Kony 2012: African Civil War meets the Internet wristband brigade.

   African civil wars have always scored high on the atrocity scale.

   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. 

   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.

    Uganda is one damn scary place even by African standards.

   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.

    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 structural reforms to the Ugandan economy which ensured Western business could continue getting cheap shit out of yet another independent 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.

Museveni with fellow dictator Gaddafi

    So where does this Joseph Kony asshole fit into Ugandan history?

  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 civilized 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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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 clean 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.

   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.

   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.

   And now Kony is an international celebrity.

   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?

   Am I saying do nothing?

   Nope.

   I'm saying something even worse. I'm saying there's nothing you can do. 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.

   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.

   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.

   The 21st century already has a whole host of proxy resource wars lined up.

   Even Jesus would agree, we don't need any more.




   

The Syrian Uprising: No foreign intervention when you've got no oil?

    Things are about to get really ugly in Syria.

    Uprisings in the Middle East sure were ugly last year but if we're talking Syria, I prefer to use the term civil war. Especially after I watched video coming out of the Syrian city of Homs last week 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. Homs 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, Homs 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 Free Syrian Army (more on them later) holed up in scattered houses with a bunch of sniper rifles and RPGs.

    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 strategic 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.

    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 Salah or Tunisia's Abidine Ben Ali did last year. Syria's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, is different. He is one of those other 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.

    Who knew that some humble fruit seller who torched himself in a market square in Tunisia last year could kick start an Arab Spring 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.

    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.

    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.

    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".

    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 el presidente). 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.

    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.

    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.

    Let's take a look at the complex web of foreign players with a stake in this mess.

    Russia

    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.

    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.


    Iran

    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.

    China

    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, they did it for the lulz.

    Israel

     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.

    The U.S.

    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.


    So how does all this play out?

    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?

The Free Syrian Army and their wide variety of small arms.

    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.

   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.

     

Phase II: Why the US wants to attack Iran

  

   Looks like the US is playing musical chairs with its carrier groups in the Gulf of Oman.

   The USS Stennis Carrier Group moved to the Indian Ocean last week so the US could transit another carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, through the Straits of Hormuz just to remind the Iranians how screwed they'd be if the shooting starts. The carrier was escorted by the cruiser USS Cape St. George, two destroyers, the Royal Navy anti sub frigate HMS Argyll and even the French got an invite and sent along their own La Motte-Picquet anti sub frigate to fill out the international nature of the party. That's pretty interesting and those frigates show the West's concern at the Iranian submarine threat and the small chance that the Iranians might manage to land a torp in the nuke belly of a carrier. Sure, it's unlikely but the Chinese did manage to sneak a diesel powered sub into the middle of a carrier group during USN exercises off Taiwan in 2006. So nothing's impossible. Also, the USS Enterprise carrier group is on its way and due to arrive in the Gulf in March which is an interesting choice considering it's the oldest nuke carrier in the US fleet, secretly nicknamed the "Mobile Chernobyl" by sailors and due to be decommissioned later this year. Warships passing through the Strait are pretty typical moves but a combined US, UK and French flotilla is unusual and reeks of dick waving to show the pesky Persians what they might be dealing with if they try any 'funny stuff' like mining Hormuz and blocking world oil supply.

   Grab popcorn but don't microwave it just yet.

   I still say this war is way too scary to enter a shooting phase but that's only because I want to believe Western leaders are not insane. And I keep getting proved wrong on that point. This week's naval moves off the Iranian coast had me rummaging through my library for obligatory Sun Tzu quotes and the best I could come up with was  "Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate." The Euros came up with an extraordinary moment of their own this week by way of an oil embargo on Iranian oil purchases that won't take effect till June and is actually a subtle attempt to stop this war from entering the shooting phase. It's a move designed to appease the trigger happy US and Israel so they don't go straight to the bombers and risk setting the world on fire. Of course, the Israelis are still not happy and don't believe it'll stop that theater parity Shia nuke.

   Truth is, nothing is going to stop that nuke.

   Even if the US and Israel do conduct air strikes on Iran's 15 nuke sites, they still can't physically damage an idea. The Iranian nuke program is diversified enough that even a concerted bombing campaign can at best only delay it a few years. Nobody can put the nuclear genie back in the bottle anymore. So this week I got to thinking of this war in wider global proxy resource war terms and that's when things started making more sense.

   Iran is sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and has huge reserves of natural gas and that's a sweet energy prize by any account. It's kind of like Inca gold and the Spanish Main in the 16th century... everybody wants a piece of the action. The fun thing about oil is that while it's in the ground, its value is theoretical but not actual. That's actually a plus. For example, when the West grabbed Iraqi oil, they didn't go in right away and start extracting spice like Hungry Hippos. That oil is fine where it is for now. It is control of the real estate above the deposit and a say in how and at what rate those reserves get extracted that really matters. And that's why the Green Zone in Baghdad houses the largest US embassy in the world even after the US pulled out combat troops. Sure, the US can let foreign competitors in to extract the spice and sub contract the work out to other nations, but so long as oil is a dollar based commodity, US economic hegemony of world energy remains intact.

   The interesting player here in all this is China. Though a long way from being a military superpower, its economic power is rising fast, so fast that the US and Europe fear the loss of traditional Western dominance of the global economy. The gaping weakness of the Chinese rise is energy supply. And without a credible naval fleet to protect the flow of spice, the weakness of China gets exposed... Chinese dependence on sea borne oil delivery and their susceptibility to a blockade sometime in our proxy resource war future. What the West really fears here in the global energy game of Risk, is Iran having unfettered control of its own huge energy reserves, selling those reserves outside the dollar to geopolitical rivals (China) and facilitating the rise of a pan Pacific hegemon that could contest Western dominance at some point later this century.

   That's why Iran is in the cross hairs.

   Their whole nuke program is symbolic of their determination not to play nice in the petro dollar chessgame and the question remains, will they get Tomahawked this year because of it?

   Let's get to the fun stuff.

   How would this war play out if the US does attack Iran? In a nutshell, really badly for Iran. Initially at least. The problem for the Iranians is their dated air defence system based mainly around the Soviet S-200 system. For perspective, Gaddafi fielded this against the US when Reagan bombed Libya in 1986 and even pre stealth F-111s managed to do serious damage for the loss of only one plane. These days, with modern EW jamming in the mix, the US and Israel will dominate the skies above Iran unopposed. Also, the US already knows where all these S-200 sites are which makes them really easy to target. Every time those fixed SAM radar antenna get switched on for maintenance or calibration it's like painting a big fat bulls eye on your air defense network. That goes for the more mobile Soviet Tor (SA-15) system too even if it can drive around, stop, find a target and drive off again. Strangely, the Iranians do have a fighter wing of Shah era US F-14 Tomcats which is pretty funny when you imagine some flailing Persian Top Gun Maverick trying to get a lock on a US bogey. In any possible strike scenario, Iran is pretty much defenseless against 5th generation Western tech. Along with the usual rain of Tomahawk missiles, air delivered bunker busters and the Israelis ruthlessly following up behind, Iran is going to wake up the morning after the raid with a serious hangover. And, I suppose, this is where we get to the the really interesting question.

   What will the Iranian response be?

   There are so many options it's hard to keep track. One option not often discussed is the concept of Iranian restraint. I've thought about this lately and it does have merits if you're an Iranian general. What happens if they do nothing? Sure, it's a long shot. But what happens if the Iranians let the world see reactors on fire, spewing radiation across the Persian landscape, broadcast pictures of dead babies to the world and try to play this out in the gladiatorial arena of world opinion? You just got sucker punched for a nuclear weapon you don't even have. In a social media world, the idea that Iran could play the wounded stoic here is a viable option and could be worth a try to make it clear who the real 'bad guys' are. Another reason why I like the idea from the point of view of their crazy theocracy is that getting bombed usually results in the "London Blitz effect". Getting bombed by external enemies rallys populations around whatever power structure happens to be in place and sure would hurt CIA funded opposition groups operating in Iran. All those Green revolution kids on the streets of Tehran getting whipped and shot by Basij thugs would suddenly swing rogue if an external enemy bombed their mom's house.

   Smart leaders in history like Churchill capitalized on stuff like that.

   The problem with politicians and the religious freaks who run countries these days is that they are rarely that smart. The Iranian theocracy is no different. So the question remains, do the Iranians go loud and bust out their myriad asymmetrical options and retaliate against the bombers once Natanz is burning? Who knows? Let's examine the Iranian options:

• Unleash a thousand speed boats and mine the Straits of Hormuz back to the Stone Age. Oil price hits $200 a barrel until US/Euro/Japanese minesweepers clear the Strait. It'll take two months to declare the all clear. Meanwhile, in the West, we cry like babies because feeding our car hurts, bread has doubled in price and nobody can afford a new flatscreen. 

• The Iranians launch their limited supply of Shahab IIIs against Israeli population centers. Tel Aviv gets hit and the Israelis launch a reciprocal strike on the civilian population of Tehran. The doomsday Iranian theocracy doesn't like it. Escalation possibilities ensue. A nuclear missile versus chemical missile war. Mass casualties happen on your TV. (Unlikely).

• The Iranians launch Chinese Silkworm missiles (and Shahab IIIs) across the Persian Gulf, hit Saudi oil installations like Ras Tanura and set the world economy on fire. The world enters a new paradigm of what the fuck? Oil hits $300 a barrel, food prices double and you wish you were a farmer who could grow his own food.

• The Iranians engage in proxy warfare and pressure Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon to bombard Tel Aviv with the thousands of missiles the Iranians have already supplied them with. The IDF responds with a massive attack on Southern Lebanon and attempts to rectify their 'defeat' in 2006. Thousands die but nobody cares in Western countries because food tastes nice.

• Iran activates their foreign asymmetrical "terrorist" cells in the US and Europe, they blow up stuff in Western cities and make already unruly citizens decry another bullshit war that didn't have to be. Meanwhile, Western countries turn into police states because everybody could be a terrorist. Oh wait, that's already happened.

• The Iranians do nothing, lament their dead babies and garner worldwide everyman support because they're just another victim of globalization and the ongoing corporate takeover of the world's real estate. Occupy Wall Street protesters finally start wrecking shit.

 

   What's most disturbing is that Western leaders seem prepared to play this casino game of chance. How will the Chinese and Russians react if Iran is burning? That's the real question in this whole cluster fuck. China is a major buyer of Iranian oil. Russia has provided enriched uranium and scientists to run the Iranian reactor at Bushehr since 2009. If Russian nationals die in that attack and if that destroyed reactor is spewing Fukushima levels of radiation across the landscape, what's next? The Russians may be happy to issue stern protests at the UN while secretly laughing to themselves as oil, Russia's main export, pushes beyond the $150 dollar a barrel mark; the mark that crashed the world economy in 2008. Since the Russians rely on oil exports to keep their economy flowing ($110 a barrel oil is the estimated minimum price to keep that former superpower economically growing and appease their restless but dwindling population), the Russians will benefit from the US and Israel's stupid war against Iran.

   China, on the other hand, will be pissed. With the just announced Euro embargo, the Chinese have already started demanding discounts on Iranian oil. If there's one thing you can say about the Chinese, they're smart as hell and playing the long game. 5000 years of contiguous history and Sun Tzu can't be wrong. They will see a Western attack on Iran as yet another chess move to block their economic growth and secretly take note of who their real enemy is. One billion people can't be wrong as they continue to conscript their cheap village labor into factories to supply American Wal Marts with cheap plastic goods. For now. Even if Iran is burning, China could be smart, like they've always been, and yet again play the waiting game. In the wake of a US/Israeli attack on Iran's nuke sites, China and Russia will supply the Iranians with military technology to prevent such an attack from ever happening again. It'll be a Rubicon moment in their eyes, the moment when the Western energy lust went a bridge too far. Hell, the Iranians might finally receive a shipment of the Russian S-300/400 SAM system that would make a repeat attack orders of magnitude more difficult for foreign air forces. But, of course, it'll take a year to train Iranian crews in the operation of that sophisticated 5th generation technology.

The Russian S-400 SAM system... The Iranian dream...

   Meanwhile, we're all living in Blade Runner.

   Let's face it, the US, the Euros, the Russians, the Chinese, India, Pakistan and the Israelis will eventually have to face the truth of what Oppenheimer unleashed in the New Mexican desert in 1945. This is what Oppenheimer said after the first nuke exploded on earth. It still gives me shivers... "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In the coming 21st century sci fi dystopia future world, every nation of consequence is going to have nukes. Does Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD philosophy) mean we upright apes get to escape our fate?

   No nation wants World War III right now.

   But then again, no nation ever wanted a World War ever and yet we dumb humans always manage to stumble into one. That's if  20th century history is anything to go by.

   2012 is starting to feel like 1912 all over again.

  

The War on Iran: Phase I

   In case you didn't notice, the War on Iran has already begun.

   You won't hear that said on TV yet though. At least not on US news networks. Those corporate shills need major fireworks before it becomes profitable to switch from diversions to 24hr news coverage of burning nuke sites and Iranian radiation warnings interspersed with commercial breaks for Viagra and Wal Mart. Right now, the biggest military operation of the decade is still in Phase I. And the corporate media and all the sleazy oligarchy that stand to profit know it's probably best to instead run 24hr news coverage of the Republican primaries where the US gets to choose which corporate spokesman the Republicans are going to run against Democratic corporate spokesman Obama. That's democracy these days folks. You know, that thing the US brought to Iraq via heavy armor.

   Next up, Iran. All for WMD nukes they don't even have yet. Reruns of bullshit wars like Iraq would be really boring if the Iran attack wasn't so goddam scary in the first place. But, no matter, 2012 is an election year and nothing gets presidents re elected and clears the streets of protesters like a brand spanking new war. This war is becoming viable to the US and only one Republican presidential candidate of nine is even against the idea.

   Sure, I've written before of the possible repercussions of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuke sites and theorized why Israel wants this Iranian strike beyond preventing the Persians from achieving "theater parity" with the Israelis on the nuke front. I've said before the US have been trying to keep the Israelis reined in as far as launching the Iranian air strike solo goes but, it seems, with developments last month and with the way things are panning out in the region, it looks like the Israelis are going to be able to get the US to do the job for them. Or, at the very least, with them.

   In the wider context of the whole region, it's not just the Israelis who fear a rising Iran. The Saudis too and Sunni Arabs in general fear the growing power and influence of the Shia. They're sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and have an ocean of natural gas on tap too. Their support of the Bahrainis versus the Saudis last year (when the Saudis began to fear a homegrown Arab Spring in their shitty Orwellian police state petro kingdom) had crown Prince Abdullah begging the US to bomb Iran for them. Just last week, the Saudis inked a deal for another 30 billion of US military tech. Also, Iranian support and arms sales to Shia terrorist organisation Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon pisses off the Israelis and they want that whole region neutralized. A war with Iran will pull an IDF tank rush into Southern Lebanon under a perfectly legit umbrella when pulled under the context of a wider regional war. As a fun side note, you know things are heating up in the region when you have a potential war that makes the Saudis and Israelis allies against a common enemy.

Note the ring of US bases and total encirclement of Iran

   Phase I:

   Phase I of any war is the infiltration phase. The recon phase. The phase where you do precision strategic damage and eliminate those targets you can't hit from the air. Special forces stuff. Assassination squads and the like. That's why five Iranian scientists and physicists have died in mysterious explosions since November 2007. The latest death of a scientist came on January 11. Next up, you break out the cyber warfare and deploy the Stuxnet computer worm that delays Iran's centrifuges and disrupts their uranium enrichment at Natanz. This extended Phase I bought time last year to bulk up Western defensive assets in 'theater'. Also, Phase I involved the deployment of drones and ever present spy satellites over the target area and bought more time to gather more intel. The recent Iranian grounding of a classified US RQ-17 stealth drone sure had the CIA and Western military think tanks scratching their heads on the state of Iranian jamming technology.

   Hence the targeted killings of Iranian 'brainy' people. Holy shit, that sounds a lot like "terrorism". I'd sure be terrified if I were an Iranian scientist right now. Of course, you won't hear that in Western media. "Targeted assassination" these days has become a less terrifying euphemism for the media to report in the West. Is not language itself amazing? You can hide any intention in there. But let's face it, if a foreign entity blows up people on the streets of New York or Jerusalem, it's automatic terrorism as far as the media is concerned.

   The interesting thing about Phase I is that it is reaching its conclusion. The final stage began in October when Western countries began running psy-ops against their own public and preparing them  for a shooting war in Iran by way of the corporate controlled media. It began with some elaborate media story about Iranian agents plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington but it didn't exactly fly with the public. Even the plebs are getting wise to the machinations of the plutocracy and the whole scheme just sounded like more WMD bullshit. The media then ran stories throughout November 2011 alluding to some amorphous fact that Iran has a bunch of ICBMs ready to rain down mega death on Western capitals. As if that is ever an option for Iran; launching nukes and inviting the West to glass 4000 years of Persian history back to the Stone Age.


   Of course, the Iranians are aware of Phase I and have indulged in some blustering sabre rattling of their own. This came to a crux over the holiday period when targeted Western sanctions against Iran's central bank caused a 10% drop in their currency in a single day. That kind of action hurts but the real question on the table is if the West is prepared to go through with its threat of an oil embargo on Iran. Since 70% of the Iranian economy is based on oil exports, that's the kind of action that would really hurt. Sure, Russia and China would veto any such action if it came to a vote at the UN but that might not matter. The USS Stennis carrier group offshore right now could easily enforce the blockade. The real question is if the West hates Iran enough to take their oil off the market thus causing a spike in oil prices and inhibiting the 'recovery' in fragile Western economies. Yes, the Saudis claim they could make up the shortfall but that is most likely bullshit considering the dirty little secret of the Middle East is that Saudi oil fields are past peak output and getting pumped full of seawater to keep the spice flowing to the top of their wells.

   What has been holding Phase II of this war back (the actual US/Israeli air strike on Iran's 15 nuke sites) so far has been the spider tree of Iranian response strategies. Sure, Iran has no air force capable of retaliating against the encircling US bases in the region or against Israeli population centers. Iran has so many options though, it makes Western war planners shit bricks. However, most of these are asymmetrical and involve proxy armies in Southern Lebanon or disruption of oil traffic in the narrow Straits of Hormuz. (I'll talk about those next week). More interesting right now is Iran's long and medium range missile technology (Shabab 3's and 4's) that are within range of Tel Aviv.

   Israel has always been pretty touchy about civilian casualties (given their small population and tight geography which makes targeting easier) so limiting the damage of an Iranian missile strike is key. Sure, the idea that bringing Tel Aviv under an impenetrable missile defence would be nice but, realistically, that's impossible. Even the latest advances in anti missile tech really only inhibit enemy war planners; that is, they force the enemy to put more missiles and decoys on any given target to assure destruction. They never bring you under a safety umbrella.

   Israel has not completed the formation of its four-echelon missile defense system yet. It will adopt counter-missiles of its (exo-atmospheric) echelon, which allow a second attempt to intercept a ballistic missile warhead, no sooner than 2013. The defense's third echelon - David's Sling - is still in the R&D phase. This reduces the efficacy of Israel's national missile defense, even if it is potentially strengthened by American ground-based THAAD and sea-based Aegis systems. But by 2013, Iran may have a viable war head and once that happens, theater parity is achieved on the nuke front and Iran becomes another North Korea.

   That is, non attackable.

   This is abhorrent to Western military planners and why Phase II, the actual air assault, could come this year. One interesting but quiet development was this week's deployment of US Air Force personnel to Israel ostensibly to run exercises that "simulate the interception of missile salvos against Israel. The American systems will work in conjunction with Israel’s missile defense systems – the Arrow, Patriot and Iron Dome." That right there is Phase II planning aimed at mitigating the possible Iranian response to a large scale joint US and Israeli strike against Iran.

   I've written about the Israeli strike before but next week I'll talk about Phase II and how that analysis changes with the US fully engaged. Stay tuned, deploy popcorn.

   2012 could get interesting fast.