're at war, killing the enemy is always good. Killing the enemy while also killing civilians as collateral damage, while distasteful in the post war analysis (Hiroshima), is, by and large, acceptable (if you want to win). The interesting new paradigm at work here is what I hate to call the 'dead baby dynamic'. Since 21st century warfare has become a live popcorn munching event thanks to the Internet and 24hr TV news, parading casualties in front of news cameras has become a sort of counter propaganda and anti narrative that would've made Joseph Goebbels jizz his pants. For the defeated, if you can supply enough dead kid videos, there's a serious chance that you can convince a sizable segment of the enemy civilian population that war is bad. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Because humans are retarded by war.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> But guess what... war is always bad</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> That's a given. And the truth is grim. Ask the average war protester what he'd do if an intruder broke into his house to steal all his shit and kill his wife and the likely answer is that he is going to freak. Your mild mannered protester will quickly resort to 'warfare' with that burglar and attempt to beat the living shit out of the intruder via the two by four which once boasted his protest sign that now suddenly comes in handy as a weapon while he swings away to break invader skull open. War, despite what Jesus might say, works as the enaction of a policy where you don't die but the guy breaking down your front door does. It's never pretty. Bear with me here, I know I'm stretching the metaphor but the ISIS threat they're advertising on TV is exactly this.... What do you do if there's a guy hanging out across the street openly telling the neighbors he wants to kill your wife? He could be full of shit or he could be serious. Do you call the police? What happens when you are the police? America's self appointed role and Obama's tech heavy foreign policy is to run the numbers through the NSA's mega computer and the resultant actuary tables say that that asshole across the street needs to die. The risk of an ISIS dirty bomb in Times Square and the global wreckage that would ensue outweighs the right for ISIS to exist; so logic dictates letting loose the greatest advantage any war fighter anywhere ever had.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The US Air Force.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> My problem is, can you win that war from the air?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Am I advocating for a ground invasion?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Nope. I'm just interested in how wars, once put into effect, get won.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Air strikes without boots on the ground never work if you're interested in defeating the enemy. What's bothering me about this campaign is the stated objectives. The West says they want to "degrade" ISIS. Surely this is the shitiest and most obscure objective ever enacted as policy. In many ways, war is very simple. You win or you lose. If you want to defeat ISIS you win by occupying the territory they do and leave them no space to run like fuck to. The West is selling this war thinking superior technology from the air can beat <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-idea-of-isis-history-and-future-of.html" target="_blank">'the idea of ISIS'.</a> The only way you can beat the "idea of ISIS" is to kill every militia fighter hiding in a hole, or, crazy though it might seem, come up with a better idea. Each option is equally impossible so what do you do? Despite the laser guided, infrared and night vision tech getting advertised on our nightly news as a problem solver via destruction, at the very least you need, in order to 'win', a recon team on the ground designating by eyeball who should and shouldn't get killed. That kind of <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2012/05/man-wakes-up-from-decade-long-coma-and.html" target="_blank">HUMINT</a> shields you from the media explosion of accidentally wiping out a wedding party though it looked, to the pilot, exactly like a terrorist campfire from 20.000 feet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And that's how we know there are already US boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Western populations demand clinical war now that Wikileaks and Snowden are all over the government's ass. The war we get sold on TV demands precision lest the population back home on their iPhones throw a shit fit if a baby gets killed. Just imagine if WWII had been fought that way? We'd fucking lose every time a Nazi baby died. Proxy wars are hard to fight in a world where information spillage is everywhere, bullshit is rampant and death is as cheap as it ever was, but it does mean that today, more than ever, attack policy can go against foreign policy if governments don't get a serious grip on the narrative.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> ISIS are media whores operating in an environment where the threat of a dirty bomb in Time Square is nearly as good as actually detonating a real one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Why?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Because social media penetration is a very profound thing that changes the dynamic of warfare in the 21st century from all that's come before. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Napoleon would've cried tears of joy and held Moscow if he'd had a media wing broadcasting to the Russian population just exactly why they should speak French. The Internet is changing how wars get fought..</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Let's get even more technical.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Drones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> When you're top dog on the global human hegemony heap like the US military is, conducting warfare while not subjecting your personnel to death is desirable. Obvious right? A functional given since Sun Tzu. Right now, the skies over Raqqa and other places in Syria and Iraq are filled with hardcore Western remote control technology. If you approach a HumVee in Syria or northern Iraq, a guy half way around the world at his work station nods to his supervisor and minutes later, the vehicle and its environs get carpet bombed by a guy who pulled the trigger from the opposite side of the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The military call it suppression.The politicians call it 'degradation' and I call it war via call center and none of it means you win. It just provides a prescription for endless war. ISIS have done their homework and learned how to challenge civilization.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Let's face it, we're living in Blade Runner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Victory will remain elusive for Western governments so long as your population demands safety. And who doesn't demand safety? ISIS doctrine is exploiting this and forcing Western governments to act in a bombing campaign that makes no sense. The world in 2014 is a boiling cauldron of seething rivalry between the great powers but, unlike 1914, nobody can make a big geopolitical move because nukes provide a cap on ambition where nobody can win, so proxy warfare, economic warfare and war via computer espionage have become king. None of the above will work against ISIS.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">L</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">et's state what we know for a fact.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Energy wars are complicated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Any military action by any state actor in the Middle East is by default an energy war.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> ISIS are formidable because the 'idea' behind ISIS recruits angry Sunni youth from many far flung places and that strikes fear into the heart of power elites in Sunni dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and every other Arab state that chucked an F-16 into the recent attack. The Shia in southern Iraq are not afraid of ISIS because they can rely on Iran for support. Mosul has become expendable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Meanwhile, the Kurds, wielding their own excellent militia and capitalizing on US air strikes, will hold Kirkuk, the oil producing gem that cannot be allowed to fall. Interestingly, the Turks, NATO members next door, have chosen to sit the whole thing out because it's getting dangerous for them a) because fellow Muslim foreign fighters are spilling over their borders into the war zone b) because the political situation in Turkey is tenuous and Erdogan got elected by religious conservatives whose goals align with a fundamental idea of Islamic unity and c) because any help Turkey provides v ISIS makes an independent Kurdistan more likely. Remember, ISIS had 49 Turks held hostage a few weeks ago but guess what... they released all of them. Not a single beheading of any kind. Talk about knowing where your bread is buttered. ISIS atrocity is firmly directed against the West. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> It's a clusterfuck of the first order and a very complicated war fighting environment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Meanwhile, ISIS are loving it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The only real question for Western policy is, where does victory against ISIS lie?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The only way to win is via occupation and who has got two million troops to spare to subjugate Sunni Arabia? The cost benefit analysis is exactly what ISIS are exploiting. That's why we get the current air campaign that amounts to a capitulation, Kony 2012 style, to popular opinion because beheading people on TV is making people rage and the public want action</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Every smart person alive today knows we're living in a kind of dystopia, a best of times, worst of times consumerist cornucopia that would make Orwell shit bricks. That's why I believe it's reasonable to stand back and resort to, and end on, a philosophical question regarding our species. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Warlike upright apes though we may be, we're still apes who managed a moon landing and currently have robots scouring Mars via remote control So the question must be why are we wasting our time with this shit? Should we not be directing our attention to a moon base, a human Mars landing and colonizing the galaxy?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I understand the current tactical fight for resources here on Earth, but how many ISIS fighters, and fighters on every side, are smart enough to realize <i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">the</i> fundamental question that has been bothering humanity since Thucydides wrote his terrible account of self destruction in the 5th century BC. That question posed 25 hundred years ago remains terribly relevant in 2014.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 'Why are we losing the war?'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Against ourselves.</span></div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com110tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-69421410095452811092014-09-05T16:25:00.001-07:002014-10-03T00:23:28.271-07:00The idea of ISIS: The history and future of the Islamic State.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgny9D_C-DhpjJAiQkU4vnqks8tQTufIFNumrN54RwXl4qa68u6v58qn2QR-L_6-8A4JAZa63jE9zNh8jg72et26SA-s35wdb5MtevtgPoFpkbVDKn1jzJtdGP7FSlHxks-hdksLJrY59Nc/s1600/Flag_of_the_Islamic_State_in_Iraq_and_the_Levant.svg_.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgny9D_C-DhpjJAiQkU4vnqks8tQTufIFNumrN54RwXl4qa68u6v58qn2QR-L_6-8A4JAZa63jE9zNh8jg72et26SA-s35wdb5MtevtgPoFpkbVDKn1jzJtdGP7FSlHxks-hdksLJrY59Nc/s1600/Flag_of_the_Islamic_State_in_Iraq_and_the_Levant.svg_.png" height="468" width="640" /></a></div>
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The first thing we're going to have to realize in any discussion on ISIS is that, despite the media hysteria, they are not a cyborg army of super muslims spewing forth from Sodom about to gobble up the Middle East in their speedy Toyota trucks. Yes, these guys are well funded, well equipped and Internet savvy but the thing nobody seems to want to mention is that ISIS are in no way a formidable force. ISIS gains its power from its enemies lack of will to confront them because, let's face it, confrontation is pricey and nobody wants to pony up the blood and cash it would take to defeat them. [Update 10/3: The West has ponied up the cash and the air campaign is ongoing]</div>
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ISIS, in the simplest terms, are a bunch of assholes on a roll in a consequence free environment.<br />
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ISIS are also an 'idea' and in a social media world, ideas can be louder than bombs (more on that later). The main ISIS goal right now is cash and territory. Land for the caliphate. Later, they might get more ambitious and hit the soft underbelly of our infidel supply lines and detonate a dirty bomb someplace inconvenient but for the moment ISIS sights are firmly fixed on the easy pickings of post US Iraq and also on the real winners of the Iraq war, the Shia, who've grown fat and comfortable from fortified Baghdad all the way south to Basra. If we're going to talk about ISIS as a Sunni resistance movement, we're not going to be able to resist a little history here so let's go back to Jordan in 2003.</div>
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Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Jihadist is an Al-Qaeda commander and leader of a militant group called "JTJ", who is watching news footage of the first American 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' bombs landing in Baghdad. Iraqi triple A fire searches the night sky to no effect. Stealth bombers and JDAMS have Saddam clearly outmatched. We've all seen the footage. The US news anchor is orgasming on the fireworks but on the crappy satellite feed al-Zarqawi's 'tech guy' has managed to jack into via the dish on the roof, it's different. For a thug like al-Zarqawi, in a ramshackle apartment block on the edge of Damascus and schooled in the ways energy markets work, he comes to a very easy and fast realization. This is the war of his life. The methodology of his war and that of his followers will be via targeted atrocity against US forces and later, against Shia holy sites. Whatever it takes to make headlines. If the West thinks their high tech toys can take the Sunni homeland then he will show them warfare from another age (with the added bonus of advertising his prowess via the West's newfangled communication device, the Internet). He and his followers will show that fanatical muslims can learn HTML too. </div>
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Zarqawi quickly pencils down a wish list that will later become the ISIS manifesto.</div>
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a) Kick the Americans out of Iraq.</div>
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b) Establish a caliphate.</div>
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c) Spread the conflict worldwide. </div>
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d) At some point in the future, nail the Israelis.</div>
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Al-Zarqawi's ideas prove more durable then the man himself. He became too trigger happy with the LiveLeak vids and got 'freedomed' by the US via a 500 pounder from an F-16. He was holed up at what was, in hindsight, 'not a very safe house' in rural Iraq. Some stories state that a group of US soldiers stumbled upon the rubble, found him alive and finished him off via pistol. The fun part is, Al-Zarqawi's dead face was all over the Internet within hours and while the clueless Bush Administration were busy celebrating another 'mission accomplished' moment, Zarqawi's death mask went viral and recruited another few thousand disaffected Muslim youths from neighboring countries to the cause.</div>
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And that right there is the problem when you're fighting ISIS. War mixed with some quasi religious message is always harder to win because when the fanatics lose they can handily resort to magical thinking and transmute a battlefield defeat into some kind of message from a god and weave that into a victory speech so long as there are fresh recruits around to buy into the bullshit.</div>
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The pesky thing about the Middle East is that a manifesto written by a dead guy spawns a martyr and spreads like Ebola. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) became the new nomenclature for the "JTJ" and other Sunni resistance groups because, let's face it, Al-Qaeda had by 2006 become a global 'terrorist' franchise with worldwide media recognition and everyone knows that these days, in our corporate consumertopia, if you're going to run a business it helps to have a recognizable brand splayed in bright lights over the drive thru window. Zarqawi's group got with the program and allowed themselves to be subsumed into the wider struggle. For the purposes of Sunni nationalism, the strategy from 2003-07 for a lot of militant groups operating in Iraq and later Syria was to sit back, bomb US patrols and Shia holy sites and allow the Al-Qaeda brand and western journalists to do their public relations and recruitment drives for them. In many ways, it was helter skelter and race war robbed from the sick dreams of Charlie Manson</div>
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And it worked.</div>
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One of the more interesting media tropes from the worldwide ISIS media hysteria (especially after the capture of Mosul in June) is the idea that ISIS were "kicked out of Al-Qaeda because they were too extreme". The fun part is, it's true. Zarqawi's policy of chaos in Iraq at all costs meant that attacking the Shia was profitable for two reasons,<br />
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1) it destabilized the US sanctioned government in Baghdad (the idea of democracy being one of the touch stones of US involvement and part of the cover story the elites fed to the plebs back home) and<br />
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2) because, for Zarqawi, there was no such thing as bad publicity (except maybe the location of his safe house).<br />
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This 'kill everything' policy might have worked until suddenly, Zarqawi's group got impatient at the pace of change, went 'all in' and detonated a massive car bomb at the al-Askari Mosque, and took out the famed 'Golden Dome', an artistic treasure and the holiest mosque for Shia Islam in Iraq. Unsatisfied with the destruction, the crazy bastard went and did it again a few months later and took down both minarets seriously pissing off not just the Shia, but everyone. The problem was, from Al-Qaeda's point of view, with a nominal interest in global jihad, was that bombing fellow Muslim sites, even the 'filthy Shia kind', was not a sound business strategy liable to impress Muslims worldwide. Al-Qaeda wanted 'the struggle' to focus on Western interests in Iraq, fun stuff like IEDing Hum Vees and putting bullets in the heads of Iraqi civilians supporting the US occupation. This difference of opinion on targeting led to tension within the organization because invariably in jihad and war, once the blood starts to flow the message gets harder to control.<br />
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Zarqawi had made himself a liability.<br />
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Once he got taken out, his tenuous hybrid organization, still operating under the Al-Qaeda brand, went through a variety of leaders (most of whom got nailed by the US) and eventually found itself in schism. This schism was embodied by current ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi whose strategy of killing anyone anywhere so long as it advanced goals a) through d) of the above agenda meant that Al-Qaeda wanted to cut his group loose. ISIS, the newly rebranded wing formed by elements of Zarqawi's group and others battling Assad in Syria and already operating off reservation, were happy to go their own way.</div>
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Let's talk Iraq 2007.</div>
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The situation on the ground is a mess. With IEDs everywhere and even mainstream US news revealing how much American corporations had been charging US taxpayers every time a marine takes a dump in their branded porta-potty or electrocuted in their badly wired shower, the US public is realizing that corporate interests have played them for a mark like a Beijing businessman at a Vegas blackjack booth.<br />
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The Administration decides upon a 'new' strategy called 'The Surge'.<br />
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The American public, needy for a narrative involving victory but also retreat buys into the bullshit. The Surge involves a slight increase in US troops and patrols but mainly involves handing out millions of dollars in freshly printed cash to every Sunni Sheikh with a beef against the invasion willing to swap outrage for a new up armored Escalade. The Surge is war via pay off. And it works because money is honorable in the desert. The Sunni tribes banded together and formed 'The Sons of Iraq', amassed 30,000 fighters and ditched Al-Qaeda and it only cost the US half a billion dollars. That was chump change compared to what had been spent before. A 'Sunni Awakening' occurred where Sunni tribal elders were promised not only money but weapons to fight the extremists and most of all, Sunni representation in the government down south in Baghdad.</div>
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In the meantime, the US needs someone it can dump the reigns of power on to. An exit strategy. Enter, not a powerbroker but a nobody, plucked from obscurity by the low tech genius of the Bush Administration. With every Sunni and Shia mover and shaker squabbling for a piece of the action, the Americans drop a harmless school teacher type named Nouriel Al-Maliki into the mix. Here's a guy with solid anti Saddam credentials and a humanities degree that should be easy to control. But there's a plot twist.</div>
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Maliki turns out to be full on proof that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment" target="_blank">Milgram Experiment</a> was not a fluke. </div>
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Handed power, Maliki goes from mild mannered asthete to Stalin in the space of a few months and engages in a brutal suppression of all things Sunni. He purges the army officer corps and local governments of Sunnis, removing anyone still left after Bremer's Baathist purge (the biggest mistake the US made in Iraq) and eliminates from the Iraqi Army any Sunni officer still left who might reasonably command a rifle squad. Some of the victims of this purge, though they did not know it yet, were to become the steel in the ISIS command structure when they swept south and nabbed Mosul. </div>
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Next up, the Obama Administration arrives in 2008.</div>
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In many ways, the weakness of democracy, is that a new leader always comes along at regular intervals. That's if you believe the US Presidency actually runs shit and it's not all just theater designed to give the plebs something to argue about come voting time. Either way, with a mandate from a war weary public, democracy puts a neophyte in power, a community organizer so removed from conditions on the ground in a foreign desert and shoe horned by a campaign promise to drag US forces out of Iraq by an arbitrary date, that suddenly the Jihadis are partying like it's 1172. </div>
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To further complicate matters, the Arab Spring happens.</div>
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Populations rise up some dictators get deposed peaceably but, noticeably, in countries that export even a smidgen of oil, shit gets complicated. Libya becomes a mess with Gaddafi putting up a decent fight until the French and British swoop in to take care of domestic business in the Mediterranean and take out his armor leaving him screwed and Gadaffi gets added to that list of dictators you might not like but, considering the alternatives, were the strongmen needed to hold desert together. Add to this the fact that the average Libyan is far worse off today then under Gadaffi, and it sure is a head scratcher trying to figure out who the winner is here. Here's a list of oil exporting Middle East countries that came out of the 'Arab Spring' better off then they were before.</div>
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a) Libya… nope</div>
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b) Syria… nope</div>
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c) Egypt (no oil but canal owners)… all kinds of nope.</div>
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The ultimate culmination of everything Arab Spring is Syria. The bloodbath of our times. 200,000 people dead, millions displaced and lets face it, a very complicated war fighting environment. In so many ways it was the adventure the Sunnis and ISIS were looking for. Assad, an Alawite and Russian ally, presiding over a country that was not a country outside of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and lines drawn on the desert according to 19th century logic, was fertile ground for newly born ISIS. The rich Sunnis in Riyadh and Qatar wanted Assad gone and so did the US and Euros. And so the money and weapons flowed into Sunni groups. But who's going to collect? Not the idiot on the corner with an AK calling himself a freedom fighter. Inexorably, the real fighters, trained veterans from Iraq, experts from abroad with explosive know-how, ex- officer corps from places like Fallujah, slowly the heavies began to seep into the fray and consolidate the disparate Sunni groups into something larger. The kids with AKs yielded to the serious guys in the know. Fighting Assad's forces to a stalemate was nice but Damascus could come later. Why fight a hard war when to the south and east lay the easy pickings of Iraq?</div>
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ISIS moved the Syrian Civil War south and east and made conquest look natural.</div>
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Worse, they made it look easy.</div>
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Western media interpreted ISIS gains as battlefield invincibility but their advance would not have been possible if they were not already rolling into 'friendly' Sunni territory the Americans had abandoned. Power vacuums never last long in energy rich regions and the Sunni tribes that had once 'awakened' against al-Qaeda were no longer on the payroll and so enmity for AQI/ISIS wasn't generating gold and the Shia government in the south was turning increasingly hostile to Sunni interests. This made ISIS a functioning spearhead for a much larger Sunni nationalistic force. The opposing Iraqi Army, operating off 18 months of training and a meagre but steady paycheck stared down the full weight of ISIS and veteran Sunni tribal militias and that left the Iraqi Army with only one real course of action.</div>
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Run like fuck.</div>
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So fast forward to today and ISIS have their swathe of territory, they have Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, they're the richest militia in history, they're swimming in captured weapons and they're on Twitter. That's the fun thing about war in the 21st century. You can load up on tanks and fancy combat gear but if you're not savvy with social media then you're losing the fight. This is where you have to admire the assholes. The ISIS media wing is top notch and they make their vids in 1080p with surprisingly high production values. They've come a long way from the grainy 'generic terrorists training on the monkey bars' vids that were pumped out post 9/11 and have expanded their range to everything from your standard beheadings, pistol executions, mass execution of guys on their knees and on, mercilessly. to vids of ISIS fighters chasing down cars on the highway, riddling them with bullets while laughing and warbling the obligatory profusion of 'Allah Akbars' as they shock the shit out of you as you try to digest your pizza. Did I mention they also do kitten pics? Seems like they have achieved the ultimate level of Internet awareness...<br />
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<a href="http://www.inquisitr.com/1449328/isis-cat-photo-memes-attempt-to-use-kittens-as-propaganda-for-the-islamic-state/" target="_blank">Master troll.</a><br />
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The Syrian Civil War was the proving war where ISIS gained its traction. Well equipped, bolstered by expert fighters, hardened by scrapes with the Americans in towns like Fallujah, tempered, as it were, by fire, they could bring the fight to Assad and show the newbies how war is done without air power or tank support. Experts in avoidance, maneuver warfare and blending into civilian populations, ISIS under al-Baghdadi showed how, in the Internet age, you cannot be killed without consequence, without a way your death cannot be showcased via broadband and molded into some kind of martyrdom to fit the cause.<br />
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Right now, ISIS have become experts in showing how serious they are, grabbing headlines every week with their beheading videos. ISIS, for all its love of the caliphate and worship of medieval theology, knows that though technology might be the unholy language of the infidels they are not so married to Sharia that they can't spot a winner. Putting themselves in your living room every night and making it hard to digest your dinner is a new kind of 21st century warfare aimed squarely at you via your monitor.<br />
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So the question for ISIS is if this brand of crazy buys them any kind of longevity.<br />
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Can shock therapy build an Islamic State?</div>
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Surely the answer is no. They are the most hated people on Earth right now and rightly so. The problem is their gains are based on light infantry, maneuver warfare combined with a heavy dose of terror. Their gains are based on expanding into territory where they are seen, for now, as the lesser of many evils. Their enemies fear them much like Genghis Khan's cavalry. You cannot win but you can do business. ISIS exploits fear and punch above their weight but none of this is going to be enough to capture Baghdad. Baghdad is Shia country these days and Iran has been sending in troops and tanks to make sure it stays that way. If ISIS thinks their caliphate will ever boast Baghdad as their capital then we already know they're operating under a faulty strategy.<br />
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The thing that's most interesting about ISIS is that they're smart but their goals are stupid.<br />
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ISIS have already pissed off too many people to enjoy longevity.<br />
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To the north, Turkey and the Kurd's want them gone. The Turks, interestingly, seem to be sitting this one out. Interestingly, ISIS have done a lot to make an independent Kurdistan a foregone conclusion and ended Turkish hostility to this idea. Kind of. The Turks and Kurds have been fighting for so long that they've suddenly realized, via an external enemy, that they are in fact unlikely brothers with a mutually beneficial interest in seeing Kirkuk's vast oil reserves piped north into Turkey and exported from terminals on the Mediterranean in a game where every old Ottoman foe gets a fat chunk of the action. Sure the Turks are split on feeding support to the Kurds but Euros seem to like it. Maybe they'll even let the Turks join the club. Hence, the Euros have been flooding the Peschmerga with fancy new toys on the assurance that they only point them at the designated bad guys and not at the friendly and former genocidal Turks.<br />
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Even the Saudis are running scared. ISIS are showing them what happens when you open Pandora's Box and hand out weapons with impunity. The Saudi Royals wanted Assad gone so bad it hurt so they dished out AT weaponry like the brown acid at Woodstock and soon everyone was swimming in blast technology. Trouble for the Saudis is, some of those weapons can get pointed back at you. The Saudis are good at buying off their population with oil revenue but they fear that even their own population are buying into the ISIS hype. ISIS are nothing if not an enigmatic idea, the kind of idea that young men are attracted too. There hasn't been something this attractive to disaffected Muslim youth across the world since '60s Pan Arabism.<br />
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ISIS offers an insidious but beguiling idea to angry youth from Bradford to Marseilles....<br />
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The idea that you could come home.<br />
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They might hate you in the suburbs of Europe, but here in the desert, there's a chance for you to strike back. It's like the allure of '70s Punk Rock. Nobody likes you around here but if you're willing to make an idealogical journey there's a party in the desert and the possibility of making a new home so long as you're willing to do a little axe murdering on the side.<br />
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Can ISIS survive?<br />
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Not at the rate they've racked up enemies. Though they've amassed a healthy war chest and have de facto control of a large swathe of territory which they can milk for cash (they've been exporting oil for 25c on the dollar and running the usual extortion rackets in Mosul and other cities) it's just a matter of time before the hardcore Shia from the South, Peshmerga and Turkish forces from the north manage a concerted crush. Throw in some US airpower and ISIS will be forced to pretend they don't exist until the heat dies down.<br />
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Interestingly, this is where things could get dangerous for the West.<br />
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So much rested on Obama's withdrawal of forces from Iraq that's it's hard to see US ground troops being reinserted into the fray. ISIS would love this because bleeding an empire is their speciality. Their command structure may be solid but their ability to resist US air power is negligible. They were beaten back from the Mosul dam because control of the Euphrates matters.<br />
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The old logic of the 'cornered rat going for the throat' is interesting considering Europe's high population of disaffected Muslim youth. You never know what kind of dirty material (chemical, bio or nuke) you can buy in an Albanian/Georgian dive bar these days. Of course, I'm not talking the dreaded suitcase nuke, I'm talking a transit van, some Semtex and canisters full of gunk from some Soviet era reactor that, blown up at the right time in the right city could set the world on fire and spark all kinds of economic and over reaction scenarios that would certainly be popcorn time.<br />
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ISIS presents that 'clear and present danger'.<br />
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Let's state what we know.<br />
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2014 has been a really shitty year if you're the type of person who believes 'world peace' could 'be a thing'. Libya is on fire, Syria is on fire, Ukraine is on fire and Iraq is on fire. Tensions are rising in the South China Sea. The world economic system depends on stability and with the number of flash points growing, it's getting increasingly hard to see a future without large forest fires.<br />
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It's like trying to predict when, where and how the popcorn will pop.</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-91164654928000141872014-03-12T08:20:00.000-07:002014-03-24T01:22:18.569-07:00Russia v NATO: Ukraine, Crimea and the new Cold War.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Admit it, the second you saw that vid of Russian attack choppers pouring into Crimea, somewhere in the back of your brain you started thinking of nuclear winter, fallout, the best routes out of major population centers and how up-to-date the contents of your bug-out-bag are. Maybe you've got to be a '70s kid and have grown up under the threat of a Warsaw Pact air burst over your local mall to be really jarred by those images, but either way, I sure hit the popcorn pretty hard. Some deep <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6U9T3R3EQg#t=20" target="_blank">repressed memories</a> perked up when I saw those choppers. It's not often you get to see the Russian Army on the move and the resulting shit storm all over US and European media made for some pretty entertaining TV, especially if you enjoy your talking heads not connected to the reality of the situation in any meaningful way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Doesn't anyone on CNN read a history book? If there were truth in news reporting these days someone might admit that Russia pulled a 'smart' maneuver here just like the West did when they secured Iraqi oil, deposed Gaddafi or bombed the rebels in Mali. Russia just joined the club! With nukes in play nobody in the West is going to become embroiled in a Slavic civil war for Ukraine. Right? Let's face it, we just love our post modern self actualizing Twittery, i-Phoney, corporatocracy too damn much to risk our comfort for a bunch of cantankerous Steppe dwellers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The Euros are locked into a co dependent, abusive relationship with Russian oil and gas and the US is way over extended for either to do anything significant about Crimea so Russia gets to keep its new real estate. When you look at it with the cold eyes of realpolitik, Putin pulled off a pretty shrewd maneuver here and the West, despite the outrage on your TV screen, is pissed not because they give a shit about democracy and territorial borders; but because they got outplayed here by Putin and their inability to apply pressure has begun to reveal some frays at the edges of 21st century Western hegemony.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> To see why Putin pulled this rather ballsy gambit into Crimea, all you have to do is consider Russia's strategic position. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian bear has watched NATO expand eastwards into its backyard bringing Poland, Latvia and Lithuania into the western fold. Worryingly for Moscow, Ukraine has seen its fair share of Western NGOs, (really just an acronym for foreign political action committees operating inside your border), and slowly pour $5 billion into the system with the aim of tilting the vast bread basket west. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> You don't hear much about Russian motivation in Western media though.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> For instance, when <span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;">Western media ran the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk" target="_blank">Nuland leak tape</a> they did so in a way so divorced from the reality on the tape that I had to check the mirror to make sure I was living in the same universe and it all wasn't an acid flashback to the '90s. Here we have two American diplomats, one of them the US ambassador in Kiev, the other the top US diplomat to the EU (and presumably voicing the strategy of Obama's tech nerds) basically plotting a coup d'</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">é</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">tat against the democratically elected leader of Ukraine. But all of this got ignored when the the story ran and somehow morphed instead into a titilating snippet about how an Obama official said 'fuck the EU'. Meanwhile, the 'news' stayed tightly focused on the armed "democratic protesters" chucking petrol bombs at the cops. Turns out a whole bunch of them are hardcore Nazis and they've already started bullying members of the Ukrainian parliament and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUQZtFaLQj8" target="_blank">people on the streets</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"> But this is democracy, right?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And let's face it, if Occupy Wall Street protesters started lobbing molotovs at the NYPD, they'd have been gunned down with M4s before their idealistic little fingers made it to their Zippo lighters while Fox News ran a donation drive to buy more ammo for the cops. Yet here we have a mass of armed protesters advancing on the Ukrainian equivalent of The White House and word out of Washington and Brussels was more cheering from the sidelines like they're witnessing freedom and democracy on the march. It reminded me of that time during <i>Operation Iraqi Freedom</i> in 2003 when looters in Baghdad ran off with priceless Mesopotamian treasure from the national museum and Rumsfeld was pushed in front of the TV cameras to inform us that that's what 'free people do'.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> On both occasions, I nearly threw up in my beer.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Am I saying Russia had justification for invading Crimea?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Nope. I'm just saying it was a shrewd move.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> When the West does it, it's sex, when Russia does it, it's rape. The Russians under Putin have been itching for a chance to rebuild some semblance of the Soviet Empire and bring as many energy rich states into a Eurasian Union to counterbalance the Euros. Seeing Ukraine join the EU and NATO would be far too risky for Putin. The Russians know from history that buffer states and winter are useful allies whenever foreign powers try </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">diplomacy by other means </i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and head for Moscow.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i> </i> That's why nabbing back Crimea was a natural play, correcting the 'mistake' Khruschev made in 1954 over vodka when he gave it to Ukraine. Of course, back then this was merely an administrative shuffle because in the heady days of Sputnik, no one ever thought the Soviet Union would collapse and Russia might find itself on the wrong end of the deal. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Russians think of Crimea today they think of cheap holidays in the sun and Sevastapol, home of t</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he Black Sea Fleet. And that fleet is pretty critical to Russian geopolitical ambitions. The naval base there allows Moscow an ice free port to exert influence over the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Middle East.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Although full of aging vessels, the fleet has been earmarked for upgrades, including six new diesel Kilo class subs and some amphibious assault ships with which to press home diplomacy when a little hard pressure is required with uppity neighbors like Georgia. It's also only a few days sailing to Syria where NATO ambitions were stymied in 2013 not least because of Russian machinations.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Putin grabbed it and let's face it, it's nothing the US wouldn't do. Watching Kerry remark on the Crimean situation last week was a further exercise in the absurd theater of reality. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMs55yUMFbk#t=810" target="_blank">Who writes this shit?</a> The needle on the hypocrisy meter broke when it tried to push past max level.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> So what are the West going to do about all this?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilj9onCUZQsK64kDDJRux10l3RmsI5RqY0q_rLBO0eorueqTDRX8NdFoxmItDfnSXFMBuhZjEhyBoywVYVMHdF0RZdwJPa2rkBvUhgFf3D2foJ2A4_6jld0itTE1N2jYLcDI2gGD4Fm1Ma/s1600/gas+lines.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilj9onCUZQsK64kDDJRux10l3RmsI5RqY0q_rLBO0eorueqTDRX8NdFoxmItDfnSXFMBuhZjEhyBoywVYVMHdF0RZdwJPa2rkBvUhgFf3D2foJ2A4_6jld0itTE1N2jYLcDI2gGD4Fm1Ma/s1600/gas+lines.gif" height="432" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> This is where it gets interesting. Realpolitik is back and the US is going to have to adjust. The instability in Ukraine exacerbated by a tanked economy allowed Putin to pull this deft move without firing a shot. A remarkable gain considering its two million population and powerful position in the Black Sea. The US initially responded with a call for across the board sanctions which Germany instantly rejected because their economy needs all that sweet Russian energy. The trouble is, unlike China, Russia exports raw materials and energy and advanced Eurozone economies mold that into machines. So for the EU at least, which does ten times more trade with Russia than the US, sanctions are a non starter.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The new idea this week is 'travel bans' on Russian officials which is kind of funny. Looks like those guys will have to go holidaying to the beach resorts of Crimea this summer. Also, there's talk of asset freezes on all that sleazy Russian money holed up in Western banks. Of course, Russian dirty money in the 'City of London' is exempt from these asset freezes because of some bullshit reason David Cameron's bankers created out of thin air; but really because those in London's financial center need liquidity and cash is always king, dirty or clean.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In geopolitics and war, you measure how much you care in blood and treasure.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And by this metric, the West doesn't care that much. Ukraine is cheap and</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Crimea is part of the Russian Federation now and it will stay that way. The upcoming referendum is a foregone conclusion, I'm gonna guess a 75% vote for Russia. Of course it's all theater but the Russians have learned from the West how to make invasions look legit.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuKp1iDRPLysumR5fjcYiAiKkefMoj8PXgJvk8CK-GaXHtXJpKQsJMJWN97G-LCcFl8AL1nN8AX2qCMPmZaFb71IifkXQ9E4rAZJVuHXMyNTcNquXFSRh_ClRKkphPltLcwItAWTV4_5Mm/s1600/stalinlove.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuKp1iDRPLysumR5fjcYiAiKkefMoj8PXgJvk8CK-GaXHtXJpKQsJMJWN97G-LCcFl8AL1nN8AX2qCMPmZaFb71IifkXQ9E4rAZJVuHXMyNTcNquXFSRh_ClRKkphPltLcwItAWTV4_5Mm/s1600/stalinlove.jpg" height="464" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The older generation celebrates the good ole days after the Crimea vote</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The real question is what happens in Eastern Ukraine and this is what I'm saving the popcorn for. For one thing, Britain, the US and Russia signed the Budapest memorandum in 1994 which guaranteed Ukrainian borders in exchange for them giving up all the nukes left over from the Soviet Union. That sure looks like a shitty deal right now doesn't it? </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The hard lesson here is... never give up your nukes. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the interim Ukrainian prime minister, said "If you do not uphold these guarantees which you gave in the Budapest memorandum, then explain how you will convince Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear status." Note to Mr Yatsenyuk: North Korea has nukes, you don't, so tough shit on that analogy sir, you lost your nuke bargaining chip in the international casino 20 years ago. Also, Iran has the 4th largest oil deposits on the planet and gargantuan natural gas reserves where you have lots of empty fields for growing grass so I'm sorry to inform you sir, but nobody gives a shit. Wheat is cheap right now but oil is precious. Different rules apply.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> If Russia pulls a 'Sudetenland maneuver' and invades Eastern Ukraine to 'liberate' the Russian speakers from Ukrainian tyranny, it sure has the potential to enter the dreaded 'escalatory spiral' where we're talking full on global confrontation. This is where I see nukes saving us. Like I've said before, nukes are the greatest peace keeping weapons ever invented because Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is the only logic us upright apes truly understand. In this case, the threat of confrontation will force leaders on all sides to the brokering table. That sure will be a complex deal.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> If Russia pours troops into Eastern Ukraine, it will force the West's hand. Proper economic sanctions, Poland will get their missile defense system and Russia will face growing isolation. If a shooting war starts on the ground (awesome multi spectrum air and land battles on mottled rolling green terrain) I sure would hit popcorn overdose. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Still, it's hard to see the Ukrainian Forces putting up a real fight. Sure, the figures above look decent on paper but war is never as simple as how many tanks you've got. The Ukrainian military is suffering very low morale due to the political situation, a low state of readiness and a military that is split between ethnic Ukrainians and Russian speakers. The Ukrainian military is unable to offer a credible deterrent right now. It's also hard to see the forces on both sides engaging in a savage shooting war. After all, Slav historical ties run deep with Kiev itself being, in most Russians minds, a Russian city. That doesn't mean it can't happen but would Putin be prepared to fight for Ukraine killing fellow Slavs... like the Wehrmacht did?</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And yet still, 220,000 Russian troops, 1800 tanks and 400 attack choppers are engaged in "exercises" on the Ukrainian border. Meanwhile, Crimea just handed over it's navy to the Russian Federation while more troops and equipment arrive daily from the motherland. If the Russians invade they'll try not to fire a shot and annex Eastern Ukraine where the Russian speakers live, draw a line on a map and seek to de escalate. They'll have their buffer zone, the EU can have the bread basket, Poland gets a missile shield and the border becomes a Berlin Wall running along the new border with massive build ups of military forces on both sides.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> It's Cold War Part Deux.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The beginning lines drawn in a multi polar 21st century.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> All those neoliberal economic ties and global interdependence is supposed to make the 21st century a century where war is impossible outside of the odd Third World resource grab or minor proxy war. Major wars are not supposed to happen say the architects of the new century because we will all buy tonnes of shit from each other and our need for more toys will mean our greed will save us from war.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I must admit I'm pretty curious to see how that theory works out.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Russia v Ukraine is surely its first major test.</span></div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com155tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-50067472951226448012013-08-28T06:31:00.000-07:002013-09-27T14:13:18.973-07:00The Syrian Regional War: NATO on deck!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Looks like NATO and Obama's tech geeks are going ahead with a 'limited' attack on Syria.<br />
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[UPDATE 9/26] Obama's nerds realized the bad idea was bad..<br />
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The US has four destroyers in the Mediterranean right now each packing 90 Tomahawks apiece plus the British have a Trafalgar class submarine offshore and a Rapid Reaction force setting up shop at Akrotiri in Cyprus. It's hard to figure the real justification here (outside of the details I gave in my <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-syria-matters-sunni-oil-versus-shia.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>) but the international media play here seems to be: "Assad unleashed his chemical weaponry and wasted civilians so now it's time for the West to bring some kinetic blast energy into the mix to punish Assad for killing people in an unapproved way." Yep, it seems the reasoning behind the attack is going to be that retarded. You kill your people via asphyxiation so we'll kill more of your people via high explosive and that'll teach you a lesson for your "moral obscenity".<br />
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Such is the madness of war.</div>
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Of course, this can't be the only reason for the attack and the above reason is just the bullshit they're going to print in the newspapers. A recent poll indicated 60% of the American public are against any intervention in Syria (because they're smart) but modern proxy resource war is never a game of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" so there is no 'ask the audience' option. The corporate oligarchy are just gonna go ahead and blow shit up and continue with the wider plan of gobbling up the entire energy riches of the Middle East.</div>
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Syria will be first on the permanently destabilized list, followed later by Iran.</div>
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This attack, for the moment, is being advertised as merely a 'one off strike' to punish Assad for using chemical weapons (if he used them, more on that later). It's the "poke the hornets nest with a stick and see what happens" theory of war. If Assad reacts and does something stupid like launching missiles at Israel (highly unlikely) then NATO will pounce and bring on the real war, armed with the excuse to retaliate they can feed to their surveillance state nominal 'democracies' back home. If Assad is smart and he sure seems to be, then the correct reaction to the NATO attack will be to do nothing and instead offer up the usual parade of dead babies to world TV cameras.</div>
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And this is where the story gets real shady for me.</div>
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Assad by all accounts is not a stupid man. He attended Western universities. He's a trained eye doctor. This at least must mean he's not a total idiot, right? Why then would he use nerve gas at a time when the rebel factions aligned against him are fracturing, fighting amongst themselves and losing control of towns? Assad's forces seem to have gained a slight initiative in this war and now suddenly, just as he begins winning, he breaks out chemical weapons and hands NATO the golden invitation to walk into his country?</div>
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It just doesn't make sense on the very fundamental level known as <i>common sense</i>.<br />
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The things is, who these days is gonna trust the US or UK when they say WMDs are a legit reason to enter a war? It is a fact that chemical weapons exist in Syria but the real issue here is, who used them? It may be hard to believe Assad is that stupid but of course, that <i>does not mean he isn't that stupid</i>. War is not a logical environment and the <i>common sense</i> I mentioned above may not be applicable at all. Maybe Assad felt that by using a terror weapon and getting away with it, that act alone would be a morale shatterer for the rebels and allow his forces to go on the full offensive; knowing that pesky entrenched rebel holdouts could be gassed out of their positions with ease. Maybe Assad was testing the waters to bring about an offensive chemical game changer to end the war decisively? We just can't know and no side in any of this as of this writing seems inclined to deliver definitive proof of who is responsible. Still, none of it passes the smell test does it?<br />
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Do not watch the video below if you would prefer to avoid the horrors of nerve gas (NSFL).<br />
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Assad's actions after the chemical story broke are telling too. He immediately offered to let UN inspectors in to examine the sites where the chemicals were allegedly used. Obviously, he's studied the West's WMD playbook in Iraq and learned from Saddam that stalling on this issue provides the West with justification for an invasion. Sure, that could be a bluff too, designed to play well with a foreign anti war public; the logic being that he at least tried to prove his innocence but the damn rebels prevented the UN convoy from getting through to the chemical sites. Maybe, he's like the shark in <i>Jaws</i>, either very dumb or very smart... he's gone under the media.<br />
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Even the mainstream media are asking these questions now but it is testimony to our times that the precedent for wars without Congressional approval, without UN approval, wars that are illegal under international law; all can happen anyway because of the precedents set in Iraq 2003. Even the will of the majority of the public can be set aside by those in power. Hope and Change was all just a slick marketing campaign. Now we see why Obama didn't go after the Bush Administration and instead made them all immune from prosecution. Another precedent was set... that of total freedom from liability for those who would run the empire and its global proxy resource wars. A freedom from liability the Noble Peace Prize winner himself will avail of when he himself presses the red button on Syria later this week. If he does because deep down I still don't get where victory lies here. Obama's defenders will say that the White House did warn that chemical usage was a "redline" moment and the US will look weak if they do not strike punitively as a matter of proving the US point. One thing is for sure though and that's that any overt foreign involvement in Syria just leads to more clusterfuck. Unfortunately, this is the only truth you will find in the Syrian Regional War.<br />
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Meanwhile, yesterday in Syria, shit got even more shady. Suddenly, on their way to the nerve gas attack sites, the investigating UN convoy took incoming fire and was forced to retreat before inspecting anything. Let's look at the possibilities here in the absence of cold hard facts.</div>
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A) The snipers were Assad's forces trying to stop the UN from discovering the truth behind the usage of nerve gas. Assad invited the UN team in as a ruse, just to seem like an honest broker and then had his snipers shoot up the convoy knowing they would flee. He then blamed the shooting on the rebels and appealed to world anti war sentiment under the idea that he did all he could to try to prove his forces innocent of chemical weapons usage.</div>
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B) The snipers were in fact rebel factions trying to prevent the UN from discovering that the rebels themselves were responsible for the gas attack either using stolen chemical artillery shells looted from Assad's arsenals or, worse still, chemical weapons supplied from outside Syria by a foreign menagerie of sleazy enemies with an interest in watching Syria burn.</div>
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C) The snipers were foreign CIA/Mossad/Turkish agents running a covert mission to interdict the UN convoy to stop the inspectors from discovering that the chemical weapons came from foreign sources, were not part of Assad's arsenal and that the rebels perpetrated the attack themselves; all this with the added bonus of confirming the fact that Assad is a callous killer who would fire on unarmed UN inspectors.<br />
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D) The snipers are just random assholes. It's a war zone after all. Some dick shot at the convoy because he hates white SUVs, hates his job, hates the war and the guy banging his wife drives a white car so he fired shots and it's all just random mad shit.</div>
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One of the above is the truth. But which one is it?<br />
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They say truth is the first casualty in any war so here we go again...</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW2Y-j1euka4A-OpIeiJDX2vO9wkGzmfhZcbEW82tShvhHDTQ8i7K56EnTwrlopaxWzPr8BM6bt0csqcjmEWAcIhQF_KOJGs-1OSkAW2P7lfrIeyBEvjCcwdKlPQwwlhdYc16E-HP5Tbv-/s1600/UN+sniper+attack.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW2Y-j1euka4A-OpIeiJDX2vO9wkGzmfhZcbEW82tShvhHDTQ8i7K56EnTwrlopaxWzPr8BM6bt0csqcjmEWAcIhQF_KOJGs-1OSkAW2P7lfrIeyBEvjCcwdKlPQwwlhdYc16E-HP5Tbv-/s640/UN+sniper+attack.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Those blast points, too accurate for sand people?</b></td></tr>
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The impending NATO strike is being presented as a sort of 'slap on the wrist' attack in world media.<br />
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To know if this is true, all we will have to do is wait to see what the primary targets for the initial Tomahawk cruise missile strikes will be. The targets designated here will be crucial in figuring out where NATO is planning on taking this war. If most of the targets are X band strikes against Syria's air defense radars than we can be pretty sure this is just the opening salvo and NATO intends to take air superiority over Syria and fill the skies later on with ground support aircraft for the rebels, a Libya part II if you like. However, if the strikes are primarily against Assad himself, his house, his swimming pool, his Bentley, government buildings and some military bases and command and control centers then, that might fit the advertising as a "punitive measure" type attack. Obviously, limited strikes against all of the above will keep NATO intentions muddled for now and will be the probable course of action. But we will still learn a lot from the extent of strikes against Assad's air defense systems. And we'd be foolish to think that the US doesn't have a whole bunch of follow up contingency options waiting in the wings.</div>
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Next up, what are the wider geopolitics of this crazy war. </div>
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And, by wider geopolitics, I am of course talking Russia and Iran here. I talked a lot about this last time but it's worth repeating. Russia currently has an undisclosed number of assets inside Syria. They have that Mediterranean base at Tartus which they would dearly like to hold. Losing it would be a serious blow to Russian prestige but I'm sure NATO have offered assurances that they have no designs here. The Russians have some Soviet era warships off the coast, some Spetsnaz and paratroopers in country and also an unknown number of technicians helping with the air defense systems. Has the S-300 SAM system been deployed yet? This is a huge question and we don't yet know. Some batteries could be operational and will be operated by Russian technicians. Obviously, the S-300 getting its first combat test v NATO would be popcorn overdose time but most likely the initial strike will involve cruise missiles and maybe, if the US goes exotic, some B2 stealth bombers from mainland US bases.</div>
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How will Russia react?</div>
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There'll be complaints at the UN and fist waving along with the Chinese. But at this stage of the 21st century everyone knows the Western <i>modus operandi</i> and the juggernaut that is US military power. The corporate empire cannot be deterred by conventional forces and nukes remain off the table because it's just not worth bringing on Armageddon. Yet.</div>
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The real question here is what the NATO plan for Syria is.</div>
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Is it perpetual chaos in the heart of the Arab world? Because if the West were truly interested in stability in Syria than the dirty little secret of this war might be that Assad would be the best option for that. Let the Arab strongman continue his authoritarian dictatorship not because it's expedient or moral or even right, but because the alternatives are far worse. Just look at Egypt in the aftermath of Mubarak as an object lesson on how things can go wrong without a bad guy on the payroll. The Arabs just don't do democracy and voting booths. In the wake of Assad's demise, what would a post war Syria look like? It would look like another Civil War but this time on bath salts with multiple factions fighting each other, Druze, Alawites, Christians, FSA, Al-Nusra Islamic radicals, Kurds, Al-Qaeda franchise elements, Hezbollah, Iranian militias, Sunni factions, ex Assad Syrian Army hold-ons all clawing each other's faces off for power. The civilian slaughter and genocide could go off the charts.<br />
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But here's the dark side for Western war planners. Once you ditch the morality of fomenting a failed state you also by default neuter it. Its teeth are gone. Its ability to project power evaporates from its neighbor's borders. All this chaos would mean the end of Syria as a contiguous state and would remove it as a threat to Israel, Turkey and Jordan and end its alliance with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran to the East. It would knock Russian influence out of the Middle East. Hezbollah would find itself with a far more difficult supply chain for rocketry to aim at Israel and Iran would find itself fully isolated and surely the next domino to fall.<br />
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So now perhaps the benefits of attack emerge however tenuously. Total destabilization. Chaos. A very scary course of action surely with many unforeseeable outcomes but obviously viewed as containable from Western war planner's madcap <i>Dr Strangelove</i> rooms.</div>
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In fact, examined on these terms, NATO's impending intervention in Syria starts to make some kind of strategic sense when you take in the big picture... total Western hegemony of the last easily extractable oil on the planet. Lessening reliance on tar sands and its low EROEI numbers and high costs-to-refine, nothing but sweet crude sitting just under desert sands in Iraq and Iran and the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. Syria barely has any oil but it is a linchpin state in the region. Damascus is the historic heart of Arabia. Maybe we've reached the stage where such chaos is desirable and that's a very scary place to be just 13 years into the new century. Hegemony via chaos is a risky game.</div>
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This is a big war and it's happening live on your TV for reasons far removed from a <i>whiff of nerve gas</i>. If Assad takes his medicine and does not retaliate (his best move) we have the possibility of continued stalemate. The fire could all die down and be forgotten in a week or it could flare up and consume more forest. It's been a long hot summer. And the desert is dry and ripe for flames.<br />
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If NATO are smart, they back down on this one. They already have all the chaos they need.<br />
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Grab popcorn. And stay tuned.</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com103tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-14071999992160025812013-06-25T11:41:00.001-07:002013-10-29T10:43:13.983-07:00Why Syria Matters: Sunni oil versus Shia oil and the battle for regional hegemony in the Middle East.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Syrian Regional War rages on and nobody knows how to put out the fire.</div>
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Up to now, the Obama administration tech nerds have proved pretty savvy when it comes to dealing with foreign war-fighting policy. After all, they got Bin Laden. They buried Gaddafi via tech support so the French and British could get the job done. And every guy sporting an AK in a strategic desert these days knows he's just a drone strike away from oblivion. Even the plebs back home immersed in media driven bread and circuses know they're under 24 hour NSA surveillance every time they hit up Porn Hub. Few care. US defense policy these days is war via computer geek and it's working in this interim decade before the real resource wars get green lit.</div>
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Meanwhile, we've got Syria like a festering splinter in the geopolitical game.</div>
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Syria is proving to be a real head scratcher for Obama's nerds. On the one hand, you've got the "Free Syrian Army", the designated 'good guy freedom fighters', an idea the world media bandied about to describe the farmers in Dera'a that got the whole ball rolling in this 'civil war' when they tagged some graffiti on the wall of the wrong mud hut. Assad's heavy handed response meant Syria got lumped in to the whole Arab Spring narrative and there was all that talking head talk on US airwaves about democracy and freedom and ME dictators being assholes. But as with most stuff on US news networks, it's all a stinking pile of bullshit. All Arab countries are run by assholes because if they weren't they'd be run my warring tribal militias and that's really bad for the oil business. The Arabs just don't do democracy. Voting booths are for pussies, infidels and ancient Greeks. Arabs respect strongmen going all the way back to Saladin. That's why the Syrian Civil War has got nothing to do with freedom fighting and democracy and everything to do with regional and global geopolitics at the heart of the desert energy chess game. Which is kind of funny when you consider Syria doesn't even have that much oil. But we're not talking geography here, we're talking regional hegemony and control of the human capital living inconveniently in the vicinity of major energy reserves.<br />
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The Syrian Civil War is now a Middle Eastern regional proxy war.</div>
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This war really has two aspects. First and foremost, it's a regional Middle East conflict between the Shia and Sunni. Yep, a good old religious war but religion really isn't a useful term here. Sure, they hate each other's guts but regional energy hegemony is the fuel that makes this war burn. On the one hand, you've got the Shia, that is, Iran, Hezbollah (firmly entrenched in next-door Lebanon) and the newly conquered Shia controlled region of southern Iraq (thanks Dick Cheney), aligned against Saudi Arabia, Qatar and everywhere else in the Middle East Saudi oil money stretches to Sunni client states.</div>
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Basically, we're talking Saudi Arabia's oil versus Iran's oil.</div>
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The Saudis took it really personally when Hezbollah retook the Syrian town of Qusair in pretty impressive fashion last week, fighting that ugly street by street Stalingrad type warfare Hezbollah have been proving adept at lately. This has kicked the Saudi royals back in Riyadh into raging camel mode. Although a long time coming, the Shia v Sunni grand regional war is beginning to take shape. The grand alignment of Riyadh and Cairo (who broke diplomatic relations with Damascus last week and called for a no fly zone over Syria) is kickstarting. Next up to the party, King Abdullah of Jordan (fearful of conflict creep and more refugee spillage across his border), mentioned recently at a cadet graduation ceremony "Hezbollah must leave Syria... there is no place for Hezbollah in Syria". These are fighting words especially for the Jordanians who've kept their head down during this whole Arab Spring so as to maintain their benevolent dictatorship in the desert.<br />
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What's all this saber rattling about?<br />
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Basically, the Sunni oil Sheikhs fear the Iranian Oil Ministry will dust off the old maps from Ottoman times and build an oil pipeline from Abadan across Shia controlled Southern Iraq to Tartus in Syria and begin making billions exporting oil to Europe via the Mediterranean. Next up, why not build a nice railway line from Tehran to Damascus and on maybe to Beirut. That right there would be the type of Shia strategic encircling axis that makes every oil rich prince in Saudi Arabia want to rage drive his Ferrari Enzo off a cliff with his whole family in the passenger seat.<br />
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Even more so, let's talk methane. The above mentioned pipeline could theoretically supply the Euros with natural gas, the "cleaner" energy the planet loving Euros crave. With the EU mandated carbon reductions set to go into effect by 2020 and Germany axing its nuke plants, suddenly, Shia Iran's South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf becomes a goldmine beyond the dreams of Xerxes. Guess who lays claim to the northern part of that gas field? Sunni Qatar. Yes my friends, dig deep enough into any war and you can ditch religion and always find money and taking other people's shit as primary motivations for any shooting war.<br />
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All this makes Syria ground zero for proxy war central.<br />
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Right now the Saudis have been pumping some serious weaponry into the FSA. MANPADS (quite apart from being the worst acronym for a weapons system ever) are shoulder mounted AA useful for taking down choppers and low flying jets and also supplied, somewhat ironically, are at least 50 <i>Russian</i> made 9M113 "konkors"; wire guided anti tank missiles that can waste Syrian T-72s. The CIA have been supplying weaponry too but through the usual plethora of back channels; shady deals via Euro allies via dodgy corporate warehouses that make the stuff impossible to trace and every government ends up with plausible deniability while the Syrian rebel at the end of the supply chain literally jizzes his pants while unboxing his new laser guided death ray; and then begins crying as he can't read the instruction booklet because it's printed in a language.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 9M113 Konkurs AT missile. FSA instruction booklet included?</td></tr>
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This war is so interesting it has me glued to Live Leak and I'm getting fat on popcorn.</div>
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One thing that makes me splurge is the second aspect of the Syrian war, namely the geopolitical aspect, and how that's leading to all kinds of complications that drag in Russia, China, the US and Japan, and surely has the policy nerds at the Pentagon tearing their hair out wondering what the best play is in this increasingly complex and risky game.</div>
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If the US goal is to prevent the FSA from losing this war then that's going to require more than covert arms sales via shady transactions through the usual back channels. Let's face it, it's going to require a Gaddafi style no fly zone. As of this writing, Assad's forces are attempting to retake Aleppo, the home of the Sunni business elites, largely abandoned by them now as the squatting, multi denominational FSA fighters holed up there have helped, along with Syrian Army artillery and airstrikes, to turn that once thriving city into Beirut circa 1978. If Syrian forces manage to retake it, like they did Qusair a few weeks back, it'll be a major coup and decision time for NATO and the Sunni alliance of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and even Turkey to make a move. If Aleppo falls to Assad's forces and the Iranian sponsored militias then the FSA initiative will have been lost. And as any general knows, losing the initiative means everything in war.</div>
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That's when it will be decision time for the major powers.</div>
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If NATO decide on a no fly zone, the first thing they are going to have to contend with is Russia's newly delivered S-300 SAM system (if deliveries have been timely and made as Putin promised). These will have to be manned by Russian personnel because of the steep learning curve on operating this complex anti aircraft system. Assad's troops just won't be up to speed if NATO decides on a Gaddafi maneuver. The S-300 is potent but as yet untested in combat but there's no doubt it's a serious contender and at least equal to anything NATO has counter measure wise. The Russians claim it is even effective against stealth aircraft but they would say that wouldn't they? Maybe time will tell. The best bet for any initial strike will be X band radar cruise missile attacks on the launchers and radar installations all of which will be manned, at least for now, by Russian technicians. That will mean the US will have to go all in and I don't think the Obama tech geeks have the stomach for it. If they do, does that mean we get to sit back and jump straight to a fun game of global thermonuclear war when Putin's personnel get vaporized? Nah. Just another shit storm at the UN and more head scratching at the Pentagon.</div>
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From a purely <i>realpolitik</i> view, if the US does nothing, and Assad wins, that's a tremendous victory for Iran and Russia. On the other hand, if the US tackles this via half measures, floods the FSA with the latest shoulder mounted anti air and anti tank weaponry, you might hand the FSA a victory that will leave them hating the US anyway (even if they provide them with all those new fancy toys). The FSA itself is so fractious and made up of so many conflicting groups of martyr worshipping 72 virgin afterlife fucking crazies, including radical Al-Qaeda franchise elements, Sharia law nuts and radicals that, even an FSA win will mean the US will have basically armed another extremist state in the Middle East and created a hotbed for anti Western terrorist training camps that'll make the Taliban goat herders in Afghanistan about as threatening to world peace as Mahatma Gandhi on Xanax.</div>
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Obviously, Obama's computer geeks are stumped.</div>
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Another fun thing about this whole Middle East energy chess game is the stake Russia has in all this. If Assad manages to hold on, then Assad owes Putin big time. Russia loves that warm water but somewhat obsolete Mediterranean military base at Tartus on the Syrian coast. Arms sales to Assad have been booming and the whole Arab Spring thing has left Russia with a serious lack of allies and weapon clients in the Middle East. After the US appropriated Iraq's oil reserves and has that symbiotic relationship with Saudi Arabia's crazy Wahhabi sheiks who exchange petrodollar monopoly funny money for F-16s and Floridian beachfront property, the Russians are loathe to lose that last foothold in the Middle East that still buys their Migs and heavy weaponry. Also, the Russians would like to hold on to the regional influence Damascus provides as the historical and metaphorical heart of the Arab world. Holding on to Syria against NATO encroachment would be a major victory for the Russians who are feeling decidedly small since the heady days of the Soviet Union.</div>
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Also, for the Iranians, Syria is the main supply route for weaponry to Hezbollah, their proxy army on Israel's northern border. Hezbollah proved themselves a serious contender for world's best irregular army when they bloodied the IDF's nose back in 2006 when the Israeli's tried an incursion into Southern Lebanon. For Iran, holding Syria will achieve multiple aims; piss off the Saudis, assert Shia aspirations for hegemony in the region and remind Israel that they've got some allies on speed dial if Netanyahu goes ahead with his dream strike on the Natanz centrifuge facility. A possible pipeline to Europe for oil and gas across friendly territory would be icing on the global energy cake. Hezbollah also proved themselves useful allies for Assad when they went into Qusair and kicked ass and showed the FSA what real idealogical fighters can do when you threaten to fuck with their shit. This furthers my pet theory that heavy infantry armed with state of the art shoulder mounted AA and AT weaponry is the most significant development in warfare since Guderian's tanks and Stukas Blitzkrieged around the Maginot Line.<br />
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That's why the Pentagon are shitting themselves with the trillions they just blew on the F-22 Raptor... it's a pricey ~$140 million per plane option when your enemy fights from second hand Toyota Hilux trucks that cost about as much as a beer and pizza at Yankee Stadium. We're decades away from major power v major power conflict and this makes 5th generation fighter aircraft so <i>20th </i>century. The future of warfare for the foreseeable future is in the hands of the tech nerds, total information monitoring, computer espionage and satellite controlled drones versus desert guys in sandals with AKs and used Toyota trucks.</div>
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One final fun aspect of the Syrian War is the whole chemical weapons debate.<br />
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Obama called their use a 'redline' moment for US involvement. Trouble is, the FSA are using them too. Also, if you're a fan of YouTube or Live Leak (and who isn't these days), then you can go ahead and watch an FSA guy eat a Syrian Army soldier's raw heart. That right there is Liberia level warfare and makes death by Sarin gas about as troublesome as a skiing holiday in the Netherlands. Still, for some reason, the general population abhors death by chemical. Sure it's ugly, sometimes prolonged, but death in war is never pretty is it? The average web surfer sipping lattes in Starbucks hates death by gas but somehow maiming and vaporizing via kinetic blast energy is seen as fair game. Chemical weapons are the least of the problems the Syrian War presents except of course if some dissident FSA or angry Syrian Army dissident manages to export some Sarin gas to Times Square. <a href="http://endthelie.com/2013/05/30/turkey-finds-sarin-gas-in-homes-of-suspected-syrian-islamists-reports/#axzz2WEu1zrED" target="_blank">And that's not even a crazy idea</a> anymore.<br />
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The Syrian <i>Regional</i> War can have many outcomes. None of them predictable.<br />
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Only one thing is for sure for whoever "wins" this thing, and I can't resist a little history here courtesy of my old friend Tacitus, the Roman historian who quoted the Scottish chieftain Calgacus after his loss in 83AD at the Battle of <i>Mons Graupius </i>and said of the Roman legions who defeated him...<br />
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"They created a desert and called it victory".</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com89tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-620496796718998642013-04-11T07:40:00.000-07:002013-04-17T22:57:52.049-07:00North Korea v The World<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOP4C_k-46Ojc53Nb0PUU76_zhHiDdaf05O3YDS6SoehWnQKjfLtq_XRo3FPZAooLjCwaXQHx6t63IySYT4f2EpIsjCGaBPIFlzx61JtetevikcyYXgVd5u2XlO1ZV19RsVW9oWLuI4PY/s1600/KOREA-NORTH+kim+un+inspection.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOP4C_k-46Ojc53Nb0PUU76_zhHiDdaf05O3YDS6SoehWnQKjfLtq_XRo3FPZAooLjCwaXQHx6t63IySYT4f2EpIsjCGaBPIFlzx61JtetevikcyYXgVd5u2XlO1ZV19RsVW9oWLuI4PY/s640/KOREA-NORTH+kim+un+inspection.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The real question Western war planners have been asking since the Korean Armistice in 1953 and especially in the years since the demise of the Cold War and rise of China has been:</div>
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How much incoming artillery can Seoul take?</div>
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Because that's the cost of any war on the Korean Peninsula today.</div>
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For all of the North's bluster the real calculation comes down to a very simple equation. At what point in the cost benefit analysis does the price of appeasement (food, fuel, tech and free HBO for Kim Jong Un) become more expensive than patching up Seoul after a NK artillery and rocket bombardment? To use a crude metaphor, war on the Korean peninsula is a lot like you stepping in dog shit on your way to a party. You've got two choices, wipe it off in public or let everyone deal with the smell. The question here, and bear with me here for a sec, is, who wins this clash of opposing realities; the dog shit or your shoe?</div>
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In many ways, the answer is no one.</div>
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For war planners right now, North Korea is the dog shit. It's just far easier and cheaper to avoid war on the Korean peninsula than win. At least, that's the conventional paradigm that held true during Kim Jong Il's 17 year reign. Western media portrayed Kim Jong Il as a crazy, lonely leader with a penchant for Hennessey, Bogart movies and nukes but omitted the fact that being crazy was the only card he had to play; dealt to him in a pretty shitty poker hand after the Cold War ended and NK lost the Soviet Union as a benefactor. Bluffing his way through the game on two pair got him oil and grain and street cred and there was always the chance he'd go full retard anyway and do something really crazy and launch something significant. Sure, that'd mean his regime's instant demise but the idea behind cultivated crazy is that you just might do it... because you're crazy.<br />
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Crazy buys you leeway and means you don't have to operate under normal "rules".<br />
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His son is trying to play the same hand but doesn't seem to understand that the house rules have changed. For one thing, China is sick of North Korea's shit. They just want to keep exporting Wal Mart inventory and soaking up bank and any war on the Korean peninsula will dent cash flow. Also, it'll mean an influx of destabilizing starving NK peasants flooding across the Yalu river into Dan dong which will be very bad for business.<br />
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China no longer knows how to deal with this war.<br />
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So, like everything war wise at the moment, it's left up to the Americans to figure it out.<br />
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Meanwhile, the South Koreans have done their own cost benefit analysis and are approaching a tipping point. The tipping point where putting up with North Korea's bullshit might not be worth it anymore. With a functional nuke in the mix, it's only a matter of time before real and permanent damage could be done to Seoul and the South Koreans are beginning to total up the possible losses today versus say, three years from now, and suddenly they're realizing that it might be cheaper to take the horrible tasting medicine today and let the air strikes begin. The alternative is North Korean nuke hegemony not only in the Pacific Theatre but 40 miles north of their fabulous and gleaming gangnam capital. That's so destabilizing it makes international capitalism shit a gold brick. Of course, the theory that South Korea can retalitate to provocation only works if the Chinese and US are onboard and we're probably not at that point. Yet. But one thing is for sure and that's that the South will not sit idly by if the DPRK bombards an island or torpedoes a corvette like the shit they pulled on the <i>Cheonan</i> in 2010.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61dCpgMM98sj2FlJu8-bQMCbiF85FNHuv7qS-bHeC09fuG2WHspm9I5_INGdVDZKQZAkP1mEfvBKkI222nlz_heZeEcn1kz3ceNE77Hs-JbBpo91NPjgfjxzJ-hwn9MVGVU3Wl5pavhRj/s1600/north-korean-cyber-war.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi61dCpgMM98sj2FlJu8-bQMCbiF85FNHuv7qS-bHeC09fuG2WHspm9I5_INGdVDZKQZAkP1mEfvBKkI222nlz_heZeEcn1kz3ceNE77Hs-JbBpo91NPjgfjxzJ-hwn9MVGVU3Wl5pavhRj/s640/north-korean-cyber-war.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The North Korean's Pentium II based missile tech. Google blocks them from downloading more RAM.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The US, for their part, would like this to go away. One thing you've got to say for the Obama administration is that they play a smart game when it comes to conflict. Unlike Bush. They are a bunch of smart nerds who play a mean game of Civ II and they'd like a pragmatic result which would be cheap, non messy and non confrontational. This, ideally, would take the form of North Korea collapsing all by itself (something which can happen but will take time) and is itself a risky gambit because it seems all of this North Korean belligerence is driven by internal pressure among the country's elites sensing the end of the gravy train. The problem with further appeasement and stand off soft pressure is that it is likely to lead to a shooting war anyway.<br />
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This war is starting to enter the realm of possibility and it may be time to grab the popcorn folks.<br />
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Just don't microwave it yet. I'm still not <i>feeling</i> this war. The North Koreans do self preservation pretty well and if the shooting starts it will only be because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation on their part. The failure of their society and the internal pressure release valving among their elites is pushing Kim Jong Un, the young neophyte, into crazy territory and that's the kind of mistake failed states make. The bubble you're in distorts the image of the outside reality to the point where pulling a trigger becomes a viable release. If they fire a missile at the wrong place it'll be up there with Gallipoli or, more pertinently, Mac Arthur's failure to properly assess the DPRK's intentions when they invaded the South in 1950 and the Chinese human wave follow up across the Yalu River that hammered the US 8th Army that November.<br />
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Of course, if the trigger gets pulled, this war will be over very quickly. Nothing I've <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-would-actual-shooting-war-on-korean.html" target="_blank">said before about this war changes</a>. The DPRK, despite the media reports on active troop numbers will crumble faster than Saddam's forces in Gulf War I. All that crappy Warsaw Pact era equipment will evaporate to precision weaponry in days and counter battery fire from the South will pin point and neutralize NK artillery north of Seoul pretty damn fast. The only costly part would be having to occupy and take Pyongyang because who wants it?<br />
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Again, it's all a matter of just how much damage Seoul is willing to take in the initial bombardment.<br />
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The real question I heard somebody raise a while back is the moral issue that North Korea presents.<br />
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Remember that argument, often made, that if the Allies really knew (which they did) about the Nazi concentration camps, why didn't they try to do something about it? There are plenty of examples of prison break missions in WWII, like say <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Jericho" target="_blank">Operation Jericho</a>, and the question often gets asked as to why the Allies didn't try something similar when it came to the death camps. Sure, there are truckloads of reasons why that wouldn't have been a sound military operation but military history is a fickle beast prone to hindsight.<br />
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And yet in North Korea right now you have all the conditions present for pre emptive war that were not present when the US air dropped a few trillion into Iraq. If Western democracy and specifically the US and UK want to hold true to the 21st century "bring democracy to the oppressed peoples" narrative they themselves established, then the fair question is, "where will you find a better candidate?" Of course, being realistic, that just means that TV talk and total media saturation is just high penetration bullshit. We already know why not. Still, if the world had principles (if it ever had), 'pre emptive war' would make sense outside of Middle East deserts.<br />
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1) Remove an aggressive, unstable, proven nuclear armed state from a strategic region.<br />
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North Korea sure checks the box on this. Right now, Iran is being sanctioned to hell by everybody and they don't even have a capable warhead. Meanwhile in North Korea everyone is handling those assholes with kid gloves. Sure, China needs to give the go ahead but they weren't too excited about Iraq either. The reason this is not happening is because they've got nothing anybody wants and the cold hard facts of conflict are that nobody goes to war for free; they go to war for resources.<br />
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2) Get rid of an evil regime and bring "democracy" to the oppressed people. (The moral imperative).<br />
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North Korea has death camps. North Korea has slave labor. North Korea is like Saddam Hussein's Iraq on bath salts. And yet nobody gives a shit all of a sudden. Why? Probably it's down to strategic resources, China's proximity and Pacific Theater strategic concerns but let's face, when you cut through the bullshit of war and war's alarms, intervention on the Korean peninsula still fails the cost benefit analysis.<br />
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3) The aftermath of North Korea's 'liberation' would not be pretty. Especially if delivered via foreign weaponry. That's 25 million people switching hard and fast to the 21st century. It'd be on par with teleporting a bunch of Mayflower Pilgrims to Times Square in 2013. It's going to look like hell multiplied by Jesus divided by where the fuck am I?<br />
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It's not gangnam style.<br />
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It's chaos.<br />
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And nobody wants to pay that price.<br />
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Yet.<br />
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-84046938392929587422013-01-31T13:27:00.000-08:002013-02-05T13:58:06.802-08:00Mali: The French go to the desert.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4x218pCwFK9bCtk9AYkSJvCfGlM__ghZDdb2_NC4LUBjRtqmJXwxmFvfPyV9ll1iPUBlKQGo4TO3BpSQBJ-yyM2ZdVPqVcSBtKP8YJWsQhAMv72Vssm1MuipQvE4-NKYtbqUdg0L2fb7r/s1600/french-jets-mali-450x299.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4x218pCwFK9bCtk9AYkSJvCfGlM__ghZDdb2_NC4LUBjRtqmJXwxmFvfPyV9ll1iPUBlKQGo4TO3BpSQBJ-yyM2ZdVPqVcSBtKP8YJWsQhAMv72Vssm1MuipQvE4-NKYtbqUdg0L2fb7r/s640/french-jets-mali-450x299.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">It's always time to break out the popcorn when the French go to war.</span><br />
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The French intervention in Mali, Operation Serval, isn't exactly a shocker since the French can be pretty touchy when it comes to what goes down in their former colonies. True, the French can be pretty touchy about just about everything but foreign deserts they used to own get them extra twitchy. Especially since their former Saharan colony in Mali is engaged in one of those shitty Islamic civil wars where the bad guys are threatening the official French friendly government. It's one of those typical post colonial African wars we've been seeing a lot of lately. As usual, the bad guys want to turn the country into some shitty Sharia theocracy and re enact that monkey bar training video Western media roll out every time they want to remind you how easily you could die on the bus to work if the designated scary people get their hands on some ungoverned desert real estate.</div>
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The new French President, Francois Hollande, decided to intervene militarily which is seen as a ballsy move for a liberal and buys him street cred with a French population feeling decidedly small on a world that has become decidedly large since the heady days of Napoleon's 'whiff of grapeshot'. Sure, the French bombed Gadaffi with British and American help but Mali is their baby and a war they can win all by themselves. Yes, Obama will probably throw some drones into the mix to help things along but the French winning a war will be a self esteem boost and help with the new American strategy of letting their allies clean up their own messes for a change.</div>
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In truth, Afghanistan has taught the US the lessons of imperial over reach and how protracted campaigns, even against goat herders, have a tendency to bankrupt your treasury. So it's time to put on the training wheels and see if the French can deal with the crazies in the desert all by themselves. There are good reasons the French are touchy about Mali. The one thing about civil wars in Africa is that they have this nasty habit of spreading into neighboring countries due to the arbitrary lines the Euros drew on Africa when they were chopping it up for fun and profit. One neighboring country is Niger, and that's currently number one on the French list of favorite former colonies.</div>
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Why?<br />
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Because Niger is France's main supplier of uranium, that pesky yellow cake the Bush Administration lied about when they needed access to Iraq's oilfields. Uranium is basically what keeps the lights on in France and nuke reactors provide 75% of Gallic electricity generation; electricity they also export to neighboring countries for serious bank. Any disruption in supply and the French get further exposed to the big fear of every developed economy in the 21st Century; buying energy on world markets that are sure to get increasingly pricey as we strip mine the planet frantically in search of more juice.<br />
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Right now, the French have retaken all the key objectives in northern Mali but that's the easy part. Warfare these days is boring as hell because the results are so predictable. How can a bunch of guys in pick up trucks with AKs possibly go up against Mirage jets, attack choppers and trained troops? They'll just run away even if it means postponing the rendezvous with the 72 virgins in the after life. The ability of these people to hold ground is non existent and with all that empty space out there, it's just as easy to run away for a while and see how much money the "invaders" want to burn holding on to their newly acquired desert. The current plan includes a UN and African force (ECOWAS) coming in after the French scatter the bad guys so everyone can share the price tag.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQx2djPiMahr-GKrcoaOJa2HxfEutsk5H1cXZjjiDhH3czf6ucHdcK8HB1qatX1oFAgtZs31wVLnOKpdK92Wo5e4jJuGKpVLMlkCIUi9Zl7-0SIzU-82d8MfeOBYXnZ9gDqOzwWLm9fGDK/s1600/Northern_Mali_conflict.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="608" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQx2djPiMahr-GKrcoaOJa2HxfEutsk5H1cXZjjiDhH3czf6ucHdcK8HB1qatX1oFAgtZs31wVLnOKpdK92Wo5e4jJuGKpVLMlkCIUi9Zl7-0SIzU-82d8MfeOBYXnZ9gDqOzwWLm9fGDK/s640/Northern_Mali_conflict.svg.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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One of the main rebel groupings fall under the banner of the <i>Ansar Dine</i>. They're just another bunch of wannabe al-Qaeda's who drive around in Toyota pick up trucks sporting slightly rusty Warsaw Pact surplus small arms (RPGs, DShK 12.7mm and the usual plethora of AK variants) and want to impose strict Sharia law on every poor fuck with a camel. This means chopping off kids hands for stealing an apple, stoning women who flash their ankle and getting rich off unsecured mineral wealth if given a chance. If you're a poor guy in Africa who can handle himself in a scrap it's not a bad career choice considering the alternatives are tending goats, tending camels or hitting up Bono for a handout.<br />
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By far my favorite outfit in the Mali desert are the Tuareg warriors.<br />
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They are pretty badass fighters. They're one of those old nomadic Saharan tribes who never had much use for civilization and preferred wandering the desert and discovering cool new interesting stuff like water. Then, when African nations gained independence from the colonials in the 1960s, the Tuareg found their open ranges suddenly chopped up into nation states; nation states that didn't fancy free peoples wandering across their bit of desert. The Tuareg are indigenous to Mali, Niger, bits of Algeria, Burkina Faso and even African behemoth Nigeria. They fought the French with swords v machine guns in the early 1900s and that didn't work out well so the Tuaregs were forced into treaties that chopped up their roaming grounds. Most recently, Gaddafi hired them as mercenaries (or private contractors if you prefer contemporary nomenclature) for $1000 per day which approaches Blackwater or Halliburton payscales. One side effect of their involvement in Libya was that they got to loot Gaddafi's armories when the smoke cleared and sailed through Niger and Algeria's porous borders to Northern Mali in 4x4s flush with some nice Warsaw Pact weaponry. They've been selling this to the Islamic sky god believers and making some nice bank on the spoils of Gaddafi's defeat.<br />
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All this desert warfare got me thinking of the state of the planet in the 21st Century. It's falling rapidly into three distinct camps. </div>
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<ol>
<li>The technologically advanced but mature economies of the West lumbered with debt.</li>
<li>The rapidly developing Asian economies armed with cheap labor craving a bigger piece of the pie.</li>
<li>The backward theocracies in the Middle East and Africa who just happen to be sitting on the energy reserves the other two need. </li>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Number one is the old school West; modern, advanced tech nations that have grown fat since the industrial revolution delivered the wonders of the light bulb, the flushing toilet and the laptop. They conquered everywhere and have been sitting pretty since the 19th century. True, they raped the earth to do this but there are side benefits like free education, pensions and welfare states. Trouble is, all this stuff costs money and that's getting increasingly hard to generate on a planet getting smaller by the second. There just isn't much real estate left to exploit to fund the relatively easy lives of the population back home.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"> The Asian economies, on the other hand, are working with hive like determination to get back into the game. With huge populations that'll work for cheap, the West thought it'd be a good idea to outsource manufacturing so everyone could have a cheap car and a flat screen. It was basically a way of lowering prices for stressed consumers in the West, a sort of cultural welfare program that worked out well in the 1990s and 2000s but now, the beanstalk has grown huge into a proverbial behemoth and China may become the dominant power on the planet by 2030. </span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"> The third grouping is all that mineral and energy wealth of the Middle East and Africa. The problem is that people happen to live on top of it. Angry people. One of the side benefits of dirt cheap manufacturing is that technology has become so cheap, even poor people can afford it. That means every mud hut in North Africa and the Middle East has a satellite dish where they get to see the fruits of the modern consumer dystopia beamed into their living space. It's a bit of a culture shock for feudal medieval desert dwellers with strict laws on what you can eat and fuck. They get to see what their lands have been raped for and what they're missing out on. This causes some kind of critical self examination where they get to see the emptiness of living under Imams where they have to obey laws written by some Dark Age goat herder who said women have to dress in black tents, nobody can have sex just for the fun of it and you're not allowed to drink either, even if to wash the pain.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"> How do you wash away the pain of hundreds of years of oppression and strict theocracy?</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"> Blow shit up.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"> </span> Blowing up the rich assholes in the West with all their fancy tech goods is a fallback remedy when your god says you can't get some love from the woman dressed in a tent living in a tent in the village down the way. The Amenas gas complex hostage crisis in Algeria is just the latest example of this. The 'Islamic extremists' in the desert are liable to strike easy but strategic energy hubs because these are the things the rich fucks in the West need from their desert; things they don't really need since they're never gonna see the profits anyway. Those profits go to the local strongman who rules the country with an iron fist and Western weaponry. Oil and gas fund those Western lifestyles they see on TV, selling stupid shit desert dwellers never even knew they wanted. The answer is Jihad. Jihad in the name of an exploited history. Jihad because my god is better than your god. Jihad because I'm stuck in a desert fapping to reruns of Baywatch on my cheap Chinese made TV.</div>
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You know what the worst thing about these three distinct global camps is?</div>
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None of them are the "good guys".</div>
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That's the thing about the 21st Century.<br />
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Everybody gets to be an asshole.<br />
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It's not like the previous century when the fascist bad guys were so obviously bad and easy to define. These days war is entertainment. The major powers get to fight in foreign places far from their doorsteps and we watch because the explosions make for good TV. But what happens when the desert dust ups draw a major clash and switch from proxy warfare to direct conflict between major powers? Right now the world is a Real Time Strategy game with three distinct races. The tech advanced West with expensive units but soft populations, the economic East with millions of infantry and hard, hive mind populations and then the fanatical "terrorists" in the desert with asymmetric tactics and vast energy reserves.<br />
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I'd play that RTS game.<br />
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If it were a game.<br />
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-37377282181507506332012-12-06T00:04:00.000-08:002012-12-07T23:09:43.892-08:00Syria: Will Assad go full chemical?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb-xu-LROqoMtNhGGVm1zbuT2Z2G-PkCg9z9xhwE0qcyWV3aaFMOiypYjWHvWcp4Ie5QGSTPwOYtI8p57aKiGqclJ7IjyYxuXhC_d8Ysx98LMbOtX8w9HdFIOVAzyqIGy3XRcfZzNz-vGZ/s1600/syria-chemical-weapons.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb-xu-LROqoMtNhGGVm1zbuT2Z2G-PkCg9z9xhwE0qcyWV3aaFMOiypYjWHvWcp4Ie5QGSTPwOYtI8p57aKiGqclJ7IjyYxuXhC_d8Ysx98LMbOtX8w9HdFIOVAzyqIGy3XRcfZzNz-vGZ/s640/syria-chemical-weapons.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Syrian Civil War just made headlines.</div>
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Why?</div>
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Because, according to Western media, Bashar al-Assad's regime is so desperate that it's threatening to bust out the chemical weaponry and watch the world burn. Death by chemicals is the kind of warfare that makes comfy consumer populations in the US, Europe and even in Russia and China squirm. Chemicals are destabilizing due to the simple horror aspect of their use. Nobody anywhere wants to die WWI trench style. Sure, the trenches of the Great War are far away in the popular imagination but mustard gas, that persistent, skin lesioning horror chemical remains in the collective memory of anybody who ever picked up a history book. Chemical weapon usage is a sure sign that the Assad regime in Syria is about to die without an exit strategy. When you load the bombers with chemical weapons you know you've gone full Tony Montana on the whole situation.</div>
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"Say hello to my little Sarin gas!"</div>
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Suddenly, the world is watching the war in Syria and every major power has a stake in the game.</div>
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Up to now, Russia and China have been blocking UN Security Council votes on intervention because all the major powers see Syria as a valuable pawn in the global energy chess game. The Middle East is ground zero and Damascus is the historic and spiritual gateway to the soul of Arabia.</div>
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Chemical Warfare is the kind of warfare that makes general populations shudder.</div>
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Sure, you could argue the case that it makes no difference how you die in a war. Death via explosives or via bullets or via sarin or mustard gas is all the same, right? You still end up dead so what's all the fuss about?</div>
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Actually, no.</div>
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Death by gas is cheating in the popular imagination. And there is wisdom in this.</div>
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War can be fair. It is possible to kill people opposed to you via exploded metal projectiles aimed down a tight cylinder. You can also kill people via a 2000lb GBU laser guided bomb that turns your target's whole body into red meat spray. But killing by chemical is the worst kind of war by every human calculation. It's deadly and most of all, it's indiscriminate.</div>
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There's the rub.</div>
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Discrimination.</div>
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At least an artillery strike is aimed at something, right?</div>
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Chemical weapons seep across the land. They infect the body. Even if you survive, the cancer may appear later in your kid. Chemical warfare is deemed terrible by our thinking because, while we can all agree that we hate the enemy and want to kill him, chemicals in our bloodstream shouldn't destroy our children. Just because I want to kill that opposing guy with the AK doesn't mean I want to gun down his kid too. Nearly every human who ever lived loved their kid. Even though it sounds crazy, even war can have rules. </div>
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And chemical weapons break those rules. Chemical weapons break the rules by wiping out everyone everywhere. They're like messy nukes. At least nukes have the courtesy of vaporizing those at ground zero and are so lethal they cancel out their own use on the mutually assured destruction (MAD) paradigm. Chemical weapons are different. You can sneak them in there and maybe get away with using them. Not of course against the US or her allies. Current US policy on chem usage by foreign entities runs like this:<br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> "<span style="background-color: white; text-align: start;">The current US retaliation policy, known as calculated ambiguity, warns potential adversaries that they can expect an “overwhelming and devastating” response if they use chemical or biological weapons (CBW) against the United States or its allies".</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: start;"> In other words, you get Nagasakied if you try any "funny stuff".</span></span><br />
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If Bashar al Assad is loading his fighter bombers with chems than you know he knows he's already dead.</div>
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There is no exit strategy for him and his family.He's trapped, beaten and probably delusional.</div>
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If chemical weapons are used then it's basically an invitation to NATO to walk into Syria and grab some amazing free Middle East real estate. Russia and China will wilt and withdraw support for Assad at the UN Security Council because once you go chemical on your population you've gone full Saddam and nobody anywhere will feel any sympathy for you.<br />
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Assad has a selection of gases at his disposal but they mainly come down to just two. Mustard gas sure is one ugly compound. First deployed in WWI, it likes to pool and remain skin melting in small depressions in terrain for days. The other choice, Sarin gas, makes your muscles fail on contact and you usually die of suffocation because you can't draw air into your lungs a few minutes after exposure.<br />
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While Syria doesn't have much oil, for Western war planners, it has another quality that's hard to sell on the world market.</div>
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Prestige.</div>
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Arabian prestige.</div>
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Damascus is the spiritual heart of the Arab world. Mecca and Medina might be nice but Damascus is the home of the real philosophers of Arabia. Damascus had street lighting while the cities of Europe were black in the Dark Ages. The neighboring Egyptians see themselves as the home of Arabian Sunni identity and their revolution is significant. But the fall of Damascus to new powers will be the most significant war in the Middle East since T.E. Lawrence captured Aqaba.</div>
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If Assad uses chemical weapons against his own population he will instantly lose Russian and Chinese support. It'd be a suicide move. That's why I think this whole chemical story in Western media is overblown. One of those fed to the media via "unnamed government officials" that stinks of CIA subterfuge. Still, I've always marveled at the existence of Assad. He's the son of a famed father, Hafez al Assad who would've known how to deal with Arab Spring rebellions early. His dad would have killed every protester in the street and called them communists or whatever word was necessary to gain support from a major power. Arab dictators who don't play ball in the energy chess game get designated as the enemy. Arab dictators who play ball in the game get called friends.</div>
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That's why king Abdullah in Saudi Arabia is seen as a philantropist and major US ally and Colonel Gaddafi went down fighting with pistols like a badass from the back of a pick up truck. Life and death in the desert is a precarious occupation. It's always been that way. The difference these days is that the world economy depends on the stuff that's buried under Arabian feet. </div>
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Either Assad is totally desperate and ready to press the red button that will extinguish his whole dynasty Gaddafi style, or, he's already been told by the Russians that he's gone too far and there is no retirement option in a villa on the Black Sea in his future.</div>
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Anyone who's ever played a hand of poker knows that you double down on the bluff when your credit line just got cut off. Maybe someone will believe that crazy look in your eye. So you push all your chips into the middle of the table. That's Assad right now. Chemical weaponry is a way of breaking the bank.</div>
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Personally, I can't believe Assad is serious here.</div>
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Using chemical weapons would be like Hitler biting into a cyanide pill.</div>
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It's certain death multiplied by the destruction of your country.</div>
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But you know what?</div>
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Wounded animals are more dangerous. Dictators are prone to shitty decision making when confined to a bunker. When you know you're about to die and you've got nothing else to lose, sometimes it's fun to just sit back and set the ignition fuse on the firework.<br />
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-56917855362991958702012-11-08T09:44:00.002-08:002013-02-07T19:52:12.691-08:00China v Japan. Are the Senkaku Islands worth a war?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLa1WNq-lVZJaGakoBhS0vyiGRALxViV1Uh_rC5tJMZpng5Jd6yTznLbUjlVea3hrHiw4eaC3n3vWt6vSCzskU6BcV2efylT9bomqod4Ey_nNgq6s9uuS4cauKqd2kHSvTExeP4Sy5jYpN/s1600/sunway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLa1WNq-lVZJaGakoBhS0vyiGRALxViV1Uh_rC5tJMZpng5Jd6yTznLbUjlVea3hrHiw4eaC3n3vWt6vSCzskU6BcV2efylT9bomqod4Ey_nNgq6s9uuS4cauKqd2kHSvTExeP4Sy5jYpN/s640/sunway.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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China versus Japan sure would be a fun war.</div>
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Fun, of course, being a relative term.</div>
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For those who like watching the world burn, sure, it'd be an interesting fireworks display. At least until cheap Asian labor dried up, killing the world economy and suddenly Walmart has no cheap shit left to sell to <i>subsistence</i> consumers in the US. The world economy right now is married to the idea of backwater peasants, recently liberated from subsistence rice growing, getting subsumed into the <i>brave new world</i> of working for peanuts in concrete warehouses that fill western economies with cheap plastic shit and flashy tech goods. China, the ultimate population behemoth in history, has been rising fast ever since they ditched Maoism and embraced the idea that Marxism, while a nice idea in theory, doesn't work because of a fundamental law in evolutionary science:</div>
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We're all greedy self serving assholes and nature seems to like it that way.<br />
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China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon. There are many reasons why and all of them involve history. Even a quick scan of Chinese history tells you that the burgeoning new middle class in China (they bought more new cars in 2011 than the US) are casting a harsh eye on their own history and noticing how they've been screwed over by outside forces (white men) since at least the 19th century. Worse still, for western war planners, the Chinese people are angry <i>and</i> they've got money. It's a critical difference from colonial times. Poor natives complaining about life is par for the course when the Euros ran their empires. But when consumers complain these days, and that's what 300 million Chinese are today, consumers; then the whole equation is radically changed.</div>
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Chinese history makes Chinese people very angry.</div>
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And who would blame them? I mean, the 19th century British won a series of Opium Wars against the Chinese where they basically turned a huge segment of the Chinese fighting age population into junkies just so they could pay for sought after Asian goods in smack instead of silver. The demand for Chinese goods in Europe was so high that Euro treasuries were being depleted of precious metals so the colonials instigated the polar reverse of today's drug war. Heroin tastes nice. It makes life better... for a while. It alters human behavior. Seeing this, the British devised a "new plan". Let's let empire commerce dump tonnes of Opium into China, the country we seek to control. It'll render their population useless. Sometimes history gets surreal. Other times, it's hard to think of a modern equivalent outside of an alien invasion. Either way, try finding the awkward truth of a reverse drug war in your average high school history curriculum.</div>
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The Japanese, on the other hand, are experiencing a 21st century existential crisis.</div>
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Their economy is stagnant, electronics can be made cheaply elsewhere (unlike when they were kings of the business in the 70s and 80s), and they've got 1.4 billion people just across the water who hate their guts for the shit they pulled in Nanking in 1937. The aging Japanese population cannot process this. In truth, the Japanese have never come to terms with their actions in WWII, at least not to the satisfaction of the Chinese. The mayor of Tokyo, a neocon Dick Cheney on crack, worships at a tomb where at least twelve Jap generals buried there have been convicted of "war crimes". The Japanese sure have a sketchy record when it comes to their memory of WWII. Whereas the Germans have been dealing with guilt for the past 70 years and attempting to make recompense for it, the Japanese are classic Basil Fawlty about the whole thing and "don't mention the war".</div>
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The Chinese want an apology for Nanking.</div>
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Unfortunately, the Japanese do apologies the same way they do unconditional surrender. </div>
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That is, you have to detonate <i>more than one</i> nuclear weapon over a major population center before they'll consider the merits of your argument.</div>
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For the rest of us, if the China v Japan conflict ever entered the shooting phase (ostensibly over these shitty Senkaku islands but really because both sides hate each other's guts), so many escalation events present that it'd be hard to see an end that doesn't involve a nuclear exchange. It'd be like India v Pakistan on bath salts. It'd screw the world economy so hard it'd make Israel's bunker busting <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2010/11/my-favourite-war-that-hasnt-happened_08.html" target="_blank">dream strike</a> on Iran's nuke sites about as interesting to the global public as Bono talking about Africa at a U2 concert.</div>
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That's why China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon.</div>
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Because nukes.</div>
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Yeah, I'm one of these crazy fucks who is a big fan of nuclear warheads. Let's face it, the cost benefit analysis since 1945's "Little Boy" airburst over Hiroshima has been positive once you take into account the conventional war alternatives. Nukes are probably the best thing to happen to humanity since penicillin although it's not really a fair comparison because nukes have probably saved more lives. Without nukes, the Red Army would have stormed through the Fulda Gap and turned Western Europe into a mega death zone. Without nukes, there would've been no Cold War and instead a constantly warm endless Orwellian nightmare Eurasia v Americana conflict where war is continuous but never winnable. Nuclear weapons have this habit of cutting through the bullshit by defining the limits of human madness. The idea that "we all get to die" makes nukes the greatest peace keeping weapons ever invented. Sure, penicillin saved a lot of 19th century top hatted sport fuckers from syphilis but Western Europe under Stalin's policies would have wiped out the global economy.</div>
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And that's a lot of dead people. Everywhere.</div>
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Advantage nukes.</div>
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Nukes rule out any immediate China v Japan war because Japan falls under the Pacific hegemony of the US nuclear umbrella. We're still a decade away from the time when the real noose tightens on the world economy (unsustainably high oil prices) and both China and Japan are majorly dependent on seaborne delivery of spice for right now. This makes them nervous. Without an Iraq in your back yard, you tend to seek out every oil deposit you can. Supposedly, the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands have offshore oil and gas deposits and that's when you know things are approaching a crisis point.</div>
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Countries start fighting for the leftover scraps in the barrel.<br />
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Even deep sea short term possible oil deposits are worth disputing. But not worth <i>setting the world on fire for</i>.<br />
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How would this war play out if it did happen?</div>
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Apparently, the US was concerned enough about the saber rattling that they dispatched the USS George Washington carrier group to the South China Sea two weeks ago just to remind all parties to keep their shit on the down low. Even though the Japanese navy could handle itself versus China's medium tech surface fleet and its as yet not ready for primetime second hand <a href="http://wartard.blogspot.com/2011/04/taiwan-liberator-shi-lang-chinas-new.html" target="_blank">Russian carrier</a>, that doesn't mean we can laugh at the Chinese Navy.<br />
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We're talking, at least at the outset, a very interesting naval war not seen in the Pacific since Midway.<br />
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Right now I see a rerun of the 1982 Falklands War with one side landing a token troop contingent on an island and declaring an exclusion zone (200km) around it while the UN shits major bricks and scrambles emergency sessions to prevent WWIII. Meanwhile, the naval blockade could be challenged because forum warriors are screaming for blood in both countries. It's funny how civilians ramp up fast to high level assholes once the shooting starts and then ramp down to cowering failures once the local 7-11 runs out of Tootsie Rolls. War works that way throughout time. It's a combination of trading self worth versus self preservation and sometimes it;s hard to predict a winner because people are prepared to die for stupid shit. Either way, the US dispatches three more carrier groups to the South China Sea to try to contain the new internet sensation: Cuban Missile Crisis Part II: Revenge of the Radiation.<br />
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Sure, this is all hypothetical as hell but nobody can deny this war is "fun" to think about.<br />
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Even though Japan might be superior in surface vessel tech the Chinese wouldn't be out of the battle by any account. Their sub surface fleet of diesel submarines is large. Sure, you might giggle at the mention of 'diesel' subs (conjuring up images of sweaty WWII Germans running around claustrophobic pipe laden interiors) but don't be so quick to discount the effectiveness of old 20th century piston and battery designs just because advanced nations have gone nuclear on sub fleets. The Soviet K-19 story is an object lesson in how these designs are dodgy even if everybody these days says technicians sleeping in close proximity to a nuclear reactor is about as harmful as licking the door of your microwave oven. Diesel subs still have a hand in the game especially when you consider the continuing stealthiness of modern diesel designs. Just ask the Germans (master sub engineers), Israelis, Australians, or, in this case, the Chinese. The Chinese managed to surface one diesel submarine undetected in the middle of a USN carrier group in exercises off Taiwan in 2006. The Chinese have a lot of these babies ranging from the useless to the effective but modern sonar technology has shown that even the AEGIS system is vulnerable.<br />
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My favorite thing about this whole hypothetical war that won't be happening for at least 20 years is the cold eye it casts on naval power itself. Modern technology means 19th/20th century naval projection is losing its luster in the 21st century. Every admiral worth his salt these days knows naval warfare is a quaint idea left over from hardier times before today's missile technology. Naval warfare is great for force projection versus lower tech nations but for industrialized nation v industrialized nation, missile tech is so sophisticated these days that surface ships are really just large, floating, meat filled shipping containers, easy to hit hold overs from a different century when having a Dreadnought added inches to your nation's penis.<br />
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The Russians and Chinese have expended years of R&D on satellite guided ways to sink USN carriers but that doesn't mean a carrier group off your shore is not force projection. A US carrier group offshore still means you're probably fucked. But force application these days is not just military. Global 'soft' pressure is economic in the post WWII era of nukes.<br />
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These days it's economic war with a smiley face where the plebs glued to the TV watch where the multi national cola company that owns the politicians mixes feel good moments on TV and some irrigation project in Africa into their advertising campaign and suddenly the thirsty people safely far away benefit from you buying the correct sugar water. It's a different kind of warfare these days. It's you versus humanity. You versus everything you're supposed to want. The dream consumertopia amounts to the same thing. Either way, it's a lot of people working their asses off while the elite host parties in Monte Carlo and you're not invited.<br />
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It's like the Roman Empire but with i-Phones.<br />
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But that doesn't make this hypothetical war any less interesting.<br />
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For one thing, Japans's version of the AEGIS cruiser/destroyer system, the <i>Kongo</i> series based on the US <i>Arleigh Burke</i> class, would go up against China's lower tech vessels spamming anti ship missiles and, if their subs can get close enough, torpedoes. Sure, the Chinese Navy is kinda funny with all their reverse engineered stuff, their dodgy stealth fighter but the newer generation Chinese destroyers do have modern radar and missiles from France and Russia. The fun part is how all these missile trading systems would hold up under the classic "fog of war" environment. Sure, in multi country war-games these designs have been billed as effective, intercepting at best X% [classified] of the incoming but all it takes is 1% of the incoming to get through and what happens if it lands in the nuke belly of a carrier?<br />
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For fun, let's say two Japanese cruisers go down to Chinese torps because they strayed into the hypothetical "exclusion zone". It'd be like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Belgrano" target="_blank">General Belgrano</a> incident on steroids. Instantly, the Japanese would be seeking to enact that clause of their mutual defense treaty with the US where the US comes to their aid in return for them not having a nuke arsenal and maintaining a "defensive" army. God, you gotta love us humans and our bullshit. No country on earth has so far gathered their forces under an "Offense Department"which sure must be some kind of divine comedy for the aliens... if they're watching as we squirm around the petri dish.<br />
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There is no such thing as a defensive sub. They are primary attack weapons and the Chinese have a lot of them so yeah, the naval war will be fun. This is the point where the war must die because the next stage is trading missiles at 'military installations'. At this point world trade has shut down, the world is in emergency session and everybody with half a brain is stocking up on canned goods.<br />
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It's a crazy world.<br />
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Full of deceit, stupidity, genius, luck, madness and sometimes a little common sense. For right now, the Senkaku Island dispute stays irrelevant. Because we're not that desperate.<br />
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Yet.</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com112tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-77687754399235990992012-08-21T09:50:00.001-07:002012-12-27T21:28:07.256-08:00Syria: Fantasy war in the desert!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqqI9Qr5d2JlZtzMZdYoQExrqn8RVWI88rLxzogE6wOepwO-IWFCKQ3b4z-Q3D8BjZIBtGqhHikQDTYrIsxNOnW58BVbJEYEnegBcVkSdJlPFZSsr-VFihFb4oPFKnRc57sVCc9Z_b82Gs/s1600/Chaos-in-Syria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqqI9Qr5d2JlZtzMZdYoQExrqn8RVWI88rLxzogE6wOepwO-IWFCKQ3b4z-Q3D8BjZIBtGqhHikQDTYrIsxNOnW58BVbJEYEnegBcVkSdJlPFZSsr-VFihFb4oPFKnRc57sVCc9Z_b82Gs/s640/Chaos-in-Syria.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Anyone watching the Syrian Civil War right now through the eyes of Western media is like some guy who figures he knows what WWII was all about because he just watched <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>. Sure, it's a fun movie but it does fall a bit short on the historical accuracy front. Kind of like world popular media today. The Syrian narrative being presented on the nightly news is of brave rebel fighters battling oppressive dictator Assad whose forces go around shelling civilians and murdering babies. And while some of that is certainly true, the real devil lies in the details and omissions; truth being the first casualty of any war since the first shot gets fired. Hardcore war in the heart of the Middle East is complex and prone to lies especially these days when all the major powers are scrambling for the last easily tappable energy reserves on the planet; but that kind of big picture view never fits into a soundbite even if a foreign public wants to hear it.<br />
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Which they don't.<br />
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Still, for those who happen to care, the Syrian conflict is damn compelling in its wider implications for regional and global security in what's sure to be a very messy 21st century.<br />
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Right now, the battle for Aleppo (Syria's largest city and the home of the business elites) is being billed as the make or break battle for Syria. It's hard to know what defector talk to believe but all of this final stand "talk" makes me think the Free Syrian Army are playing right into Assad's hands here. Let's face it, the major strengths of any guerrilla army since Spartacus are hit and run type tactics and not all out decisive battles against the enemy's frontline "teeth" divisions. Major battles involving light infantry versus heavy infantry, tanks and air power, even in urban areas, is not the kind of warfare that puts guerrilla troops to their best use. In fact, 'decisive' confrontations play mainly to the strengths of Assad's army where it's easier for him to motivate his government troops by telling them they're embarking on a big final push against the rebels. The alternative, years of attrition type warfare with no end in sight, is the kind of protracted war your troops may not think worth the paycheck.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhStVLdeYglJUOpefidHpmSrj-DEoHThxX-Gr9vEU0bBTYgVv4wfXzYE9CvweK40LPh70RB8z2K2_iYaOsyZBMKgWUWEDCzWBeLoqe6rkmAEm6_O8zC_W_3JXcHOGYBU-tyjMJmW65GLCjV/s1600/Syria+Photoshop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhStVLdeYglJUOpefidHpmSrj-DEoHThxX-Gr9vEU0bBTYgVv4wfXzYE9CvweK40LPh70RB8z2K2_iYaOsyZBMKgWUWEDCzWBeLoqe6rkmAEm6_O8zC_W_3JXcHOGYBU-tyjMJmW65GLCjV/s640/Syria+Photoshop.jpg" width="608" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The first casualty of the Syrian War is Photoshop!</td></tr>
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Another thing that's confusing is the Western media's constant insistence that the rebels are outmanned and outgunned. Sure, they're outgunned barring the occasional stolen T-72 or BMP but outmanned they certainly are not. If one fifth of the unemployed young men that make up 50% of Syria's angry youth can get their hands on an AK (and when has it ever been difficult to get your hands on an AK anywhere in the Middle East) that's a healthy dose of rebel fighters sending 7.62mm the Syrian Army's way. And that's not even taking into account all that Saudi money supplying <i>covert</i> arms through Lebanon and the plethora of foreign special forces running around <i>observing </i>the burgeoning mess. But nope, this Western portrayal of the rebels as oppressed freedom fighters fits with the whole Arab Spring narrative the West likes to push whenever there's energy in the vicinity. <i>Democracy</i> and all that other funny talk.<br />
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These days, democracy is just a feel good word the suits on TV say when they want you to know who the good guys are.<br />
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Democracy is likely to deliver up another theocracy like what's happening in Egypt in the aftermath of Mubarak. Let's face it, these rebel fighters (and they seem to come from all kinds of sketchy demographics including the <i>Al-Qaeda </i>franchise) are no saints. Setting up shop in dense urban areas among the civilian population, drawing artillery and rocket fire and then posting the inevitable parade of corpses on YouTube isn't exactly a Mother Teresa maneuver. Even she knew where to draw the line when shaking people down. Making the enemy look bad is one thing but hiding behind civilians and chucking corpses in front of news cameras is quite another. It's not exactly the honorable tactic of the <i>good guys</i>.<br />
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Ooops! I just made myself spew beer all over my keyboard. Yup, I just said 'honorable' and 'war' in the same sentence. Perhaps it's just the romantic in me, hoping for an <i>honorable </i>desert war like maybe Afrika Korps v 8th Army in North Africa in 1942. But that kind of major army v army action on sandy terrain isn't going to be happening anytime soon in our desert proxy war timeframe. Unless of course if something really fun happens like Turkey invades Syria. That right there my friends is my secret little fantasy war in the desert that'll never happen. I'll indulge more in that later.<br />
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Right now, if the FSA are serious about winning this thing they should stick to the tried and true tactics of guerilla warfare that have proven solid since time immemorial, that is, interdicting the enemy's logistics and supply routes with hit and run raids and ambushes. Instead, they seem determined to duke it out with frontline armored divisions using urban areas as cover. Also there's that old Mao maxim about controlling the countryside to control the cities but maybe that doesn't work so well when the countryside is a desert. In guerrilla warfare there's always the Sun Tzu tactic of trading land for time, a tried and true tenet of guerrilla warfare and time would seem to be on the rebel's side here because one thing seems for sure, the longer this war goes on, the weaker the Assad regime becomes. And then there's the whole atrocity factor that's playing in the FSA's favor when civilians start dying. That might be the whole rebel plan in the first place. Sure, it's a dirty tactic but clean went out the Mosque door a long time ago. It's a play straight from the old Vietnam playbook where the side with the big guns like the US (the Syrians in this case) drops an errant bomb that wipes out 40 women and children in some bamboo hut village and suddenly you've just recruited 100 peasant rice farmers into the Vietcong. I figure the FSA strategy here is that by fighting in the cities they can provoke Assad to naturally play to his strengths, artillery and heavy armor, thus racking up plenty of civilian casualties that'll swell the FSA with new recruits.<br />
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It's dirty war and the dirtier it gets the bigger the FSA becomes.<br />
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Maybe that's the whole crazy plan.<br />
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The FSA could not hold the pockets they established in Damascus a few weeks back but Aleppo may be a juicier target to set up shop in. For one thing, Aleppo is primarily made up of Sunni middle class businessmen who have supported Assad up to now but only because he's left them and their cash alone. With the war reaching Syria's richest city it's a pretty good sign that the tacit agreement between Assad's Alawite leadership and the Sunni business class is cracking. It's hard to say for sure what the Sunnis think now that Aleppo is on fire because polling a populace under shellfire ain't easy. With the FSA forcing Assad to level his business districts this means more Sunni refugees fleeing and more Sunnis recruited into the FSA with the added bonus of a small chance of foreign intervention. The Saudi's are already pumping millions into the FSA and there's also the Turkish factor which brings me to my favorite fantasy about this whole war.<br />
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When the Syrians shot down that Turkish F-4 Phantom a few weeks back my war-dar started registering blips right off the scale and I got excited about the possibility of a regional war in the desert. But that's just the Rommel in me. I just got high on the possibilities for mechanized warfare in the desert not seen since El Alamein. Turkey invades Syria. That right there would make for an <i>honorable</i> tank duel in the desert.<br />
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Truth is, who isn't tired of shitty heavy civilian casualty warfare where well equipped armies go up against guys with AKs? I'm talking the multitude of proxy resource conflicts where a bunch of goat herders go up against Predator Drones and find that their early warning radar (goats) are pretty shitty at warning early because no notifications get bleated when the Hellfire comes down the chimney pipe of the mud hut and wipes out four generations of Pashtun or Yemenis or Iraqis. Yeah, those bearded dudes in the graveyard of empires are resilient but that doesn't make the US mission in Afghanistan entertaining. Hell, you can IED a US convoy these days and not even make the nightly news. Let's face it, wars are pretty dull right now. Even the <i>mainstream</i> media doesn't give a shit. You know you've either lost or won a war when a war stops being news. For the US, Afghanistan is kind of like watching your dog take a shit on someone's lawn. Do you walk away quickly and not give a fuck or stand there looking responsible while acting like you're going to pick up the turd with a Costco bag? That's the US mission in Afghanistan right now. Maintaining the illusion of responsibility. Sure, that war has always been ambiguous and mostly awful. But you know what would be less awful war-wise right now?</div>
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Watching two equally matched modern nations going head to head in a wider regional war.</div>
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That right there would at least be entertaining in the current sea of shitty heavy civilian casualty wars. Battles like Fallujah, Misrata and Aleppo suck because one side has all the heavy weapons. But proxy resource wars are par for the course these days as the planet gets increasingly overcrowded. With supply chains long, food resources subject to the vicissitudes of climate change and oil production pretty much maxed out, it's only a matter of time before the major powers clash directly for what's left. That's the scary future that makes this squabble in the desert a minor preliminary salvo.</div>
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For the Turks, losing an F-4 Phantom wasn't exactly a major loss militarily. Sure, it's a bummer the pilot didn't bail out but Phantom's are basically Vietnam era flying double decker buses with the maneuverability of a cement truck in rush hour traffic. That Turk pilot never saw it coming and was probably sucker punched by one of Syria's Russian supplied S-300 SAMs (one reason NATO doesn't fancy a rerun of Libya over Syria). One thing F-4s always had going for them even in Vietnam, despite their lack of cannon was a pair of serious get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here engines that allowed the Phantom to run from any engagement it didn't fancy the odds in. To my mind, the Turkish F-4 incursion into Syrian airspace was a move designed to get the Syrians to turn their air defense radars on so they could be pinpointed for NATO airstrikes later on in the event Assad doesn't fall in a timely manner.</div>
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Every time I think of Turks involved in war my mind automatically reverts to the Siege of Constantinople in 1453 when some Byzantine idiot forgot to lock the <i>Kerkoporta Gate</i> and allowed a bunch of Turks in to raise a flag on the battlements that sowed panic in the defenders; a ploy that ultimately led to the end of the last twinkle in the old Roman Empire's eye. Sure, the possibility of a Turkish invasion of Syria is practically zero but I'm not going to let that burst my bubble right now because I'm salivating on the idea of tank on tank action in open desert terrain which is a hell of a lot more fun than a bunch of rebels smoking hashish in a kebab joint getting shelled. Syria has a major beef against the Turks for water rights on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Those pesky Turks have big plans for hydroelectric power on those rivers and that pretty much sucks for the Syrians and Iraqis downstream who need that water for agriculture. The Turk's have a problem too with Syrian refugees spilling over their border possibly further destabilizing a region where their own ethnic Kurds are liable to stir up trouble. A limited invasion into Syria to create a refugee "buffer zone" might not be out of the question. It would also be a nice time for the Turks to redraw their southern border with Syria which is mountainous and difficult to defend. Still, it's unclear if they'd make such a ballsy move. Politicians in Turkey are wary of anything that might increase military prestige in a country where the military likes to throw its weight around the political arena.<br />
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But this war is fun to think about.<br />
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The tank on tank action would pit Turkey's modern arsenal of German supplied Leapord 1s and 2A4s against Syria's aging but more numerous Soviet era T-72s, T-62Ms and believe it or not, T-55s (the most produced tank in history) but completely out of date. That'd make for a fun <i>turkey shoot</i> in the desert. Add in total Turk air superiority by way of US supplied F-16s and naval dominance off the coast and this war that'll never happen becomes even less fantastic. In fact, it'd get boring pretty damn fast. I see a rerun of the Yom Kippur War in the Golan Heights where less than 40 Israeli tanks held off over 500 Syrian tanks. Maybe the Israelis threatened to bust out a nuke, maybe they didn't, either way, the Syrians retreated.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFB0afq5rDkDEbdNNsIAROyPh5UaDPNdjxFcOXvbjZQEP9nwSiSV7vctbqPkFZzU9WaktRWSpdMjbC52utbrrZjKeH8vsn411Xhyphenhyphen3gYWtF2Z67P6C0c9KBWTJpsDjBUIjR6feVZsQOH49_/s1600/rebel+held+areas+of+syria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFB0afq5rDkDEbdNNsIAROyPh5UaDPNdjxFcOXvbjZQEP9nwSiSV7vctbqPkFZzU9WaktRWSpdMjbC52utbrrZjKeH8vsn411Xhyphenhyphen3gYWtF2Z67P6C0c9KBWTJpsDjBUIjR6feVZsQOH49_/s640/rebel+held+areas+of+syria.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rebel held areas of Syria are primarily border regions for easy resupply.</td></tr>
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Bashar al Assad's days in power are surely numbered. Ever take a look at the guy? He's like that tall awkward friendless guy that joined your second grade class whose dad showed up with lollipops for everyone in the hopes that you might like his dick son. Just because dad was alpha and bought off or murdered the competition doesn't mean those genes automatically pass down to your jizz. Maybe there was a predominance of pussies on mom's side of the family that emasculated junior but either way, this war wouldn't be happening if dad was still in charge. One thing is for sure, I don't see Assad Junior going out like badass Gadaffi in some high speed car chase pistol in hand. Nope, Junior will probably opt for some beachfront property on the Black Sea in Russia. If he's lucky.<br />
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Even if Assad bails with a few billion in pocket change what'll be left in Syria is anybody's guess. Very likely we'll be talking partition along old sectarian lines with Alawites, Druze, Kurds and Sunni Muslims looking to draw lines on prospective new homelands. The aftermath could be just as ugly as the war itself. Meanwhile, the major powers all see Syria as part of the global energy chess game. Damascus, the gateway to the Middle East. It certainly was in T.E. Lawrence's day when the British and Arabs recaptured it from the Ottomans during WWI. But these days the prizes have shifted further south and east and the Wahhabis (who even Lawrence knew were insane in 1917) were sitting on the real prize on the sun fried lava of the Saudi peninsula<br />
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Meanwhile, Syria turns into the kind of war zone with a level of destruction not seen in Syria since the crusaders holed up in their citadels and tried to fend off Saladins armies. Even the ancient fortress of Krak des Chevaliers has not been spared, shelled by the Syrian army because some rebels rightly assumed it'd be a good place to hole up. The Arabs sure built wonderful castles back then so much so the crusaders copied their designs. Even Saladin could not break the crusaders at that fortress but then again, Saladin wasn't packing 155mm howitzers. There are reports from all around the country too that ancient treasure sites and museums have been looted so, along with Iraq's Mesopotamian treasures, all will likely wind up on the black market somewhere. Perhaps even venerable Saladin's green silk tomb cover bestowed by Kaiser Wilhelm could end up in some <i>nouveau riche</i> Chinese billionaire's ritzy apartment overlooking the endless grey Beijing smog.<br />
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What a sad end to history.</div>
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That, I fear, is a pretty good template for how the 21st century is plays out. Us dumb apes begin to feed on ourselves and our past in search of simpler times, times before the resources got scarce and the planet got too small.</div>
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Along with Iraq and Libya, Syria is the last of the Middle East's low hanging fruit to be subsumed by larger empires. From here on in, things get hotter and direct competition by proxy war gets harder to control. Meanwhile, countries devolve into surveillance and police states as governments try to suppress populations who decry increasing resources dedicated to grabbing the last strategic energy, food and freshwater reserves. Exciting times for those who like watching the world burn.</div>
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Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese love to stymy any Western inspired <i>peace</i> efforts at the UN because bringing Syria under the Western sphere of influence through some brokered peace deal that would get rid of Assad would be just a little too disconcerting now that the West has successfully locked down Iraq's energy reserves and taken Gadaffi out of the picture.</div>
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The Iranians too, who've provided plenty of bumbling covert assistance to Assad would see the last gate in the Middle East fall. They're smart enough to know that if the Syria question gets settled, then the battle lines in the Middle East will be clearly and inexorably drawn.<br />
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Battlefield Iran.</div>
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The Iranians, despite their crazy theocracy, are smart enough to know where the real cross hairs will aim and they'll have to wonder if they will be the next domino to fall.</div>
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-73888345215998959502012-06-13T18:52:00.003-07:002023-05-05T07:01:13.274-07:00Arctic Melt: The New Cold War<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This article was <a href="http://www.kingstribune.com/current-issue/1515-21st-century-resource-war-and-the-race-for-the-arctic" target="_blank">first published in King's Tribune</a>.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18px;"> There isn't going to be a shooting war for Arctic resources just yet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Major powers like the the US, China and Russia are still waiting for the Arctic ice to hurry up and melt away. And that process is moving along at a pace that makes the average environmentalist want to sign yet another petition during Nat Geo Channel commercial breaks and bong hits. The Arctic is said to have up to 25% of the world’s oil and gas sitting like Inca gold under all that pesky ice and, with current global oil production maxed out and prices rising fast, the North Pole sure has the potential to be proxy resource war central in the increasingly tense 21<sup>st</sup> century.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> In 2007, the Russians planted a titanium flag on the seabed under the polar ice which was a pretty ballsy move ripped straight out of the 16<sup>th</sup> century when European powers had a habit of sailing to foreign shores and planting flags on valuable shit they didn’t own. That flag move was designed by Putin to tell Canada, the US, Denmark and Norway (who all claim a piece of the Arctic action) that the Russian claim theoretically extends all the way to the Pole. Naturally, this pissed off everyone and sets the stage for a Cold War Part II later on this century.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Another fun thing about the melting ice is the profitable new shipping routes that are opening up. The famed “Northeast Passage” is a handy shortcut from Europe to Asia that bypasses the Suez Canal and becomes ice-free every summer. Lately, that shipping lane along the northern Russian coast is becoming increasingly viable even in winter. The Russians like this because it would mean cheaper export routes for Russian oil tankers to burgeoning energy hungry soon-to-be superpower, China. The Russians recently exported 60,000 tons of oil products to China via northern Siberia on the vessel, <i>Perseverance</i>. A trial voyage for sure, but a whole lot cheaper than building a pipeline to China.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Meanwhile, the US is engaged in proxy resource war in Middle East deserts and sniffing at regime change in Iran and the opening of the third largest oil field on the planet to sleazy Western oil companies. The Russians and Chinese are playing a longer game here on the global energy chessboard. While blocking concerted action at the UN against Iran and Syria (stymying Western attempts at energy field access in Persia), they see a future multi polar world of more balanced rival powers (as the US loses it singular super power perch) and the ending of US hegemony on global energy supply.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> This sure is an interesting time if you’re interested in how the 21<sup>st</sup> century will play out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18px;"> The retreating Arctic ice shelf is putting a smaller and much ignored part of the planet into the global spotlight. Ground zero for global resource scrambles in the Arctic right now is Greenland. Nominally a Danish ‘protectorate’ (code speak for Copenhagen owns all your shit), the US has been floating the idea of ‘independence’ for that Euro centric island. This would be handy for US oil and mining corporations to skirt pesky European environmental laws that say you have to clean up the mess after you’re done strip mining. Preliminary reports from the soggy permafrost in Greenland reveal uranium, diamonds, gold and rare earth metals packed under the retreating glaciers and those rare earths are in high demand too since 90% of existing supply comes from a single mine in China. Those rare earths get crammed into plasma TVs and i-Pads and the Chinese have been restricting exports, which are subtle opening salvos in the proxy resource wars that will dominate the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The Greenlanders recently retracted laws governing the digging up of radioactive elements on their soil and decided spilling gamma waves into igloos for cash was a deal they could live with. This has attracted the usual swarm of sleazy corporations looking for mining rights. Fun thing is, these corps represent US, Russian and Chinese mining interests with a host of smaller countries like Canada, Australia, Norway and Finland looking for a piece of the action too. Everyone wants access to the last non-raped piece of real estate on the planet. Sure, the polar bears won’t like it but let’s face it; polar bears are assholes. They'll just have to make do with shitty zoo swimming pools and dancing for fat fucks on cellphone vids.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Will there be shooting over these resources anytime soon?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Nope.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Climate change still has some work to do to melt away those last bits of polar habitat that'll make the region viable for free-for-all energy and commodity extraction. But if we fast-forward to say 2020, shit starts to get interesting. By then, it'll have fully sunken in to us dumb upright apes that economic growth on a planet is finite and tied to energy supply. Nobody's going to be particularly happy about this. Especially in rich countries where we will get to learn the hard way that the plastic bottle that contains the Coca Cola is actually worth more in real terms than the shitty sugar water inside. When that truth comes down the pipe, along with $200 barrel oil, food price increases and shittier lives, it's going to be somebody's fault. In Western countries, that'll probably mean the Chinese and Russians.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> That's where the seeds of future resource wars will get sown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Wars always start with angry people. People who get angry blowing their paychecks on fuel and food and not having enough left over for a new plasma screen. This has been going on ever since some hunter-gatherer tribe killed the last mammoth in the valley and pissed off all the other tribes who also needed new fur coats too. Truth is, despite the dystopian sci fi consumertopia we're all living in today, not too much has changed. We've got satellites and i-phones but we're still dumb upright apes when it comes to killing people who try to take our shit. Killing each other for resources is a proven strategy and civilization is just a thin veneer pasted on top of four million years of naked raw survival. When lower living standards peel that veneer away, shit will get interesting fast. And by interesting I mean war. Thing is, future resource wars are going to go global fast because every tribe is going to want a piece of the last mammoth left in the valley.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Will the Arctic be worth fighting over?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Sure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt;"> The Russians have already started beefing up their Northern Fleet and, I shit you not, have </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;">begun building a prototype floating nuclear power station to power undersea drilling. That’s sure to make environmentalists shit bricks. The</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> Norwegians just inked a deal with the US for 52 new F-35 multi role stealth fighters which is a $10.5 billion order and gigantic when you consider Norway’s tiny population. It reeks of a ballsy ambition to stake a claim for some Polar resources but then that’s typical of the Nordics. If the shooting ever starts they’ll be looking at a Finn style rerun of the Winter War in 1939 when the tiny Finns bloodied the Red Army’s nose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> The Canadians too are gearing up for some possible pew-pew.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> In October, the Canadian Navy announced a $25 billion order for 23 new combat vessels of various types aimed at patrolling the Northwest passage, shipping lanes in the Canadian Arctic that are opening up to maritime trade again due to melting ice. Canada has been running Arctic military exercises every year since 2006 (Operation Nanook) designed to warn the Russkis to keep their filthy titanium flags off Canada’s sea floor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> The US of course is well positioned to defend any Arctic claim. In addition to a defense budget larger than the next ten countries combined, the US has 50 nuclear attack subs that have been lurking under the Arctic ice for decades and it’s hard to see them being over whelmed in any future resource war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> But here’s where we come to the fun part.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> In an increasingly nuclear-armed world, are limited resource wars even possible without escalating to full on WWIII take-us-back-to-the-Stone Age action? That sure is an interesting question for the 21<sup>st</sup> century and</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> the fun thing about nukes themselves. They're really only useful when they never get used. In fact, nukes are the greatest <i>peace keeping weapons</i> ever invented.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> Global power since WWII has been primarily economic and “soft”. Having aircraft carriers and stealth bombers is useful but not game winning when you consider that once a nuclear armed power starts losing a conventional war it’s time to press the big red button of win and sort out WWIV with sticks and stones. Nukes were the mutually assured destruction glue that kept the Cold War from ever turning into a shooting contest. The US and Russia fought through proxies and kept warfare on the down low. But will this paradigm endure once oil production peaks and prices increase to the point where the era of cheap energy ends?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> Right now nukes mean there can be no winner and that has made leaders realize that it is better to trade than conquer. Global communication means there are no ideological divisions right now; every nation is money grabbing capitalist pig and that works pretty well for everything but the planet. As planet conditions change and make human populations more costly to sustain, it sure raises some interesting questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> Do we get to stage where desperation creeps in?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> Sometime later this century, a major power may have to make a move on some energy, water, or sea lane because failing to do so would result in a collapse of the state anyway; so war and nuke escalation events further down the road are not impossible the way they are now. Resource shortages later this century are the type of things that result in paradigm shifts. Sure, China right now is happy exporting plastic shit, Russia is having a lulz fest squeezing European natural gas supply and the Americans are having a field day running around ME deserts securing future oil supply. But this kind of status quo has a sell by date and that's coming pretty damn soon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"> It's a scary recipe for the future. In fact, it’s so scary I think I’ll go sign some useless petitions and take a bong hit.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-73523277630956726342012-05-04T11:39:00.002-07:002012-12-20T20:58:59.211-08:00Man wakes up from decade long coma and figures he's living in an Orwellian dystopia... asks if he can be a Viking instead.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDq5sjrhIit3ss5FbqjWEIUDExtLxDKBfAqDbmwkbj3dP80JGktAFqjqOENtIGUwMPlk_8aded1W-RZlONFC-5W5x31P8KV-bqWtKM2FjhxspZszlZWDQpOtWkzMnBvGa1osBrhUg-4R47/s1600/banksycf4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDq5sjrhIit3ss5FbqjWEIUDExtLxDKBfAqDbmwkbj3dP80JGktAFqjqOENtIGUwMPlk_8aded1W-RZlONFC-5W5x31P8KV-bqWtKM2FjhxspZszlZWDQpOtWkzMnBvGa1osBrhUg-4R47/s400/banksycf4.jpg" width="301" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Taking a look around at how scary the world is getting makes me
wonder what it'd be like to wake up after a decade-long coma and take a fresh
look at the surveillance society that's been coming down the pipe since the
9/11 attacks baptized the new century in crazy. Let's say it's 1999 again and
you dropped some windowpane, watched <i>The
Matrix,</i> felt like you just witnessed your autobiography and then jumped off the
roof of your apartment to see if you are indeed "the one". Bad idea...
seemed logical at the time. Anyway, next thing you know you wake up in a
hospital bed and everyone around you looks like they stuck with the<i> blue pill</i> because they're
wearing that ‘bad test result’ face as they tell you it's 2012 and you just
skipped the whole terror decade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
All of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
Catching up on world history since 1999 would be like reading some
dystopian future sci-fi novel by the likes of Orwell or Dick except you're
reading The New York Times and it's news and all real. Just a quick scan of
early 21st century history would have you longing for the '90s and the happy
days of OJ trials and sex scandals in the Oval Office where the corporate
spokesman in the suit messes up the intern's dress and not the entire direction
of the new century. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The century got defined by 9/11 right from the start and the future was always going to
suck if you were a fan of privacy and keeping your shit on the down low. For a
coma victim nursing a migraine in 2012, the 9/11 attacks sure would look like
some stunt ripped out of one of the shittier Bond movies complete with the
perpetrator being an evil villain millionaire living in a cave lair. Sure, it'd
sound like the dumbest cliché-ridden plot ever if you tried to sell it to
Paramount, but the new reality has a habit of running with the absurd.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqpI4FarIDx__NlkNRkD2tnH3-t7ZP5QwOSivIi1Mhtl6PZUNqvboYMgRSblH8CV3bIKQzA-URFi9pwZ2uo9NaWyI_PlQ9-OGsc1vG59PsVwPtHYBr-v4uU7nr_wqvCf8TUZVTMWtLtLrR/s1600/originalfortress-hoopa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqpI4FarIDx__NlkNRkD2tnH3-t7ZP5QwOSivIi1Mhtl6PZUNqvboYMgRSblH8CV3bIKQzA-URFi9pwZ2uo9NaWyI_PlQ9-OGsc1vG59PsVwPtHYBr-v4uU7nr_wqvCf8TUZVTMWtLtLrR/s640/originalfortress-hoopa.jpg" width="568" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bond villain lair or actual news story? This graphic actually appeared in US media in 2001.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Quite apart from the very bad idea of a land war in Afghanistan and the necessary resource grab in
the Mesopotamian desert, the greatest legacy of the 9/11attacks for the United States will be the
terrorism-industrial-complex that sprung up horribly like an erection at a
nudist funeral. Just nine days after the attacks the largest merger in US
government history occurred when 17 agencies from the Coast Guard to the cops
merged into the colossal Ingsoc that is the Department of Homeland Security.
9/11 was seen as a "failure to communicate and connect the dots" on
the part of everyone with a badge and a 9mm, so centralization and
intelligence sharing in a single giant database was seen as the answer. That,
and a few billion dollars to corporations and private contractors to design and run the software<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To keep us safe.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
US intelligence agencies have always relied on technology to invent their
way out of a knowledge hole. Since WWII the NSA and CIA have excelled in the areas
of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imaging Intelligence (IMINT), which is
your run of the mill but tech heavy wire-tapping, code-breaking and picture-taking of your "secret" new missile launch facility. From the
U2 spy plane to the SR-71 Blackbird and on to satellites that can read your
golf ball from space, IMINT has never been a problem for the skilled genius of US technology. The weak spot has
always been Human Intelligence (HUMINT). That's a harder pitch for the US
to swing at as it involves spies and agents and assets operating behind enemy lines speaking
and acting like natives. The Israelis are the kings of this simply by the
demographics of the Jewish diaspora. There are native Jews in many countries
and if Mossad wants to know where a nuke scientist's mistress lives, fresh
HUMINT is an encrypted email away. During the Cold War, the US relied on Israel
for HUMINT in exchange for US SIGINT and IMINT. Post 9/11, mass surveillance is
seen by the US as the way to make up for their HUMINT deficiencies, a weakness
the US sees as leading directly to 9/11. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
In the new sci-fi dystopia, the police state starts with the cop on
patrol who is expected to "feed the system" with suspicious stuff
that might flag someone as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">terrorist</i>.
The problem is, Main Street USA isn't exactly a target-rich environment for
towel-headed mullahs waving AKs and yelling "Allah Ackbar" every time the local 7/11 runs out of pita bread . In order to
justify the billions being spent, the DHS must continually see 'enemies'
everywhere. The enemy morphs into the citizenry itself, be it activist,
protester or anyone with a beef against the prevailing narrative. The primary
weapon of the average cop is the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), which
includes activities like taking pictures, reading maps, driving while looking
out the window a lot; pretty much anything about you the average donut guzzler
doesn't like. Cop cars are being equipped now with license plate scanners that
not only read every infraction of every passing car but also relay this info along with GPS data to
the centralized database; something that makes every unpaid parking ticket a
shit brick offense. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In the sci-fi dystopia, everyone is a suspect.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
It's no surprise that most of the headline-making F.B.I. busts of terror
plots in the US are perpetrated by a bunch of dumb fuck wannabe al-Qaedas who
end up sleepwalking into an F.B.I.-produced trap, like stars in some twisted episode of MTV's Punk'd where the G-men
supply fake explosives, blasting caps and a party van while co-opting some dip shit
Bin Laden fan to drive into the middle of the sting. The mark gets zip ties instead of cameras and there's no explosion except for the
thud of the perp's skull against the cell wall of a SuperMax as he trys to
figure out why he trusted the 'knowledgeable chemical guy' at Home Depot who turned out to be a bomb tech narc. After you get showcased nabbed, it's a simple matter for the F.B.I. to go on Fox News and tell all
their viewers how they are winning the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">war
on a noun</i>. Just recently, we learned the evil doers (still operating under the al-Qaeda franchise) are hiding their 'secret plans' for mayhem inside porn images which is the funniest thing I've heard since that idiot tried to blow up a plane with his boxer shorts.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> What ever happened to the <i>smart</i> terrorists?</span></div>
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There are currently 72 DHS "fusion centers" planted all around
the US collating and indexing every bit of HUMINT about everyone, trying to
sniff out who might want to hijack a cruise ship, blow up a bridge or chuck a
flaming shit bomb into an Olive Garden. There's been a ten-year building boom
going on around Washington D.C. too as drab-looking four-story buildings sprout
up like whack a moles. Beneath these nondescript Cold War commie-looking structures
are up to ten subterranean floors of who knows what. Nobody knows how much
they've cost – including the US government – because everything is a semi
state/ corporate hybrid of melded privatization and black hole money pit
contracts hidden under a rug of secrecy in the name of national
security. The monitoring of information (SIGINT) between the US, UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence)" target="_blank"><span style="color: #002acf;">(ECHELON)</span> </a>is
well known but the US seems to be hitting it out of the park when it comes to
total communications monitoring of its population. This of course comes in
the form of the recently reported super structure under construction in the
Utah desert, the Stellar Wind server farm that will basically be 'downloading'
the entire Internet every second and sniffing through yottabytes<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=111395980737563171" name="GoBack"></a>
of our emails and faxes and cellphone GPS data searching for the bad guy with a
plane ticket to New York and a pipe bomb up his hole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In
the sci-fi dystopia, everyone is a suspect. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
And your privacy is the price of your security because <i>what do you have to hide?</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK1oZD4kfyzhTvr9mI9QTtjIUyg24gF4K3zWwaM5Lz5_TvlueoU2-TFu5HFjNFM0NZvlsx-kE1mUmg5AtxKX5xLBhaxk0OAObadD3LPcqC1gbsiZtocpCqluWkQ_1z2yGDfP9RtKPRgI-U/s1600/Echelon.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK1oZD4kfyzhTvr9mI9QTtjIUyg24gF4K3zWwaM5Lz5_TvlueoU2-TFu5HFjNFM0NZvlsx-kE1mUmg5AtxKX5xLBhaxk0OAObadD3LPcqC1gbsiZtocpCqluWkQ_1z2yGDfP9RtKPRgI-U/s400/Echelon.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sometimes paranoia is just a heightened state of awareness...man.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes you need to be a decade out of the loop to truly see the extent
of what's gone down. History happens gradually and things only gain
context when historians hammer events into a coherent narrative usually long
after the fact. Meaning emerges further down the road. For instance, a
Weimar Republic German in a similar coma in say 1926 who woke up a decade later
would wonder why so many of his countrymen were buying into the crazy
bullshit of the angry guy with the mustache. First it was a beer
hall putsch followed by goose-stepping militarism and a power-grab later, the
Reichstag burned down mysteriously and in no time the German Army were partying on
the Avenue des Champs-Élysées thinking "this is awesome but possibly a
bad move in the long run if shit doesn't play out well". The nature of history is that it unfolds gradually
enough that nobody notices the emergent narrative because they're too busy <i>living in it</i>. By the time the story
emerges in context, Army Group South is surrounded by Zhukov at Stalingrad and the Wehrmacht is screwed.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The one thing about the mass surveillance society we're building that
would fry Orwell's brain is the nature of information in the Internet age. Sure
most governments these days see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i>
as an operational tech manual but we're not just living in an age when
just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Brother</i> is watching; we
ourselves are watching each other with the intense fascination of zoo chimps
fapping at the banana delivery man. The camera culture is so prevalent and
everyone's face so buried in a cellphone that nobody knows what's going on in
his or her immediate vicinity. Except of course when there's a car wreck and then
everyone's phone is uploading footage to YouTube or, if it's really awesome and
messy, LiveLeak.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
Part of the sci-fi dystopia is the willingness of the population t<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">o be watched</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
To be a minor celebrity in the ongoing movie of your own life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I
was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">voyeuring</i> on some old
school friends via Facebook the other day and came across this guy I remember
from first grade who used to shit his pants in class just because it pissed off
the teacher and made everyone laugh. I remember the teacher washing his underwear
and me watching it steaming dry on the radiator as he waved his little cock at
the teacher when she turned her back. It was pretty funny when you were seven.
Yeah, I went to Catholic school. Anyway, according to Facebook that guy's a
plumber now (shit makes sense) and just got a divorce from a wife who took the
kids and left him for some douche bag. I know all this because he thought it
would be cool to post all this on his Facebook wall and not keep his shit on
the down low. It's a law enforcement wet dream. No need for gum shoe field
agents anymore, just Google the perp and see where he hangs out and who his
friends are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
Orwell's mind would be blown.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2FhmOymZXy6Kr6KFOn08gdbobSaiDMqhxksddW5gkrVm64ewLYs4zuKCVDjgTrUviiqymrIqe66eJ73pH2l84jpEOPGyVrAwXaM9iPQiU5E4VP2puxyLh8xN4uJkothE8E1uw7AHk_7S/s1600/Facebook+Updates.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2FhmOymZXy6Kr6KFOn08gdbobSaiDMqhxksddW5gkrVm64ewLYs4zuKCVDjgTrUviiqymrIqe66eJ73pH2l84jpEOPGyVrAwXaM9iPQiU5E4VP2puxyLh8xN4uJkothE8E1uw7AHk_7S/s320/Facebook+Updates.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Except the cop investigating you or the prospective<br />
employer checking to see if you're an asshole.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"> </span> Next up to the party: Police Department unmanned aerial drones circling
24hrs a day over every city. Now that's pure sci-fi. It's also handy if you can
control the narrative too. That hasn't been a problem so far. The thing with
wars these days is that the corporate oligarchy are getting really fucking good
at bullshitting. The technology of bullshit is now so ubiquitous that the mass
media totality of Internet, TV, cellphones and 24hr news cycles make it easy to
beam a consensus reality into the ether of our brave new world. We are all
feeder antennae jacking into a whitewash of total information where everything
is up for debate. There's no need to hide anything anymore because anything could be
true <i>because you read it on the Internet</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">
Case in point: Libya. All the interventionist narrative needed was a bad
guy (Gaddafi); some oil, a possible Euro refugee crisis and some media story
about Gaddafi firing back at the guys trying to overthrow him. Basically, he
pulled a Kent State with attack choppers; nothing the US wouldn't have
done if OWS protesters brought something a little harder-hitting to the party
than sleeping bags and a bong and started wrecking some Bentleys. NATO
precision bombed Gaddafi's armor and the country got handed over to a rag tag
bunch of rebels willing to write favorable oil deals with sleazy Western oil
corps. All this went down live on TV without a single sign-waving long hair on
a street anywhere. That's when you know you've got serious media penetration
and total control of the narrative.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Holy shit! What a time to be alive, right?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">
That old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times,"
sure applies today.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I've often wondered what it'd be like to live in other eras. Personally, I've always fancied a stint as a Viking, you know, sailing around with your
mates in a bad ass longship, raping and pillaging in a consequence-free environment but I was born
too late for this and missed out on all that awesome Valhalla action. And it looks like I was born too soon to
hyperdrive around the galaxy on seed ships discovering strange new worlds
and... and raping and pillaging them in a consequence-free environment.
Christ, if we humans ever advance to the level of a space-faring species the
galaxy is screwed. It'll never happen though because we upright apes will self destruct before we get that far. The technological adolescence hurdle of "fission before fusion" is like a universal failsafe to keep the riff-raff out of the star gate club. Any civ must prove they can live 100 years with nukes and not red button each other back to the Stone Age before they gain access to free energy and 'warp drive'. Right now, we ain't gonna be passing that test.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let's face it, we just might be the scary bad guys in our own dystopian sci-fi
novel that leaves us all wondering...<br />
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Who wrote this book?<br />
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Everyone is <i>suspect.</i><br />
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-88960998711080455922012-03-16T09:20:00.019-07:002012-11-21T19:43:38.750-08:00Kony 2012: African Civil War meets the Internet wristband brigade.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdiIwjpgttBggM3-l1Bc1nPwp8q5BPkxsH1MBfKoyGXiNEcXPDcgIGBy1Ci2sSR4izGWKO91LORdd1i1dU3WodeC6LZ1pW_QJrT3B4wuKbstRKFwP26W63bdaj8cyuTfQXll19nhDPY8Mf/s1600/JOHNN.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdiIwjpgttBggM3-l1Bc1nPwp8q5BPkxsH1MBfKoyGXiNEcXPDcgIGBy1Ci2sSR4izGWKO91LORdd1i1dU3WodeC6LZ1pW_QJrT3B4wuKbstRKFwP26W63bdaj8cyuTfQXll19nhDPY8Mf/s640/JOHNN.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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African civil wars have always scored high on the atrocity scale.</div>
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It turns out the Internet got wise to this last week by way of a slick YouTube video called Kony 2012 detailing the sick fuck exploits of Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda in the 2000s. Supposedly, this vid was produced to "raise awareness" of the child soldier armies that have been running around Africa ever since some warlord realized 12 year olds can be just as useful with an AK as any adult. </div>
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The whole "raising awareness" business always makes me cringe. Most times it's an excuse for rich people and celebrities to throw $2000 a plate charity parties to highlight another hell hole African war zone while photographers snap pictures of which star is banging the latest supermodel. Sure, a cursory Google search would deliver all the awareness of African misery you could wave a wristband and gift bag at, but if there's one thing the kids in our sci fi dystopia respond to these days, it's some slick ass marketing campaign. Before I hate all over the Kony 2012 vid, let's first take a look at the depression inducing mess that is post colonial sub Saharan Africa; specifically Uganda. </div>
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Uganda is one damn scary place even by African standards.</div>
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After the British left with the embassy furniture in 1962, the usual struggle for power erupted amongst the natives in newly independent Uganda. This resulted in a series of military coups with a slew of shady guys in suits vying for control using election fraud, torture and sudden disappearances as the standard set of banana republic political tools. Still, it wasn't until Idi Amin seized power in 1971 that Uganda's body count started aiming for a respectable high score. Amin managed to do away with 300,000 people in his eight year rule. After eight years, he'd pissed off enough people to get himself invaded by Ugandan exiles with the help of neighboring Tanzania. Of course, victories over dictators in Africa are rarely reasons to celebrate and usually just the prelude to more screwed up shit further down the road.<br />
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This was certainly the case for Uganda in the 1980's. The current leader, Yoweri Museveni, has been in charge since 1986. A guerrilla fighter who knows his way around an AK, he fought Amin and also led the National Resistance Army in Uganda's Bush War from '81-'86 which was a power struggle against another warlord, Milton Obote, who'd held power after Idi Amin got exiled on the usual retirement plan for African dictators; Saudi Arabia. Museveni fit a suit well, didn't look too shabby on TV and quickly abandoned his Marxist ideals to gain support in the West. This got him a thumbs up from the World Bank and IMF who advocated the usual series of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">structural reforms </span>to the Ugandan economy which ensured Western business could continue getting cheap shit out of yet another <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">independent </span>post colonial African hell hole. Museveni is no stranger to human rights abuses either and, just like Joseph Kony, his National Resistance Army have used child soldiers, forcibly displaced thousands, burned villages and executed hundreds. Still, this is Africa we're talking about so no guy in a suit is going to have clean hands.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb17N-43wBCiq3lfnOXF3xsOfTi69qOMayziIw5wOw_HqG1kzoA5p_veBHcRQySnczg273xbWPefkKdl_3A0z7SOl4mDhukQ1D_-b5eChQDJovJ9w4SnB2O0-Aq8U25HY9cv71CGFUzyO6/s1600/Museveni-and-Gaddafi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb17N-43wBCiq3lfnOXF3xsOfTi69qOMayziIw5wOw_HqG1kzoA5p_veBHcRQySnczg273xbWPefkKdl_3A0z7SOl4mDhukQ1D_-b5eChQDJovJ9w4SnB2O0-Aq8U25HY9cv71CGFUzyO6/s400/Museveni-and-Gaddafi.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Museveni with fellow dictator Gaddafi</td></tr>
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So where does this Joseph Kony asshole fit into Ugandan history?<br />
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If Museveni gets a free pass from the international media on the whole war crimes front it's only because he comes up a saint compared to Kony. Kony is the kind of crazy fuck so far off reservation that even a Serbian couldn't make a decent torture porn flick about him because the sick fuck is just too sick for celluloid. If you want to understand Kony you have to take into account his people, the Acholi, a Sudanese tribe of which just over a million live in Northern Uganda. Discriminated against for years by the more <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">civilized</span> and prosperous elites in the south, the Acholi were pretty much used as cheap laborers by the British when Uganda was their protectorate. However, they proved themselves decent fighters and, after independence, made up a sizeable portion of the Ugandan army. Hoping to get a better deal and some respect, an Acholi general grabbed power in a military coup in 1985 but his reign lasted only six months and was toppled by current president Museveni. This set up a simmering low grade civil war by the Acholi against Museveni's rule that lasts to this day.<br />
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The Acholi are devout Christians, mainly Catholic and here is where we inject the crazy into an otherwise typical African power struggle. Once you bring religion into the equation, you know things are going to turn ugly fast. As soon as you infect your army with the mind virus that death is not real and that bullets, machetes and land mines don't kill you but send you to some paradise on the other side of existence, then you've pretty much got yourself an army of ruthless killers.<br />
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Kony's outfit, the Lord's Resistance Army, grew out of the ideas of Kony's batshit insane cousin Alice Lakwena and her Holy Spirit Movement. In 1987, she proclaimed herself a prophet and convinced a size able portion of the down on their luck Acholi that they could defeat Museveni by worshipping Jesus more and covering their bodies in nut oil that would act like some kind of divine Kevlar and protect them from bullets. Her followers were also taught never to take cover and never to retreat from battle which are pretty fearsome tactics for any army right up until they encounter a well emplaced heavy machine gun nest.<br />
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Still, emboldened by religious zeal, Lakwena's army scored some key victories and began to march south. Joseph Kony marched along with her duly noting the effective mixture of religion, AKs and bat shit insane. However, by 1988, the Holy Spirit Movement got their asses handed to them at the town of Jinja (when they ran up against actual heavy MGs), and Lakwena fled to Kenya. This pretty much left Kony in charge of a movement that morphed into the LRA. They laid low for a few years until the mid '90s when the LRA started receiving military support from the Sudanese who were pissed at Museveni's support for rebels in that country.<br />
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As they grew in strength, the LRA under Kony started flexing their muscles on the atrocity front. One of these was their policy of recruiting child soldiers. There's a dirty logic at work here and that is that child soldier armies are pretty fucking scary and effective. Once you ditch the morality of the whole thing, Kony, like a lot of African warlords, realized that a twelve year old can shoot an AK just as well as an adult can. Throw in a blank slate mind too young to have a conscience, some heroin, sprinkle in a little intimidation, convince the kids gunshot wounds send you on the express train to heaven and pretty soon you've got yourself a ruthless clone army of juvenile pint sized killers.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsWJIkzqIMBsljKZLI43IJfPQIRUtRhIAZKDLrbhONmbCWIrx_RikWq12I7584i6pEFjUPD2LMxYKVJozvj7DZsQzjlKoZfW2oHYzISwMhZT5QlabW2vvMYc6K4Tk0m2a_RDn4us0v68T-/s1600/child+soldiers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsWJIkzqIMBsljKZLI43IJfPQIRUtRhIAZKDLrbhONmbCWIrx_RikWq12I7584i6pEFjUPD2LMxYKVJozvj7DZsQzjlKoZfW2oHYzISwMhZT5QlabW2vvMYc6K4Tk0m2a_RDn4us0v68T-/s400/child+soldiers.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Under Kony's tutelage, the LRA became a massacre crew that cut a swathe through northern Uganda, killing and intimidating everyone, even the Acholi people themselves who came to be seen by Kony as decadent and not loving Jesus enough. In 2002, LRA members encountered a funeral procession of mourners carrying a dead guy. At gunpoint, they forced the mourners to boil and eat the dead guy and then shot them all for doing it. The LRA went from village to village in the 2000s, killing thousands and displacing many more. There are plenty of reports of cannibalism, medieval type torture and child rape.<br />
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It's hunter gatherer war like they've been fighting for millenia where you sneak up on the neighboring village, take out the sentries and then let the rape and pillage commence. You steal all the shit you need, usually livestock, the odd diesel generator, a DVD player and maybe some Hannah Montana jerk off material. Then you disappear back into the jungle laughing at Amnesty International's rage. It's dirty war. And it doesn't fit the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">clean</span> war paradigm of the West where the bad guys get cut to pieces by 20mm from a hovering Apache or a 2000lb GBU-24 cleanly obliterates some goat herder's shack and doesn't leave too many body parts for us to stress about.<br />
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Yeah, us Westerners like our killing long range and with minimal gore. That's why you've got to step way outside your comfort zone when dealing with wars fought on the cheap in Africa. Their kind of war is up close and personal and involves the kind of whites-of-their-eyes gore fest that hasn't been seen on Western battlefields since Agincourt. Hate and religion run deep in the Ugandan jungle. For a child soldier in Africa, a blank slate young mind gets acclimatized to the horror fast because there aren't many places to get treated for PTSD in the bush outside a bottle of vodka or stab of heroin.<br />
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The LRA has been hard to defeat too. Congo, Sudan and the Ugandan Army attempted to crush them in 2008 but even their combined efforts were unsuccessful. One problem is the LRA's mobility and their ability to cross national borders into neighboring countries all of which are as corrupt and suspicious of their neighbors as Uganda itself. The LRA are liable to attack when they're outside Uganda too, most recently in 2009 when they hacked up 300 in the Democratic Republic of Congo with machetes. They made off with eighty children, the boys as fighters and the girls as sex slaves.<br />
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And now Kony is an international celebrity.<br />
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The Kony 2012 vid on YouTube has made 100+ million viewers aware of just how ugly war in post colonial Africa can be. But the scary part about this simplified exercise in "raising awareness" is the elevation of Kony to a global pariah, the embodiment of evil warranting a military solution. What's scary is to what extent do millions of people on Facebook hitting the "Like" button translate into actual foreign policy?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaeNimilAjrKTQqPo5W2F-JxCfB2IFvLGNfoYLcwerwjlMAJsgY_nDHDT0jqrEENRySwDMWFsMLvG3vNN4pzzOeKIl_uDbsdgv8qGoxbz4EN7TKcxot_EjRkYBcWmkhTt1Q8ob9i9rpBTe/s1600/ca0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaeNimilAjrKTQqPo5W2F-JxCfB2IFvLGNfoYLcwerwjlMAJsgY_nDHDT0jqrEENRySwDMWFsMLvG3vNN4pzzOeKIl_uDbsdgv8qGoxbz4EN7TKcxot_EjRkYBcWmkhTt1Q8ob9i9rpBTe/s400/ca0.jpg" width="396" /></a></div>
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Am I saying do nothing?<br />
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Nope.<br />
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I'm saying something even worse. I'm saying there's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">nothing you can do</span>. That's a pretty radical mental adjustment to make but if you live on this planet long enough you get acclimatized to the fact that we humans on the whole are pretty shitty creatures. Once you accept this fact, things sure get a lot easier. Sure, mass media and consumerism have us locked in to this fake reality of happy breakfast kitchens selling us high fiber cereal so we can shit better, energy companies selling eco friendly offshore drilling rigs and hybrid cars that only need a little Mid East oil to function; and that's when you have to face the really ugly truth; all of our consumertopia is built on the rape and pillage of people and places at far corners of the world. Just what countries will do to secure their energy supplies most citizens prefer not to know. It's like pre packaged meat at the supermarket... nobody wants to know exactly how that turkey breast ended up neatly wrapped in plastic.<br />
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Truth is, nobody wants the 'naked lunch' moment where they actually examine what's on the end of their fork. Sure Joseph Kony is a bad guy. But there are many more in Africa just like him. General Butt Naked in Liberia during their civil war ate babies before battle. Now he's a street preacher, runs a mission and he's ever so sorry about the whole thing. He's PTSD free because his god has forgiven him. That right there is one of the most dangerous ideas ever that someone should make a video about. The Christian idea that you can commit any atrocity imaginable and be forgiven for it. But there's no Kony 2012 video assailing that far scarier idea, an idea that's gotten far more mileage in past wars than the warped actions of a single man in Africa.<br />
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Another dangerous idea of Kony 2012 is that the emotionally manipulated masses could actually succeed in having some military action conducted just so some sleazy politician can get re elected. Will simplistic explanations of long running wars become the future of foreign policy? Holy shit that's a scary idea! What'd be next, intervention in Syria and the declaration of a no fly zone because some well funded think tank runs a slick video on Assad's sleazy regime? If this Kony vid succeeds in getting Joseph Kony killed then that'll set a terrifying precedent. Crowd sourced intervention in foreign conflict launched by a bunch of ill informed YouTubers is the kind of thing that should make anyone with a passing interest in global conflict shit bricks.<br />
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The 21st century already has a whole host of proxy resource wars lined up.<br />
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Even Jesus would agree, we don't need any more.<br />
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War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111395980737563171.post-11968910701814297022012-02-20T04:06:00.001-08:002012-02-24T00:09:44.834-08:00The Syrian Uprising: No foreign intervention when you've got no oil?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTLPS4fFFxoGyx4yxfLvPkESZqwuN3BPHt2Fyvq-Xwv8a95dbJTbtHXG8qihpxO-88Ko9cUSXXkP_ROXSPlAAq7zGpODZvyffXpUOzW3IVnn4IWUjqr9Uc1cWJoDkaYvOeWW4H4VIJnep/s1600/An-anti-regime-demonstrat-005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTLPS4fFFxoGyx4yxfLvPkESZqwuN3BPHt2Fyvq-Xwv8a95dbJTbtHXG8qihpxO-88Ko9cUSXXkP_ROXSPlAAq7zGpODZvyffXpUOzW3IVnn4IWUjqr9Uc1cWJoDkaYvOeWW4H4VIJnep/s640/An-anti-regime-demonstrat-005.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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Things are about to get really ugly in Syria.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Uprisings in the Middle East sure were ugly last year but if we're talking Syria, I prefer to use the term <em>civil war.</em> Especially after I watched video coming out of the Syrian city of <em>Homs</em> last week<em> </em>where a father was carrying his dead baby down the street and trying to push brain back into the infant's skull. That's when I knew it was time to turn off the TV and go have a shower or something. Shelling civilians in dense urban areas is pretty much as dirty as war gets these days outside of someone busting out a nuke. The Syrian Army have surrounded the city with heavy armor and are shelling the metropolitan area indiscriminately with the usual array of Soviet era artillery, rockets and air burst mortars. <em> Homs </em>is no minor town either like say, Dera'a, that small provincial southern outpost where this whole Syrian mass protest movement got started back in March last year. No, <em>Homs</em> is a major industrial center and Syria's third largest city with a population of 800,000. It's now considered the capital of the insurrection and mixed up with all those civilians are some elements of the <em>Free Syrian Army</em> (more on them later) holed up in scattered houses with a bunch of sniper rifles and RPGs. <br />
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The fun question is whether NATO or the Russians or even the Arab League will get involved to stop the shooting? And the short answer is no. For lots of reasons, not all of which are predicated on the fact that, unlike say Libya, Syria has no oil so there's nothing obvious for anyone to grab. That doesn't mean that Syria doesn't figure in to our global proxy resource war future. It's geography is pretty critical in Middle East <em>strategic </em>terms and that makes it important enough that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Israel and the US all have a stake in how this mess plays out. That, paradoxically, means it's probably too risky for any foreign player to allow a rival power to get directly involved. That's really bad news if you're a Syrian protester dodging artillery fire. This war has long drawn out stalemate written all over it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Dictators shelling their own cities is a pretty good indicator that they are not going to go away nicely with a Learjet full of cash to some beachfront condo in Saudi Arabia like Yemen's <em>Salah</em> or Tunisia's <em>Abidine Ben Ali</em> did last year. Syria's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, is different. He is one of those <em>other</em> kinds of dictators like Kim-Jong-Il; which is to say he's the son of a more famous and hardcore dictator who ran the country for decades, died and passed on dad's pocket police state to their dip shit "Participation Award" winning son. By shelling Homs and massacring thousands, Assad Junior is trying to prove he can be just as ruthless as his asshole father who leveled the Syrian city of Hama back in 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood tried an uprising against Alawite power. That resulted in a scorched earth policy by the Syrian Army and at least 20,000 deaths; most of them civilians. Right now, it looks like Bashar al-Assad is trying to beat his dad's high score.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> Who knew that some humble fruit seller who torched himself in a market square in Tunisia last year could kick start an <em>Arab Spring</em> and shake up the entire Middle East where the citizens of six Arab countries could trade-in their ruthless dictators and exchange them for a whole new variety of oppressive bastards? Especially considering the strategic and resource rich nature of the real estate those demonstrators happen to be living on. The problem for the West right now is that the entire power structure of the Middle East has changed in the last year and, especially when you consider Egypt, none of those changes are in the West's favor. Having dictators on pay roll was a nice deal and made Egypt a client state costing a mere $2 billion a year to buy off Mubarak who kept Suez running smoothly and promised not to mess with Israel. That's all gone now. Libya is a mess right now too but at least the oil is trickling out. You could view these protest movements, initially at least, as organic uprisings against repressive regimes but considering we're dealing with the Middle East here, selective foreign intervention from the West was inevitable. <br />
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However, the Syrian rebels can expect no intervention from the West this time around. Sure, on the surface you might say that's because Syria has no significant oil worth declaring a no fly zone over. But the reason why there will be no NATO 'no fly zone' over Syria is more complex and plays into the wider global proxy resource wars that will characterize the 21st century. If we really want to know what's going on in Syria, we have to go all the way back to the Cold War. Sure, that's only two decades ago but that's practically ancient history in today's techno sci fi dystopia. <br />
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Syria signed a pact with the Soviet Union in 1956 after the Suez crisis when Egypt decided that they might actually own their own canal so the French, British and the Israelis invaded to tell them they didn't. They were all forced to withdraw however after the US and Russia got pissed at the strategic land grab by the former old world powers and decided to remind those old farts who the new and real superpowers on the planet were. Syria, under martial law at the time and terrified of an Israeli invasion, signed a pact with the Soviet Union. This was a nice deal for both parties. The commies got a foothold in the Levant, a base on the Syrian coast in the Mediterranean and the Syrians got some cool new Warsaw Pact tanks and artillery. Thing is, Syria, like a lot of Arab states is strongman country which means right up until 1970, every guy with an AK tried a power grab and successive mini coups meant the Syrian government kept changing every year.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBYqF0bz2_eRea94nbK_cQiT7qutyskcCJdQIkY-hqc682xIIs-GQHQSdn5h9L-aO1f1EkXzMOlBrJMFbZObhEwQew9sVCqwImEMY-ZRBoLzHktsvXeGFakyPMI3P_svDG6klldWjfMSks/s1600/kc4ece16c2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBYqF0bz2_eRea94nbK_cQiT7qutyskcCJdQIkY-hqc682xIIs-GQHQSdn5h9L-aO1f1EkXzMOlBrJMFbZObhEwQew9sVCqwImEMY-ZRBoLzHktsvXeGFakyPMI3P_svDG6klldWjfMSks/s400/kc4ece16c2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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It was in this environment that Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 and organized Syria into a lock down security state mainly to make sure no more strongmen could come along to challenge his rule. Syria today has 57 different varieties of internal security forces making them the Heinz ketchup of desert police states. Like I mentioned earlier, the only serious challenge to his rule was from a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood who considered Assad and the Alawite sect he came from heretical to Islam. Assad surrounded the city of Hama and massacred everyone, to this day considered "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East".<br />
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Hafez al Assad died in 2000 after 30 years of strongman rule and the Syrian 'parliament' quickly rewrote the rule book so his 34 year old son could take over (previously you had to be 40 to become <em>el presidente</em>). Junior pulled one of those Saddam Hussein type Baath Party elections where no one runs against you and you amazingly wind up with 97.89% of the vote and call it unanimous victory. Which is democracy by desert standards I suppose. With a new guy in charge, a lot of Syrians were hoping for reform and an end to the "state of emergency" that had been in place since 1963. A bunch of small movements and political forums got started in private homes floating the idea of democratic elections. Bashar al-Assad thought about it for about a minute and then decided against it and instead went ahead with locking up everybody who dared voice a contrary opinion; a new desert strongman had arrived.<br />
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Then came the Arab Spring last year and suddenly throwing out asshole dictators became fashionable in the Middle East. The protests started out as teenage graffiti on a wall in the southern farm town of Dera'a and as usual, just like Mubarak and Gaddafi in Egypt and Libya, the dictator gene kicked in and Assad sent in the army. That resulted in dead people which instead of serving as a warning like it might have done 20 years ago, this time it pissed off people right across the political and economic spectrum. The protests grew in size and quickly spread to other cities.<br />
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And right now this fight is entering civil war territory which means it will get even more ugly. We're talking here Lebanon Civil War style ugly. All the ingredients are there especially when you consider the hodge podge ethnic make up of the country. Though 74% Sunni Arab, there a whole bunch of Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Armenians and Turks who could settle old scores if the traditional power structure falls apart. Even then, they'll probably be left to their own devices and no referee will come and break it all up. There are too many conflicting foreign parties involved for any of them to allow the other to scoop up the prize that is Damascus; the heart of pan Arab prestige and the oldest continuously inhabited city on the planet.<br />
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Let's take a look at the complex web of foreign players with a stake in this mess.<br />
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<strong>Russia</strong><br />
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<strong> </strong>The Russians have a naval base in Syria. A pretty important foreign base for them on the Mediterranean. With ties going back to the Cold War, Russia cannot allow their old ally to fall into the hands of the Western oligarchy. Down and out since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is a wounded superpower with designs on regaining her stature. Watching the US run riot across the planet for the last two decades, gobbling up desert real estate wholesale sure has pissed them off. But there is a silver lining. Russia has all that resource rich land mass and with oil only going to increase in price, they're well positioned for the proxy resource war future.<br />
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It sure made me laugh when the Russians vetoed the Syrian resolution at the UN a couple of weeks back. The US media were so shocked while leaving out the fact that the US has vetoed every UN resolution aimed at Israel for the past thirty years. Protecting your client states via UN votes is par for the course in proxy warfare. What's really happening here is that we are entering Cold War Part II. As Russia's oil and gas reserves become more and more valuable, strategic containment of the West is key. Syria and Georgia are just the opening salvos.<br />
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<strong>Iran</strong><br />
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<strong> </strong>Iran is a growing regional power and the West seeks to contain it. With Syria being it's main ally, destabilization in Syria is in the West's interest. A main conduit of Iranian arms to Shia proxy armies (Hizbollah, al-Qassam) in Southern Lebanon, Syria is the gateway for arms shipments to these groups. For this reason, Iran would like to keep Syria open for business and the current regime in power.<br />
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<strong>China</strong><br />
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<strong> </strong>Along with Russia, they used their UN Security Council vote just to hamper the West's designs on the Middle East oilfields. In many ways, <em>they did it for the lulz</em>.<br />
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<strong>Israel</strong><br />
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<strong> </strong>Obviously, Israel would like Syria destabilized but this is a risky game even for them. When Mubarak fell in Egypt, they lost a compliant dictator on their southern border. It remains to be seen if a new regime in Damascus would be compliant enough to settle the Golan Heights dispute. Strangely, you can throw Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Sunni Arab US allies in the region in with Israel as they all fear the growing power of Iran. A weakened Syria plays to this interest.<br />
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<strong>The U.S.</strong><br />
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<strong> </strong>The US would like to see Assad fall because it would push Russia out of the Levant and make it easy to consolidate all their gains in the Mesopotamian oil fields. Syria as a compliant democracy would be vastly weakened insofar as its ability to resist Western encroachment. It would also have the side benefits of knocking out an Iranian ally and cutting arms shipments to Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon. All in all, a win win on the global chess board. Sure, the country might be left a mess and fall into faction on faction religious warfare but even that kind of chaos is preferable to a hardcore dictator who hates your guts and refuses to play ball. With Syria gone, the only domino left to fall will be Iran for total control of Middle East energy.<br />
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So how does all this play out?<br />
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Most likely it will come down to the Syrians themselves. It is certainly true that foreign special forces have been running around inside Syria, fomenting this along. It is also true that Assad's regime has received weapons shipments from Russia and Chinese 'moral support. Ultimately though, this whole war comes down to whether or not the Syrians can do this for themselves. And as usual, when the shooting starts (as it has) you can brush away that quaint idea that nonviolent protest ever changed any power structure in human history. No need to quote me Gandhi or MLK either. Those peaceful movements only worked because there were far more violent guys waiting in the wings if the peace and love fest didn't work out. So apart from suicidal protesters getting gunned down by the Syrian army, does this protest movement have a little more bite?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRiSO6BkSk0BccDgFLuQ9Daa5k-WX5UYqOZaQfBi9pzaHCcS7FnkNpY3GUALEiRCs-Xy0QvaopBuuSuWSmiDTbsaZdsr2MwiLutf1x1p7tRCl2FpDU5N4J4gJoKRsVZttQlM6dt8CybDL8/s1600/1_picnik.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRiSO6BkSk0BccDgFLuQ9Daa5k-WX5UYqOZaQfBi9pzaHCcS7FnkNpY3GUALEiRCs-Xy0QvaopBuuSuWSmiDTbsaZdsr2MwiLutf1x1p7tRCl2FpDU5N4J4gJoKRsVZttQlM6dt8CybDL8/s640/1_picnik.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Free Syrian Army and their wide variety of small arms.</td></tr>
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It does and it's called the Free Syrian Army. This army is composed mainly of defecting Syrian Army troops and is under the command of a Syrian air force colonel, Riad Mousa al-Asaad. They claim to be 40,000 strong but this figure is most likely inflated and more realistically in the 15,000 range. Composed mainly of conscript soldiers who either didn't show up for duty or refused to shoot at protesters (risky considering Bashar al-Assad is executing men who fail to pull the trigger on unarmed civilians), they are lightly armed with AKs and RPGs. Most of their operations have been interdiction strikes on Syrian Army supply trucks, hit and run stuff which is the best you can do when you've got no air support or heavy weapons. Only time will tell if the defections continue or if the Syrian Army itself, at least the hardcore element, sees Assad as the lesser of two evils; the other evil being total chaos like in Egypt after Mubarak fell.<br />
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Either way, The Syrian Civil War stays ugly for some time and how it plays out will tell us a lot about the future of the Middle East. And the world.<br />
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</div></div>War Tardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07695998564986230897noreply@blogger.com25