Why Syria Matters: Sunni oil versus Shia oil and the battle for regional hegemony in the Middle East.

   The Syrian Regional War rages on and nobody knows how to put out the fire.

   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.

   Meanwhile, we've got Syria like a festering splinter in the geopolitical game.

   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.

   The Syrian Civil War is now a Middle Eastern regional proxy war.

  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.

    Basically, we're talking Saudi Arabia's oil versus Iran's oil.

   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.

   What's all this saber rattling about?

   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.

   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.

   All this makes Syria ground zero for proxy war central.

   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 Russian 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.

The 9M113 Konkurs AT missile. FSA instruction booklet included?

     This war is so interesting it has me glued to Live Leak and I'm getting fat on popcorn.

   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.

   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.

   That's when it will be decision time for the major powers.

   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.

   From a purely realpolitik 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.

   Obviously, Obama's computer geeks are stumped.

   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.

   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.

    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 20th 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.

   One final fun aspect of the Syrian War is the whole chemical weapons debate.

   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. And that's not even a crazy idea anymore.

   The Syrian Regional War can have many outcomes. None of them predictable.

   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 Mons Graupius and said of the Roman legions who defeated him...

   "They created a desert and called it victory".

North Korea v The World

   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:

   How much incoming artillery can Seoul take?

   Because that's the cost of any war on the Korean Peninsula today.

   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?

   In many ways, the answer is no one.

   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.

   Crazy buys you leeway and means you don't have to operate under normal "rules".

   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.

   China no longer knows how to deal with this war.

   So, like everything war wise at the moment, it's left up to the Americans to figure it out.

  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 Cheonan in 2010.

The North Korean's Pentium II based missile tech. Google blocks them from downloading more RAM.

   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.

   This war is starting to enter the realm of possibility and it may be time to grab the popcorn folks.

   Just don't microwave it yet. I'm still not feeling 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.

   Of course, if the trigger gets pulled, this war will be over very quickly. Nothing I've said before about this war changes. 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?

   Again, it's all a matter of just how much damage Seoul is willing to take in the initial bombardment.

   The real question I heard somebody raise a while back is the moral issue that North Korea presents.

  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 Operation Jericho, 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.

   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.

   1) Remove an aggressive, unstable, proven nuclear armed state from a strategic region.

    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.

   2) Get rid of an evil regime and bring "democracy" to the oppressed people. (The moral imperative).

    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.

  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?

   It's not gangnam style.

   It's chaos.

   And nobody wants to pay that price.

   Yet.

    

Mali: The French go to the desert.

   It's always time to break out the popcorn when the French go to war.

  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.

   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.

   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.

    Why?

  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.

   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.

   One of the main rebel groupings fall under the banner of the Ansar Dine. 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.

   By far my favorite outfit in the Mali desert are the Tuareg warriors.

    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.

   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. 

1. The technologically advanced but mature economies of the West lumbered with debt.
2. The rapidly developing Asian economies armed with cheap labor craving a bigger piece of the pie.
3. The backward theocracies in the Middle East and Africa who just happen to be sitting on the energy reserves the other two need.    

  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.

  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. 

   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.

   How do you wash away the pain of hundreds of years of oppression and strict theocracy?

   Blow shit up.

   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.

   You know what the worst thing about these three distinct global camps is?

   None of them are the "good guys".

   That's the thing about the 21st Century.

  Everybody gets to be an asshole.

  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.

   I'd play that RTS game.

   If it were a game.

Syria: Will Assad go full chemical?

   The Syrian Civil War just made headlines.

    Why?

   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.

   "Say hello to my little Sarin gas!"

   Suddenly, the world is watching the war in Syria and every major power has a stake in the game.

  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.

   Chemical Warfare is the kind of warfare that makes general populations shudder.

   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?

   Actually, no.

   Death by gas is cheating in the popular imagination. And there is wisdom in this.

   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.

   There's the rub.

    Discrimination.

   At least an artillery strike is aimed at something, right?

   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. 

   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:

  "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".

  In other words, you get Nagasakied if you try any "funny stuff".
   

   If Bashar al Assad is loading his fighter bombers with chems than you know he knows he's already dead.

   There is no exit strategy for him and his family.He's trapped, beaten and probably delusional.

   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.

   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.

   

   While Syria doesn't have much oil, for Western war planners, it has another quality that's hard to sell on the world market.

   Prestige.

   Arabian prestige.

   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.

   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.

   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. 

    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.

   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.

   Personally, I can't believe Assad is serious here.

   Using chemical weapons would be like Hitler biting into a cyanide pill.

   It's certain death multiplied by the destruction of your country.

   But you know what?

   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.

  

   

   

   

China v Japan. Are the Senkaku Islands worth a war?

  China versus Japan sure would be a fun war.

  Fun, of course, being a relative term.

   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 subsistence 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 brave new world 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:

   We're all greedy self serving assholes and nature seems to like it that way.

   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 and 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.

   Chinese history makes Chinese people very angry.

   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.

   The Japanese, on the other hand, are experiencing a 21st century existential crisis.

   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".

   The Chinese want an apology for Nanking.

   Unfortunately, the Japanese do apologies the same way they do unconditional surrender. 

   That is, you have to detonate more than one nuclear weapon over a major population center before they'll consider the merits of your argument.

   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 dream strike on Iran's nuke sites about as interesting to the global public as Bono talking about Africa at a U2 concert.

   That's why China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon.

   Because nukes.

   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.

   And that's a lot of dead people. Everywhere.

   Advantage nukes.

   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.

   Countries start fighting for the leftover scraps in the barrel.

   Even deep sea short term possible oil deposits are worth disputing. But not worth setting the world on fire for.

   Yet.

   How would this war play out if it did happen?

  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 Russian carrier, that doesn't mean we can laugh at the Chinese Navy.

   We're talking, at least at the outset, a very interesting naval war not seen in the Pacific since Midway.

   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.

   Sure, this is all hypothetical as hell but nobody can deny this war is "fun" to think about.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   It's like the Roman Empire but with i-Phones.

   But that doesn't make this hypothetical war any less interesting.

   For one thing, Japans's version of the AEGIS cruiser/destroyer system, the Kongo series based on the US Arleigh Burke 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?

   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 General Belgrano 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.

   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.

   It's a crazy world.

   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.

   Yet.

   

  

Syria: Fantasy war in the desert!

    

   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 Inglourious Basterds. 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.

  Which they don't.

  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.

  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.

The first casualty of the Syrian War is Photoshop!

   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 covert arms through Lebanon and the plethora of foreign special forces running around observing 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. Democracy and all that other funny talk.

   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.

   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 Al-Qaeda 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 good guys.

   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 honorable 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.

   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.

   It's dirty war and the dirtier it gets the bigger the FSA becomes.

   Maybe that's the whole crazy plan.

   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.

  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 honorable tank duel in the desert.

  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 mainstream 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?

  Watching two equally matched modern nations going head to head in a wider regional war.

   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.

   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.

   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 Kerkoporta Gate 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.

   But this war is fun to think about.

   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 turkey shoot 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.

Rebel held areas of Syria are primarily border regions for easy resupply.

 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.

   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


   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 nouveau riche Chinese billionaire's ritzy apartment overlooking the endless grey Beijing smog.

Krak des Chevaliers: Not immune to modern artillery.

   What a sad end to history.

   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.

   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.

   Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese love to stymy any Western inspired peace 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.

   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.

   Battlefield Iran.

   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.