On the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, the Guns Fell Silent

Am commemorating Veteran's Day by waiting in an internet cafe at the airport, aware that many have been sacrificed for the privilege of my doing so. The above Black Adder clip, while comedic, might as well be a real transcript of low-level British commanders steeling themselves with black humour before embarking on a suicidal attack in the Great War. Here's Hugh Laurie of "House M.D." fame playing the Leftenant who greets a glum Captain Darling, sent down by a general to join the deadly fanfaronnade:

Laurie: "Well this is splendid comradely news! Together we'll fight for king and country and we'll be sucking down sausages in Berlin by tea-time!"

Darling: "...rather hoped I'd get through the whole show. Go back to work at Pratt & Sons...keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen...marry Dorothy. Made a note in my diary on the way here...it simply says, 'Bugger.'"

(Credits to "WTF is it now?")

If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You Might Not Get There

A week or so back a story came out in the WSJ reporting the president had just finished reading Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.

The book's narrative arc concerns a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead," urged on by a hyperbolic Pentagon that saw commies under coffee tables while committing unbelievably basic mistakes on the ground. As the story goes, Tom Donilon (a long-time Biden ally), the deputy national security advisor, gave Rahm Emanuel a copy of 'Lessons,' then Rahm went to pass it on the prez but learned he was already reading it, so he loaned it to David Axelrod. Obama passed his own copy on to Biden, whereupon it became required reading for all of Washington and sold out of bookstores. It still must be back-ordered on Amazon.

The Pentagon, now hyperventilating about islamo-fascists under coffee tables, prefers a different narrative arc, one conveyed in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. This work has the US military finally figuring out how to apply COIN principles and win, which it was manifestly starting to do by 1971-72, only to have its plug pulled after 8 previous years of patient learning and sacrifice, all wasted by a White House too focused on political gain. Various generals have been pressing the book on their subordinate chains of command since 2005, the WSJ article relates, and it is currently sold out at Amazon.

The broad lines of debate are exposed. Regular readers (Jon in particular) might expect me to dump on the military's choice of exemplar, but not in this case. Creighton Abrams took over Vietnam's command from William Westmoreland in 1968 and promptly switched the strategic focus to protecting villages from incursion and training a truly effective indigenous army (ARVN). Abrams was one of the best military minds in the 20th century in both combat and command, and given a couple more years' head start and 500,000 men, he probably would have succeeded in at least partitioning Vietnam's narrow isthmus. The book is an excellent choice on which to base an argument of COIN and see-it-through.

The White House's book is similarly well-chosen, in that its focus is on McGeorge Bundy, one of the so-called "best and brightest" or "wise men" in the Kennedy Administration, in which he served as National Security Advisor. Having been born to one of Boston's elite families and pledging as member #322 of the Skull and Bones society while at Yale, he was tapped at age 30 to serve on the Council of Foreign Relations while the Marshall Plan was being implemented in Europe as an anti-communist firewall. From there he went to serve as Harvard's youngest ever Dean of Faculty. In the Kennedy Administration, he was an outspoken hawk for escalation, but was first of the early hawks to change his mind and advocate cutting the losses. Like the current think-tankers paid to wind up generals, airwaves and representatives, Bundy knew nothing about war's conduct. He had never studied it.

The arcs don't apply particularly well because Afghanistan is far larger, less stable, more permeable, hostile, and diverse than Vietnam. Afghanistan is a failed state starting from a point of near-zero cohesion, whereas Vietnam had two systems of governance, each entertaining useful thralls of competing ideologies, each on the cusp of establishing a post-Colonial national identity. In Kabul, no one collects the garbage, the Karzai government huddles behind sandbags collecting drug money while it piles higher, and every time the author of a strategic plan relieves themselves on a toilet in the US embassy and flushes, they literally shit on the city's residents. The city's sewage system is its streets.

The Obama Administration's only strategic goal in Afghanistan is to simply contain al-Qaeda, which has already been accomplished. They're re-fighting Vietnam while al-Qaeda openly blossoms orange and red in Pakistan, and it seems that Vietnam is aiming too high.

A Bright Shining Showdown

Give the picture above a close look; it's the first time the President of the US and the commander of his ground forces in Afghanistan met 1-1. Today is the Year Eight of the war they're conferring over, and their body language is telling. Obama's posture is patient, explanatory, verging on remonstrative; Stanley McChrystal's is taut, defensive, and tilting to one side. The general looks like he might be struggling to maintain his composure while thinking, "I could spatter his head like a bug."

Obama's intellectual training was primarily by Socratic method, which emphasizes dialectical questions designed to get one party in a debate to tellingly contradict themselves, strengthening the inquirer's point. I have been very critical of the President for asking for a report he knew would, in a word, suck. In his defense, maybe he didn't know it would suck this badly, and didn't expect it to collapse so easily upon an amateur's inquiries. For example, BHO may have asked self-contradicting questions like these:

"Are you telling me that 40,000 more troops are enough to decisively defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, once and for all?"

"How will these new troops limit al-Qaeda's continuing growth in Pakistan, where we know it's becoming a deadlier domestic and international threat?"

Stanley A. McChrystal is a Crusader, a third-gen Military Industrial Complex product deeply in the pocket of the NeoCons, and Fred Kagan, who authored the bribe-the-Sunni-insurgents-and-leave plan known as The Surge in Iraq, is his strategy advisor. He has gone on 60 minutes to tout his plan. He has given a speech to an international crowd in London. His allies, one would hope not his own office, leaked his classified troop request report to the press. His disdain for Obama, his commander-in-chief, is visible, quotable, and wholly insubordinate. Obama is likely too smart to fire him, and McChrystal is probably too dumb to resign. I suspect McC's superior, Gen. David Petraeus, has masterfully set up a good soldier to take a fall for him.

When it comes to making war or anything else, Fred Kagan and the NeoCons are turds in a picnic cooler. One must assume the questions, simple questions above were put to their report, and no good answers were blurted. Obama today announced, as expected, that there will be no withdrawal. That sounds bland and depressing enough, but he also set no timeline on a decision for escalation, no numbers on additional troops at all. In other words, it is the omission which speaks loudest, and he's breaking the news to the NeoCons softly. Refer again to the body language in the picture above.

In D.C. Newspeak, Obama's announcement today signifies No Buildup. There may be a token compromise (a.k.a. Operation Kevlar Chandelier), but bottom line, this is an infuriating hog-tying for the NeoCons and their Generals, and they're off in basements and bars this evening uttering vile oaths, making pacts and desperately sharpening knives. Having been brilliantly stalemated, the best they can do is cry, "leisurely," and "too deliberate!" For once since his election, I stand in admiration and applaud: Barack Hussein Obama didn't give them the satisfaction of a clear "No."

Saying No To The Long War For One Brief Week

Let's see, now...what unfortunate coincidence befell the last sitting President who said "No" to the Pentagon? Hmm. Wish I had a better memory. Anyhow, Obama's annoying re-consideration of his decision this Spring to expand troop levels in Afghanistan, which I had discussed in a recent prescriptive post (A Solution for Afghanistan: Changing the Mission to Observe and Contain) was sure to generate swift repercussions from the military industrial complex crowd. And they came, mild openers such as these:

1) Republicans are telling Congressional Democrats that if B.O. withdraws, they'll personally be blamed for slaughtered virgins raining from Afghanistan's skies;

2) General Stan McChrystal has preemptively threatened to resign if he doesn't get his 40,000 more troops;

3) Impetus is gathering for congressional hearings about O's mishandling of the Afghanistan war, with a parade of generals and policy analysts. Mutiny, in other words, is afoot;

4) The Defense Secretary, Bob Gates, went on CNN Sunday and appeared to contradict his boss, saying an exit strategy would be a "strategic mistake;"

5) General David Petraeus, more on him later, again denied that he's thinking about a presidential run in 2012.

These wails aren't keening over nuke-bearing Russkies and these breasts aren't being beaten over invading Chinese hordes, but over the prospect of disillusioned donut salesmen trying to figure out how to mix acetone and peroxide together and hurt other people as well. The Complex will turn up the heat on a recalcitrant White House, and the most likely political response will be re-emphasizing al-Qaeda and de-emphasizing the Taliban.

This switch of framework can be easily packaged for public consumption by explaining that al-Qaeda is offensive in nature and the Taliban is defensive, therefore a troop buildup to chase the Taliban in Afghanistan doesn't make sense--but, for the sake of the populace in the areas we've made promises, withdrawal must be very gradual and we Will Not Abandon Them. This political solution will please few other than politicians, is almost as bad operationally as a build-up, and will probably result in a creeping expansion anyway. In the spirit of the times, I hereby take the liberty of christening it Operation Kevlar Chandelier.

While it's possible B.O. will have the political courage to put his head on the line and withdraw from his Dumb War in accord with what we already do against aQ on the cheap in places like the Sudan, it's a much longer shot than any Mr. Oswald took from the Book Depository. Thankfully, a commenter named VietnamVet on Sic Semper Tyrannis (link on right) repeats myself for me:

"The Long War is a losing proposition; it will break the bank and break the force.”

I have long been a proponent of containment. The only force that works to pacify an insurrection is a native police. If an empire is going to occupy a foreign country it has to work the ethnic divisions and build a native state that can police itself. This worked more or less until WWII. However, the AK-47, IED, cell phones, internet, and excess oil money make it impossible for a Jewish or a Christian country to occupy and pacify the Muslim people.

Containment and Energy Independence are the only strategy that will work for Western Civilization. These are the only schemes that won’t bankrupt the Middle Class. Unfortunately for America’s future, all the government Stakeholders have a game to play and wedge politics has neutered the Middle Class voter.

The infuriating fact that we're certain to lose doesn't matter. Rory Stewart, who knows the area better than any talk show analyst, recently put it so:

"...basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is a little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: “We’re planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?” And we say, “Don’t drive your car off the cliff.” And they say, “No, no, no. That decision’s already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?” And you say, “Why by all means wear a seatbelt.” And they say, “Okay, we consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart."

Post-Kennedy US foreign policy starts coming together once you realize the United States Middle Class is viewed in certain circles as an accident which should never have happened. Any straps extending underneath that class are now introduced as entitlements. Geopolitics were once games of chance to the inbred hemophiliac royals who had their private parties and scorecards and something like it is happening again. Senseless wastes and gambles begin making sense against that backdrop and the drama of tawdry and conveniently far-off places works as well as Western movies. The Apaches are out there, planting IEDs.

Thus we play the fools with time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us. But there is still an ember, there is still a glimmer, and I still blow.

No One Could Have Predicted The Pentagon Would Repeatedly Beg For More Troops in Afghanistan

The median age in the tribal region known as Afghanistan is 17.5 years old. Over 50% of its population is 15-64 and there are roughly 14 million Pashtunis in the provinces where NATO has something less than 80,000 combat troops. It can be deduced that 3-4 million armed, hostile and clanned-up males are living large in those parts, not to mention getting visits and aid from 28 million sympathetic Pashtuni cousins over the porous Pakistan border. Nation-building with 100,000 troops there simply doesn't cut it, a fool's errand in a half-assed war.

A NYT article on the nature of things to come, the first official announcement of Serious Deterioration issues from the Pentagon, a mere four months after the start of the Af-Pak Surge, in 'US Military Says Its Forces Insufficient:'

The commanders emphasized problems in southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents continue to bombard towns and villages with rockets despite a new influx of American troops, and in eastern Afghanistan, where the father-and-son-led Haqqani network of militants has become the main source of attacks against American troops and their Afghan allies.

The possibility that more troops will be needed in Afghanistan presents the Obama administration with another problem in dealing with a nearly eight-year war that has lost popularity at home, compounded by new questions over the credibility of the Afghan government, which has just held an as-yet inconclusive presidential election beset by complaints of fraud.

The assessments come as the top American commander in the country, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has been working to complete a major war strategy review, and as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, described a worsening situation in Afghanistan despite the recent addition of 17,000 American troops ordered by the Obama administration and the extra security efforts surrounding the presidential election.

“I think it is serious and it is deteriorating,” Admiral Mullen said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics.” He added that General McChrystal was still completing his review and had not yet requested additional troops on top of those added by Mr. Obama.

Clearly, then, we must give McChrystal more money to throw onto Fortuna's roulette wheel. He aggressively campaigned in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back ("Taliban Now Winning") to go whole hog, more or less saying the Taliban were about to overrun a Wal-mart near you.

The odds against him are even more steeply fun now after last week's election wreck. In short, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah (nice media ring to that name!) will dispute the election, cite widespread reports of fraud, and probably force a run-off with Hamid Karzai, who was already known as "The Mayor of Kabul." Now he will be known as "Ridiculous Shithead Who Can't Even Rig An Election In The Most Corrupt Country on Earth."

To quote a general now lost to history in the Google Age, meaning I once read something attributed to him, probably in David Halberstam's 'A Bright Shining Lie,' and then googled for it and couldn't find his reference or his name, but anyway here goes: "It'd take 500,000 troops 8 years, and even then you couldn't do it." At the time, the general was estimating the number of troops it would take to stabilize Vietnam and turn it into a democracy. For Afghanistan, start with a million troops, think 20 years and then hope you get lucky. Quick, somebody pass Obama another bong hit.

Shiva Gets His Nukes Back

Against the week's chaotic backdrop, a high-impact foreign policy decision was made without perceptible coverage or forbearance, one which signals a major shift in risk factors. Congress and the White House passed legislation allowing a nuclear deal with India, despite the latter's refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or allow transparent inspections of planned reactors. Under the deal, only civilian sites can be inspected, and India defines what "civilian" means at any time.

In other words as of today, India is an official sorcerer's apprentice to The Bomb, which will be made on their soil by United States nuclear engineers. Behind the kabuki screen, America's long, strained, ever-hopeful, ever-cynical relationship with Pakistan has been scrapped and there is a new backstop in the "Global War on Terror." India will be used to strike fear in the hearts of Pakistan's generals, and, it is hoped, as a way to split up an emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) Bloc.

Proponents of the deal push it as enlightened self interest, pointing to its positive effects on energy, strategic alliance, and economy. Those hopeful positions give scant cover to the move's desperation in ending the 30-year ban on nuclear fuel and technology sales to India. Its successful tests in 1974 provided the major inspiration for having a Non-Proliferation Treaty in the first place, and for Pakistan to clandestinely develop its own Bomb. Given their acrimonious past, the circumstances surrounding the formation of Pakistan, and the incipient defeat of the West in Afghanistan, it's difficult to see how a nuclear incident between it and India can be long avoided.

Large Hadron Collider Rap

If you read the headline, "Scientists Seek to Re-Enact Big Bang," you can be forgiven for automatically forming a few crystals of concern and asking, "Now what hells are you damned fools going to unleash?"

While smashing nuclei together at the speed of light (probably) won't create a black hole strong enough to suck Lake Geneva into some nth-dimension, an ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) success in creating dark matter and quark-gluon soups will open a new age of high-energy science.

First, beady-eyed scientists will claim they can weaponize the reaction and make the atomic bomb look like a holiday kiddie-sparkler, which is why the US paid half a billion bucks to CERN for observer rights. On the bright side of the dark side, even more scientists will try to figure out how to use it to make clean energy, which is why the CERN consortium spent $4 billion on building the world's most advanced superconductive 17-mile long underground particle accelerator. It's located in an area famous for making the world's most precise watches.

A 23-year old intern from Michigan State, Kate McAlpine, wrote and produced a rap video while working on ALICE. It's delightful, instructive, and possibly the best argument ever for getting Midwestern white girls into rap.

In For A Penny, In For An Armageddon

As a Russian carrier task force bobbed through the Med on its way to the Levant, Syrian president Bashar Assad (who before the NeoCon Surprise in Georgia and the Polish Missile Crisis had been working on a peace treaty with Israel) was in Russia. Assad assented to hosting a "defensive missile shield" and a Russian base in his country. Let's see now, for Fundies waiting on the Rapture, is it Gog who will play Russia, and was it Magog who'll be China, or was it the other way around? Saddam Hussein, Babylon the Great, the Anti-Christ, numerology, the King of the North et cetera, you just can't tell the players without a program:

The Russian aircraft carrier “Admiral Kuznetsov” is heading from Murmansk towards the Mediterranean and the Syrian port of Tartus. The mission comes after Syrian President Bashar Assad said he is open for a Russian base in the area. The “Admiral Kuznetsov”, part of the Northern Fleet and Russia’s only aircraft carrier, will head a Navy mission to the area. The mission will also include the missile cruiser “Moskva” and several submarines, Newsru.com reports.

President Assad in meetings in Moscow this week expressed support to Russia’s intervention in South Ossetia and Georgia. He also expressed interest in the establishment of Russian missile air defense facilities on his land.

The “Admiral Kuznetsov” also last year headed a navy mission to the Mediterranean. Then, on the way from the Kola Peninsula and south, it stopped in the North Sea where it conducted a navy training exercise in the immediate vicinity of Norwegian offshore oil installations.

Alternative energy is lovely stuff, but oil is the hottest source there is, and civilizations have shown a pronounced preference to pursue the #1 option; plus, as Phil of Perils of Caffeine in the Evening once observed, "We're humans. We burn shit." Less sagely, Condi Rice said last week, "The Cold War is over," and I sure hope she's wrong again. Because if she's right, she's too right. Give us a Cold War again, give us Nikita Kruschev in Manhattan banging his shoe on a table at Maxim's demanding service, hell, bring on a caviar embargo. It's better than the same old Bush Administration "who, me?" looks after another botch-n-blot on the escutcheon, wiser than the harsh retaliations of signing a missile deal with Poland, suspending NATO's ties with Moscow, and launching more meetings on Georgia joining NATO.

Living off the tampered hydroponics fed to us in the Media Hothouse, its easy for anyone, Big People included, to miss the primary facts. Modern armies are the most enthusiastic users of oil that ever existed. The Russians have a much-improved army, and do not need to back down. They can beat the US and its proxies on the ground in Poland, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Ukraine without breaking a sweat, and all are areas they have controlled for most of the past three thousand years. As the Russian President remarked today,

"We're not afraid of anything (including) the prospect of a Cold War..."If they want to preserve good relations with Russia, they will understand the reason for taking such a decision (for parliament to recognize independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and the situation will be calm."

Now they are about to have an aircraft carrier parked just off "America's strongest ally," and they have no intention of allowing control of an area's hydrocarbons to pass to Western oligarchies, i.e., Dick and Dubya's friends. On the map above, two little countries separate Russia from Iran, each with a new pipeline running oil out through them to the west. As a demonstration of intentions, Russian forces cut the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline which passes through Georgia carrying 4% of western supply, and then, when Georgia tried to get the oil shipments out by rail, they cut the tracks.

It'ss unclear whether Russia will let either resume, but they can throttle them at will, and this changes the power calculus in the entire region if not the world. The Ukraine must keep Russia happy. Azerbaijan must keep Russia happy. Israel must keep Russia happy. For Georgia, it would be wise for its president, the one who listened to American admonitions to attack Russia, to step down; his own people, the ones who gave him 96% of the vote in a free and fair election, know he's a liability.

As it happens, Dick Cheney has gone on a diplomatic mission to Georgia, the Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. If anyone is disturbed by finding the words "Dick Cheney" and "diplomatic mission" in the same sentence, why yes, you should be. (Welcome to Club Paying Attention, and here is your complimentary Xanax.) Unfortunately, he's back on the stage after an all-too-short internal exile. Cheney's prime directive is to suck oil and gas out from the Caucasus and Caspian Basins in order to slow the long-term growth rates of Russia, India, and China. That's about where the analysis ends in his cost-benefit equation, because the benefits of getting those resources to him easily outweigh the costs of millions of dead, and it's not like higher energy costs are a deterrent.

As a Pumphead, Cheney cannot back off from the finite prizes he covets, believes them to be in our civilization's long-term best interests, and doesn't recognize how bad his position, or rather our position, has gotten relative to Russia. He is horribly prone to further over-reach even as Israel, precious Israel wavers. As the pipelines go, so go they, and it was Panglossian hubris, a willful denial of Russia's military capabilities and interests, to install a major new line 70-80 miles away from its southern border.

While an American Maniac plays out his part, we will be very lucky indeed if he doesn't promise a military response to Georgia. They'll ask for one, although Bush would first send troops to Atlanta (h/t to reader Jon for that quip). A good outcome is one in which Ossetia and Abkhazia break away from Georgia in return for the pipeline flowing again. In that case, the bell rings, and we can go back to our corners, take a breather before the next round and try to figure out how to win on points. The bad outcome, which should not, must definitely not happen is for a US Carrier Battle Group to deploy to the Med. That's the signal for when the Pipeline Wars start going very, very bad.

Fear of Russia Ends Israeli Support For Georgia

First off, if you're an English speaker, every story proffered on the Russia-Georgia conflict is 100-proof propaganda. Next, the most important story you haven't heard is that Israel is betting against US success vs. Russia. Paradoxically, and despite Israel's typically overweening, convoluted conceits, this is very heartening, since it means they think the US won't go to the mat and start launching its nuclear arsenal. Apparently, they also believe the Russians can handle US Navy, Air Force, and Army units going into Project Georgia in the names of "humanitarian aid" and "peacekeeping." Israel understandably wants the output of the BP-sponsored Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan whoever controls it, yet until now they've been neck-deep in arming and training the Georgian military. How deep? Georgia's minister of defense, for example, is a citizen of Israel.

Still, it's tough to be sanguine, or resist going into seizures or duck-n-cover positions. The Bush Administration is about as dangerous as a badger on crystal meth, and as we've repeatedly seen, they're so dumb they can screw up a soda straw. If they send military personnel into a war zone, as they announced their intentions today, I don't see how some of them won't get zapped. While the Russians have already achieved their negotiating objectives vs. NATO-BushCo, it will be next to impossible for them to restrain the itchy trigger fingers of individual, low-level units flush with easy victories.

I'd love to be the bearer of good tidings, I'd love to regale with tales about how Water Engines, sunny pyrolysis and wave energy will save the earth and our asses, and that we'll all sing Joni Mitchell songs in harmony. Ice cream castles in the air, feather canyons everywhere, yep. Unfortunately, this is probably the closest we've been to nuclear conflagration since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This isn't pessimism, just a cold-around-the-heart look at the factors. On the happy side, having the Israelis bail out on arms sales to the Georgians, renouncing their military sponsorship and offering a no-confidence vote on the Bushies, well, that's a reason to not pack up the fam right now and head to Saskatchewan. If Israel is packing up to leave the the tattered hulk of America's security umbrella, much of which they've built, pay condo fees on, and effectively control, it's a high decibel, panic-button message.

On the other hand, look at the body language of Bush, SecState Condi Rice, and SecDef Gates in the above photo as they march out of a press conference after threatening Russia with reprisals. They look like a beaten football team, but still dangerously angry. They're not going to shake any hands and say, "what a great game." They were all called back from vacations, they're grim, resigned, resentful, and their collective arrogance, the long bearing of our national privilege, is steeped in all the rages and fears of failing Priam. It's life's illusions I recall, and will these people lay off the nitrous oxide and learn humility anytime soon? (Don't answer.) Meanwhile, blog-friend Naj reports that three new carrier groups, including the amphibious invasion carrier USS Iwo Jima, have arrived on station in the Persian Gulf. (Happy thoughts, Christmas songs, happy thoughts.) From Israel Today:

A top Georgian envoy in Israel on Sunday urged the Jewish state to use whatever leverage it has to put pressure on Russia to pull its forces out of the small Caucasus nation. But while voicing support for Georgian territorial integrity, Israel decided instead to appease Russia by halting all arms sales to Tbilisi.

Israel has sold some $500 million worth of military equipment to Georgia over the past few years, and top Israeli military experts have been involved in training Georgian armed forces.

Israeli soldiers who participated in training Georgian forces as recently as four months ago told Ha'aretz that they were not surprised when hostilities broke out. "There was an atmosphere of war about to break out. ...From my point of view, the battles of the past few days were to be expected," said one soldier.

As Russian forces invaded Georgia late last week and the two nations engaged in what is increasingly being called a full-scale war, Israel's leadership expressed concerns that Moscow could retaliate for continued Israeli military support of Georgia by selling advanced arms to Iran and Syria.

Defense officials cited by The Jerusalem Post later said that arms sales to Georgia had ceased several months back, after Israeli authorities became alarmed by urgent requests for large supplies of weapons by Georgian authorities apparently aware that they were about to go to war with Russia.

Said one Israeli official, "We have good relations with [Russia and Georgia], and don't want to back either in this conflict. We therefore made a decision to drastically minimize sales of weapons to Georgia."

Many Israelis expressed frustration with what they said amounted to abandoning Israel's allies in Georgia to appease Russia, even though advanced Russian weapons have been reaching Iran, Syria and their terrorist proxy Hizballah for years.

Israel is home to some 80,000 Georgian Jews who would also like to see Jerusalem provide outright backing to the small Christian nation.

Georgia's other major military backer, the United States, has said it will continue to provide support and training to the Georgian army, and warned Russia that its military escalations could severely damage relations between Moscow and Washington.

The Unbearable Lameness Of Being A Neocon, Pt. I

Once upon a time, in a valley far, far away, I was an anti-communist, and for fun, I mapped Soviet advances through the world in tints of red. They completely controlled 8 other countries; 6 more they ruled by proxy; over 15 were solidly under their sphere of influence; a dozen or so were struggling against communist-funded insurgencies; 10 had signed mutual cooperation treaties, and a few, which I festooned with pink candy stripes, were teetering on the fence. I was among the last crop of prospective Cold Warriors, when the Soviet Union was at its largest and all foreign policy exercises were performed with red magnifying glasses, so we could cast a leviathan into something pythonically vast.

Every graph, every veracious view proved the pernicious, creeping ideology of the Enemy was jeunesse doree, about to break through and burrow like syphilis into our closest allies and dearest resources. Above all, it was impossible to argue with the maps, which responded to questions and had inexhaustible vocabularies of 3 words: you...are...losing. The maps were all-pervading, and if you asked your professors or classmates, "So...what are Malaysia's prospects," they would refer to the arbiter of all things geopolitical and it would say, "You are losing." You could ask the map any question at all, such as, Is Greece really still in the balance? "You are losing." Will I get an 'A' in this class? "You are losing." Was the movie 'Red Dawn' made by homosexual communist sympathizers? "You are losing."

Panic is a conventional wisdom. Few wiser heads dared predict or intuit how quickly and soon the Red Tide would recede, and given that, you'd think forgiving the people who came to be called Neocons would be easier. It is not, no, decidedly not. In no small part that's because they're still wonderfully positioned to screw up the world yet more, are collectively unrepentant and unreformed, and have always been transparent fools. No one seems to even understand what they are or where they came from, and although the stars of their uber-nationalist lunacies may be setting, they might not be, and are still high in the sky. Why were such twittering machines, these ungainly and vacuous intellectual monstrosities, ever allowed to ascend so far?

There's a story, of course. The far right, having shot itself in the foot, ever-desperate and facing irrelevance, searched for a magical narrative. Once they found it, they became the loudest voices in American anti-Soviet policy circles, drumbeating the idea that strong religions, whether Christian or Muslim or Jew, were the best way to thwart communist threats. Surprisingly, amongst much that was ludicrous, this was not. The Soviets were quick to compete with and suppress religions, being structures inimical to themselves wherever they went, so the idea had solid on-the-ground basis.

For example, the Catholic Church was playing a strong, probably indispensable role in Poland's Solidarity movement, eventually tempting the Vatican into a radical departure from tradition by naming its first Polish pope. Hence, it was understandable the US would embrace fundamentalist Muslims and Jews as anti-communist, pro-stability allies, particularly when newly vertiginous waves of Christian fundamentalism were swelling, and I rode their crests and troughs off the strongest American point-break.

Reagan was the embodiment of pro-religious foreign policy prescription, so his sympathizers engaged with the Iranian mullahs well prior to his election to strike deals: arms for the return of American government hostages, to be consummated after his victory, and access for selected companies. They found much to like, and each side immediately shared an intuitive understanding of the other, not perhaps as fondly as Republicans would get along and actively cooperate with al-Qaeda operatives and Muslim Brotherhood surrogates during their formation in Pakistan, but the mullahs and the Reaganites were deeply religious social radicals who had wandered long in their respective wildernesses, outcasts who were brought back in triumph by resounding activism and majorities.

Few in wider policy circles cared much about Iran beyond its oil, and it was always Jimmy Carter's misfortune to take the phrase "we will not negotiate with terrorists" seriously. The mullahs had been toughened by austere decades of Western repression, any human rights issues were not a concern, nor were the finer points of comparative religion. By contrast, Carter and the Democrats had probably set events in faster motion by regularly undermining Iran's Shah over human rights abuses. With the proxy overthrown, from a Reaganite viewpoint and from nearly everyone else's it was better to have unpredictable Khomeinist mullahs in charge of Iran than an unpredictable, democratic, Bambi-tastic government within easy reach of Russian weapons and aid. The mullah regime could be relied upon to quickly purge the communists, and Reagan policy was to leave it alone until further notice. As for the Shah, Beverly Hills had always suited him best.

Under Reagan, rapprochement with pious forms of islam was followed through on as policy all over the Mid-East, most aggressively under Bill Casey in the mid-1980s. The notion was seen as straightforward and sensible, and it was (so to speak) orthodox. It was pointless to argue against, and even if a far-right insurgency were not in the middle of joyously taking over a government, it's always hard to argue against the quick fix.

With monacle-wearing hindsight, it's easy to see predictable consequences of encouraging the rise of disparate theocracies in whereabouts considered absolutely critical to US interests. And it's easy to notice that the stage set of "Dances with Mullahs" is where the struggling Neocons and their simple-minded Kantian philosophical frameworks of aggression first responded to a casting call and won some parts in a major play, 'Morning in America.' It's where they learned their lines, fine-tuned their performances, and were richly rewarded. When the show closed down, they departed to work on another production, which I'll pick up on in Part Two. Say what you want about Neoconian acting quality, but those stage props, sheesh!--they're to die for.

Crude Awakening: Barrels Of Oil Per Ounce Of Gold

As we teeter off the tipping point of a non-negotiable way of life, we collectively suffer from multiple illusions, these still shored up by past observations logged by our inductive social brains. We're like Bertrand Russell's examplary thought-chickens, so convinced of our keepers' benevolence by continued feedings that we say, "See, these humans ain't so bad, look how good they been to us lot! Worth trading a few eggs for, I'd say. Hey what's that sharp metal thing Farmer John's carryin'?" The past lulls us into thinking it's always prologue. It's not, and having been outside this box, my thinking is unorthodox.

I say Farmer John is bent on murder. To wit, the diverging lines in the graph above. The blue and red lines ascending skywards on Jacob's ladder represent the Dollars and Euros required to buy a barrel of oil. The purple line snailing its flat path across the chart is the number of barrels of oil an ounce of gold will buy. Oil and gold are commodities, so they have intrinsic value; dollars and euros are pieces of paper, so they do not. The price relationship between oil and gold has been remarkably stable for the past 70 years. Therefore it's not so much the price of oil which is going up; it's the value of currencies which is going down. That's the key to understanding what is happening to the US place in the world economy, and its likely implications, and whether or not the Eagle is become as paper, as the Bear once was.

Most analysts would probably point to Peak Oil as the cause of oil's price increases, but US demand for oil fell year-on-year by 4% this January, world oil production went up by 2.5%, and world consumption increased by only 2% over the same period. Refiners such as Valero have cut production, called off expansion, and laid off workers because of low margins, yet gasoline reserves are at the highest level in the past 16 years. In this case, Peak Oil or the gas and oil "shortage" touted by the US President and his Secretary of Energy are illusions, and ungloving their hidden hands is easy.

Investment in speculation probably accounts for more than 50% of oil's price increase. Not surprising, since price volatility attracts speculation, and sustained price movements build their own momentum to create price bubbles. The total market in oil futures was worth $9 billion in 2001. It's now worth $250 billion. As the speculation extends, the more it attracts new entrants, and there's little reason to think oil speculation is in a late stage.

But there's something deeper going on than extraordinary oomph in one commodity. Across the board, commodities are up by more than double their year-prior price. Copper, rice, bauxite, silver, chicken feed, flour, you name it. Wheat futures went up by 70% on one Friday a couple of months back. Such broad-based sustained buying is consistent with a flight from currency into alternative values, and it's never happened to this extent in my lifetime. Granted, oil is a special case due to heightened global political risk and to clear domestic policy intentions to work up price--with both POTUS and VPOTUS being influential oil men, they've rewarded their own.

But two causal roots are anchored still further in the earth, and both are tolling knells to continued American leadership in the world. Each is a clear signal of lost fiscal confidence, at least in US tender. Primo, foreign banks want to unload gigantic dollar holdings, and they've been doing so. China alone has a $1.5 trillion reserve and has been hoarding commodities for years now. Secondo, the dollar monopoly on oil exchange is now broken, and it's why current US leadership is still considering an attack on Iran.

Suffocating Iran's anti-dollar initiative is critical to maintaining dollar hegemony. If that cannot be done, a day will come when the US government can't print up paper and buy all-you-can-eat energy with it. That means no operational military might, no further capacity to borrow. Government actions would have to be earned by building foreign exchange reserves. I'll turn to Brother Tim (who runs the always-principled, oft-provocative Blog of Revelation) and surface his comment on a previous post (What's That Got To Do With The Price Of Rice?):

The Iranians have now opened up their oil bourse, accepting mainly petro-euros and yen, and a few lesser hard currencies. Absolutely no petro-dollars accepted.

Last September Iran started accepting only yen from the Japanese. The Japanese and the Chinese account for a large part of Iranian oil exports, around 20% each.

Iranian production is capable of 6 million barrels/day, as witnessed in the 70s and 80s. Iranian consumption is just over 1 million barrels/day. They're now producing around 4 million barrels/day, exporting 3. So, roughly 3 million barrels/day has been pulled off the open market (NYMEX & IPE).

Add to that 'Private Oil'. This is backroom dealing between producers and consumers, effectively eliminating the middle-man (NYMEX & IPE). An example of this is the Chinese deal with Sudan to get 200,000 barrels/day @ $60.00/barrel for 10 years, in exchange for investment capital for infrastructure and exploration. Russia and Venezuela have made similar deals with China. Every barrel that is sold or traded in this way is one more barrel taken off the open market. THIS is a big part of the rising oil prices, and will surely get worse as time goes by.

Many think the New York Mercantile Exchange and London's International Petroleum Exchange are invincible. They believe that since the two largest Exchanges are basing oil on the dollar, that the dollar cannot fail. However, when those two Exchanges collapse (and they will) the dollar will go belly-up with them. Every barrel bought with yen, euro, or renminbi, is a barrel lost to the dollar.

Every barrel bought with yen, euro, or renminbi is a barrel lost to the dollar. Because it weaken's the dollar's liquidity. The economic conflict is broken down the old capitalist/communist fault line, except now the capitalists owe the communists huge sums of money. That chart above explains much about how the war is going, and nearly everything about the United States' choice of enemies. Tim, you seem to have an excellent grasp here, and I'd appreciate it if you could expand as you see fit.

Well That Didn't Take Long

The day after presidential aspirant General "Surgemaster" Petraeus took over CENTCOM command from Admiral William Fallon, two Iranian boats were fired on in the Persian Gulf. Oil went over $120 a barrel, a 20% raise in the last month. In concert, Joint Chiefs Chair Adm. Mike Mullen focused on Iran's role in Iraq yesterday, (NYTimes, WaPo) stating that military action against Iran is okey-dokey.

The nation's top military officer said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq.....

"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability," he said at a Pentagon news conference.

More Pentagon talking points delivered to the NY Times:

The administration has, in fact, discussed whether to attack training camps, safe houses and weapons storehouses inside Iran that intelligence reports say are being used by the Quds Force to train fighters, according to two senior administration officials.

Looks like Cheney has some room left to run. People who say the US can't attack Iran, because to do so would be illogical, are very nice, well-meaning folk whom I'd dearly love to believe.

4,000 US Soldiers Killed

Wrapping up a nine-day overseas trip to Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, about the effect on the nation of today's grim milestone of at least 4,000 U.S. deaths over the five-year Iraq war:

"A lot of men and women sign up because sometimes they will see developments," Cheney said. "For example, 9/11 stimulated a lot of folks to volunteer for the military because they wanted to be involved in defending the country."

I took the liberty of expostulating further, to what he was really saying:

"Not only did we let them defend their country, we even paid them their monthly $1,600.04 checks. With free medical care on top of that. They wanted to get involved, so we got them involved. Even better, we added excitement to their joyless, pointless little lives, and I'm told by the experts that being blown up is the ultimate experience. You can't find that kind of stimulation working at a Walmart, can you? And for all the National Guard people who signed up to have a little fun a weekend a month, and are whining? well they got to come along for the ride, the privilege to serve their country for as many as three tours so far. This is the Long War, the Global War on Terror, and caveat emptor is latin for being American."

Cheney wasn't content to stop there. After the reporter brought up the unexpected burdens placed on military families, the Vice President reminded her that the biggest burden is carried by President Bush. Yeah. It must be terrible for him. Maybe one day a returning, highly-trained volunteer soldier will alleviate his suffering.

They're Not Gone Yet

Like the muted, hockey-masked monster 'Jason' in Halloween: The Recapitulation Pt. XIX after he's been run through with a telephone pole, drowned in an acid vat, attacked by mechanical sharks and then feted with a flamethrower flambee, it's tempting to heave a sigh of relief and say, "Thank god they're finally dead" about the minions of Castle Bush. Unfortunately, that's not how horror movies work. The monsters have to be really, really, really dead, as in obliterated, and even then you know it's only a matter of time for them to some-how, some-way find their way back. And these things are not dead yet.

As proof neither the fork-tongued zombie reptiles nor their ambitions have yet been thwarted, they just made the CENTCOM commander resign over a minor magazine article. Regarded as the best strategic mind in the US command, Admiral William Fallon was quoted by a source (probably a Senate confirmation committee member) as privately saying an attack on Iran "Will not happen on my watch." The anonymous confirmation source also related Fallon as saying:

"You know what choices I have. I'm a professional. There are several of us trying to put the crazies back into the box."

Fallon's resignation comes in the wake of this month's Esquire article, one which focused on his resistance to administration warmongering. Amongst other things, he vetoed the deployment of a third carrier task force to the Persian Gulf last spring, a move which blocked the surprised Cheney Faction from further attack preparations. At the time, there were conflicting reports from the White House and the Navy about the USS Nimitz Task Force's destination, shortly after I sounded a blog alarm: three carrier battle groups were about to join two amphibious marine assault carrier groups off Iran. Not good.

A Navy press release closely followed the Nimitz departure, stated that the USS Eisenhower would be rotated out of the Gulf and would not overlap with the Nimitz on-station; the mixed signals can be retroactively disambiguated, and it looks like the call to deescalate was the CENTCOM commander's alone. Last week's Esquire article described his contribution, and predicted the possible effects of his demise:

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. [...]

Just as Fallon took over Centcom last spring, the White House was putting itself on a war footing with Iran. Almost instantly, Fallon began to calmly push back against what he saw as an ill-advised action. Over the course of 2007, Fallon's statements in the press grew increasingly dismissive of the possibility of war, creating serious friction with the White House.

Last December, when the National Intelligence Estimate downgraded the immediate nuclear threat from Iran, it seemed as if Fallon's caution was justified. But still, well-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don't want a commander standing in their way.

If you've spent any time boning up on who The Crazies are and the crypts they come from, you know they're Washington's most experienced politicians, and that their box must be incinerated and its ashes scattered before full denouement and decompression. You have to hope Fallon has plenty more Friends.

Kosovo: Independent State, Or Mephitic Gas?

On the surface, what with all the favorable press coverage and foreign endorsements, you'd think Kosovars did a good thing by declaring independence from Serbia. Nobody really knows where Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania are, because they're next to Macedonia and Montenegro, and nobody knows where they are either. Sure, Alexander the Great was born in Macedonia, but that was a long quaint time ago, and few people have recently been blessed with any idea why they should care about Serbia and Kosovo.

So here goes. This is how crashingly, igneously ignorant the erupting situation is, and how cold-blooded its planned containment: Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia is like the Alamo declaring independence from Texas, only worse. The brief aggregation called Yugoslavia (or "south of Slavland") was once formed from a chunky stew of violent religious migrations and wars. In their fundamental concept of nationhood, the Serbians (Greek Orthodox) persevered over persecution, holding fast against all comers. They still see themselves fighting off Muslims (Bosnians), regular Catholics (Croats), teeming Albanians (Various Bastards), al-Qaeda (Saudi Foreign Legion), and the Nazis (formerly played by themselves, now by NATO). I'm greatly simplifying the area's bloody, complex history, and skipping over an unsavory present. The point is, Serbians see themselves doing all this fighting across ancient and recent history, right from the heart of Kosovo, and they make Texans look like Comanche-cuddling candy-asses.

The US embassy in Belgrade was burned as a declaration of war. Most US diplomats and Foreign Service staffers have been sent home. The burning isn't going to stop, and it isn't going to "cool down" with a little diplomacy and PR. Serbians could care less if a tidy Western oil pipeline should cut through Kosovo, they understand they will get bombed with US warplanes once more, and they are turning to the Russians for more and better weapons. If NATO plans to go in there to protect Kosovo's independence, it will face a vicious insurgency it's not prepared for, one it can't quell without serial-killer determination.

Yet US and NATO support for Kosovan independence is an entirely logical extension of what was started in Clinton's 1998 intervention. Then as now, it isn't about freedom, self-determination, or halting ethnic genocide. Kosovo is a pawn in a cavalier, supercalifragilistic game in which our players acknowledge neither the limits of their intellects nor their powers. The reason we should care now? It's not just about them. The protectorate is perched on Russia's southern doorstep, and this time, Serbia is set to serve as a proxy, if not more, in an energy war widening from the Mid-east to the Caspian to the Balkans. Western oil companies have been unsuccessfully seeking a transport route into the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles since 1994, and they want to build one through an expanded and secured Albania. Enter Russian premier Vlad Putin from stage left:

"Those who do this, subjugating their allies to their will and by force of arms, are not thinking about the consequences of what they are doing. This is a double-edged sword, one whose second edge will snap back into their gobs sooner or later."

The best diplomatic outcome in Kosovo is to not take our players seriously, and cajole the opposition into treading water for a year. Many see BushCo as simply a continuation of US aggression, and true enough. But it's also an apotheosis, one overstretching everywhere. We've arrived at the confused, panicked, unjust cave in A Passage To India, and every noise yelled into the cave returns an unwelcome 'Boum!' The menu for the next US leader will be where to retreat, how to consolidate, how far and and how fast. As for friendship, may well we come to it, but even the earth and sky seem to say, 'Not yet.'

Information Warfare: Mid-East Has Its Intertubes Tied

It's worth wondering why the fiber optic cables to Iran, Egypt, and Dubai were cut. While making some sport of it in my first post, and the title of this one, it's also cause for serious concerns. Ones I didn't vent at first. Conspiracy theories? Uhn-uh. To think 5 cables got cut in a total of 6 places from ships dropping anchors, the only explanation offered thus far, is to buy a lifetime membership in the Ignorance Is Bliss Gated Community.

Under current US and Israeli war doctrines, knocking out the enemy's communications infrastructure is Priority One. Those undersea cables would be the first thing to go, because if you're making war, crippling them is risk-free, high-payoff. It not only seriously degrades the enemy's advanced communications, but it also gives you mastery of the public relations message to the world. Al-Jazeera can't transfer, upload, or air video over the internet in real time. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), not to mention the virulent nation itself, knows that it is first and foremost a propaganda machine. An awesomely effective one. (Remember, it's The Holocaust, and none other holocausts shalt come before it.)

Israel has to be the prime suspect in this gig, with the US a close second or an outright participant. Various other possibilities readily present themselves: countries wanting more censorship, Islamic extremists, a self-inflicted test, a psy-op...but each of these is also relatively easy to dismiss.

Naj from Iran Facts finds the censorship angle ludicrous, since manual, ad hoc measures are fully effective in the eyes of her former government. It's highly doubtful Islamic extremists possess the coordination or inclination to carry out such an operation, nor with such a light touch. A self-inflicted test on infrastructure effects carries some appeal, yet it's a stretch to imagine exactly what multinational Mid-east body would've wanted to conduct one. An intelligence psy-op study is even more appealing, but it would almost have to be a rogue operation, one whose scale makes it unlikely; the Mid-East is an active war zone where the military takes precedence.

A telecommunications professional of long acquaintance briefly mused that the cables may be tapped; while technically possible, bouncing light signals out of thousands of underwater optic strands is arduous and, due to signal loss, obvious, compared to sniffing right on the server nodes. Still, surveillance can't be ruled out, with resulting service disruption playing nicely into multiple purposes.

While very bad, I don't think the internet vasectomy signals immediate war as an attack would've (probably) already happened. It would be difficult to imagine, even granting the past and current imperial wooden-headedness in the region, giving an enemy so much time to re-adjust. This incident reads more like a message of mastery, an ape beating its chest and thumbing its nose. Strategically, it's an excellent way to signal you're escalating the threat level up another notch. You can safely sit back, gleefully gauge the reaction, and send a witty note to make your point. As mentioned in the first post below, the countries in the region are about to break down the fence and stampede off the dollar farm, and giving them electric collar shocks is just about the only means of non-violent control either primary suspect has left.

Unfortunately, the move is openly aggressive, illustrates what a wider regional war would first look like, and gives the Mid-East abundant and well-founded reason to stock up on three things: paranoia, desire for payback, and making communications infrastructure and procedures more redundant and secure.

Iranian Speedboats, US Warships, The Straits of Hormuz

The US has just filed an official protest against Iran for the actions of its coastal patrol speedboats, which are alleged to have crossed the bows of warships passing through the Straits of Hormuz, dropping boxes into the water in front of them. Iran has denied the allegations, said the US videos used footage from an earlier incident, and released its own video, the second attached above. An examination of the videos will find that the US version is irrelevant to its claims legal or otherwise, and the Iranian video provides a clear-cut basis for complaint.

When CNN first reported the story, my impression was the White House was caught flat-footed, with no prompt statement, no press conference, no apparent preparation. If the incident had not been genuine, one would expect much quicker reaction times; perhaps Iran used the occasion of Bush's first visit to Israel to do some buzzing of Navy ships. Over the next days, both the Pentagon and Washington got on the story and pushed it into "harassment," a "clash" and a "skirmish." Opportunism and orchestrated outrage begin to seem more likely. From the videos and counter-claims, a careful viewer can't really tell what happened, how non-routine the behaviors were on either side, or how close it came to acts of war.

With a formal protest lodged by the US, the incident will be taken seriously, yet the case against Iran is a loser. In the second video above, the Iranian patrol boat captain hails vessel 73, which replies to his hail and identifies itself as a coalition warship. The Iranian then requests the vessel's course and speed. The warship replies that it is "operating in international waters," and gives the same reply to repeated requests for clarification of course and speed. The warship's reply is false, since the Straits of Hormuz are only 21 miles at their widest, and much narrower for large-ship navigation. Ships can't pass through there without being in territorial waters claimed by either Oman or Iran under the transit passage provisions of UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In the second video, regardless of time authenticity, the US Navy violated the Law of the Sea. Technically, Iran's territorial water limit extends up to twelve miles off shore, and vessels including warships can take "innocent passage" through it, and the Straits of Hormuz. Yet nations have the right to temporarily suspend innocent passage in specific areas of their territorial seas if doing so is deemed essential for the protection of their security. Therefore, if the coalition warship were on Oman's side of the ill-defined territorial border, it should have answered as such, claiming right of passage granted by Oman; if it were in the very well-defined shipping lanes exercising innocent passage on either Omani or Iranian territorial waters, it should have expressed that right (as it did in the first US video). If the ship were on Iran's territorial waters, transit passage law grants the Iranians every right to demand information on course and speed. Additionally, they could also unilaterally deny innocent passage under UNCLOS, and approach and demand to board vessels inside their territory which they deem a threat to their security.

Given past US actions in its waters, and its recent hostile stance, there's abundant basis for Iran to cite the US as a security threat. On 18 April 1988, the U.S. Navy waged a one-day battle against Iranian forces in and around the strait. The battle, dubbed Operation Praying Mantis by the U.S. side, was launched in retaliation for the 14 April mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58). U.S. forces sank two Iranian warships and as many as six armed speedboats in the engagement. On July 3, 1988, 290 people were killed when an Iran AirAirbus A300 passenger jet was shot down over the strait by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. There is still lingering controversy about the event, considered among the most controversial tragedies in aviation history. On January 10, 2007, the nuclear submarine USS Newport News, traveling submerged, struck M/V Mogamigawa, a 300,000-ton Japanese-flagged large oil tanker just south of the strait. (Wikipedia credit for links in this paragraph.) The tanker had suddenly slowed before impact, indicating the US submarine was attempting clandestine underwater passage in its prop wash. Hardly innocent transit.

Does legality matter in the Persian Gulf? Not yet, and Iran may have reason to feel contemptuous of the UN's impartiality. Ultimately, however, legality could become very important, and knowing how laws regarding coastal sovereignty are supposed to be handled calls the competing official versions out into clearer, less bullshit-clouded light. Coalition Vessel 73's claim that it was in international waters was intentionally idiotic and insulting. A US Navy spokesman said that the speedboats were "a heartbeat away" from being blown up two days ago, that may be so, and it's impossible to precisely assess what happened in this incident. In contrast, it is not at all difficult to assess that the routine passage of US warships through the straits is an act of war should Iran choose to define it as such, and is inherently dangerous. Iran's daily restraint indicates very high levels of patience and discipline on the part of its Navy and government, as well as on the part of the coalition warship crews. Otherwise, a far worse "clash" would have already occurred.

The Beginning Of The World As We Know It (Part One)

Having gotten all the nice spiritual Rumi-stuff out of my system in the previous post, on to practical things; to the world's problems, and their solving. My ersatz leaders keep telling me how anything wrong is all my fault, so I thought, why not? Let's have a go and make it good. Our problems are only as big as the wind and the waves, as the sun and the rain.

At first, my working title was 'Why Democrats Are A Bunch Of Drooling Catamites.' You see, my case of Two-Party Immune Deficiency Syndrome (TPIDS) is late-stage, and the Democrats surely play their part as Complicit Mommy Government to perfection, as a companion and helpmeet to our Abusive Daddy Government. Whom it's our enviable task to either kill, beat sense into, or run away from. So, yes, let's start off with the Party of the Damned, or what I choose to call "the Dims." I changed the title above to something more active, with an eye to an ongoing series; by way of power law and microcosm, Dims are great projectors for our Big Problems. As the old military recruiting jingle goes, "what a great play-ace, it's a great waay...to start!"

Isabelita, the thoughtful cookie at Learning to Sequence, noted in the comments section of Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama that Hillary:

'seems like a "kinder gentler" form of the GOP, and Obama seems insubstantial. There's not a single Democratic candidate I'd vote for; wonder if we can outsource the leadership of this country to, oh, say, New Zealand?'

Iz sums up my sentiments well. If Hillary gets elected, we will be renting and watching "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" as en-masse comfort food. Paradoxically, though, the inmates of Casa Lord have given money to Obama and were invited to lunch with his wife. We have an Obama sign hanging in our window. Yet, something inside me still wants to crisply slap each side of the guy's face with a pair of wet leather gloves and bellow like George S. Patton, "Be a man, fer chrissakes!! There are brave candidates out there fighting and dying, and you're hiding in the make-up room like a coward!" Sigh.

But what else is left? I've considered supporting Dennis Kucinich, and even Ron Paul, because at least they take an unequivocal stand against The War. The obvious political lesson they, or any well-choreographed goose-steppers provide, is this: Take a stand, you existentially challenged boobs, take a stand! (Note: See goose-steppers.) So at least Kucinich and Paul "get" the basic prerequisite. Fortunately or not, however, neither can get "elected."

It all starts with The War. In the beginning was The War. The War is run by the War Machine, which now makes up most of the country's remaining manufacturing base...you know, just like it did for The Soviet Freaking Union back in 1984. That being the case, if the Democrats truly didn't want us to invade/occupy/eternally exploit Iraq, would we still be there, or ever have gone? Would Cheney still be President? Would Hillary Clinton have been the one who first used the phrase after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us? (Yep, she was first, and beat Dumya to it.)

The truth is, the Dims support The War Machine, and that's why they support The War. They're bending over, busy slurping at the Money River, looking up to carp threats occasionally and then backing down to slurp again at the life blood of this nation, this precious gift of governmental innovation, as it runs in rivulets and rills down into the scuppers of FACISM. The same ugly thing this country pulled out all the stops to defeat 60-odd years ago, bombing every major city full of evil German and Japanese people to smithereens, not to mention the Italians and French who got in the way. People keep wondering and marveling how craven, how caved-in and sold-out Congress can be, but it's really simple. It's as simple as buying and selling hogs. Fascists love hogs. [Sotto voce: And fascism's better, because run! Cower! Twitter like fluffy yellow chicks, and be afraid! (Looking left and right for spies.) The only alternative is so-cial-ism. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!]

To paraphrase the idiot son of an asshole, "Being an Empire is hard work." Yes...yes, Fearless Leader, you masturbatory imbecile, it is hard work. So here it is, the answer, the solution to our problems: smarter work. The only way to save what's left of imperial standing melting away like run-off from a denuded hill, and our domestic freedoms at the same time, two-birds-one-stone style, is to wise up. And make a big, hard, brave yet obvious choice. A choice which is ultimately necessary anyway. Amongst smaller hard choices, the Democrats have to not only renounce The War, they must renounce The War Machine. Nothing much other than a tack into the wind, merely risking political and physical assassination domestically and a heapin' helpin' of Humble Pie internationally. So how, other than fitting our alleged representatives with electro-shock collars and pumping them full of 100 mikes of LSD, do we work them up to the gargantuan tasks common to vertebrates?

Somehow I can't picture my Senators (Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell) driving that bus in Selma. Actually, I'm picturing it right now as they're dragged off the bus by police and savagely beaten with batons. Ha-ha! To be realistic, look, we're dealing with a government that told us with a straight frigging face to go out and buy duct tape in case of a nerve gas attack, and that kerosene can melt steel. (Mental Note: I suppose duct tape could be used as a way to cover your mouth and nostrils so as to induce a less painful death. Kerosene and jet fuel don't melt steel, not in my back yard.) A direct frontal assault on The War Machine won't work. It would simply send Terminators after us like Skynet and shoot us with plasmatic death-rays.

But what we can do is start small. An insurgency they don't see coming, an infiltration, a Rat Attack. It's already got plenty of foot soldiers, even investors. We can do things that my darling Senators, the Bobbsey Twins, will enthusiastically support. They just won't know the full implications, and when they finally glom, it'll be ok by them. Because they care about money. Every Constitution, every Estate, is based on money, on a currency. A currency is a metaphorical basis for storing power and wealth. We need to switch the fundamental basis of our power and wealth. The US has switched its currency basis at least four times in its history, and it will do so again.

Power and wealth. And beer! Mmmm. The focus of our big ol' technologized Teddy Bear, our throwing-candy-to-the-children-while-it-kills-them War Machine, is oil. Our currency isn't The Dollar. Our currency is oil. This is a VERY BIG problem. First, its worldwide production has begun to go into decline--9.5 million Saudi barrels a day wen down to 8.5 over the past year, but they "could pump more if we wanted to!," sure, and Iran, well, they're desperate for nuclear power because the mullahs know how wildly overstated their reserves are, and the rate at which their wells are declining--plus, we're losing control of the damned stuff anyway. That's why we're building military bases on top of wherever we can find new, relatively helpless sources of it. Even if that quixotic effort starts getting a lot cheaper or miraculously succeeds, well...we're still, for all practical purposes...Going To Run Out of Oil.

We need to switch our currency. This implies a future Manhattan Project, a huge national investment and roll of the dice, on sustainable energy. And that will, at some point, happen. But the Rat Attack doesn't have to wait for a Manhattan Project. It can germinate and advance incremental change. Its weapons are not just wind farms and solar panels, not bipolar Priuses and biodiesel Passats, but all manner of gardening, all sorts of ruminants (including ponies), tree-planting, urban bee-keeping, de-centralized heating, and simply giving a damn. Raising chickens on your patio, damn the Bird Flu, full speed ahead. This is how the Amish and most of the world survive on two bucks a day. We should probably do A-OK on forty thou per capita. And if a schlumpf like me can do organic gardening,anyone can.

This might be a good place to note that Exxon's corporate profits were bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen countries last year. Exxon and other distended, artificial, inhuman structures like it are The Enemy. These are the enemies who are stealing your money. By the way, they also want to kill you, slowly, so they can wring every last bit of useful output and consumption out of your body. They've calculated the calories, and want to turn the world into one big "Arbeit Macht Frei" concentration camp, their kapos as commandants, and they're succeeding. Every drop of oil you don't use and every ray of sunshine you do sends these monstrous mutants, and many of their large shareholders, into fits of depression and murderous rage. Because they know, deep down in their black insatiable selves, that no one owns the wind, the sun, or the rain. Although they've hired lobbyists to address that disadvantage.

We need to start an anti-oil insurgency, and it's going to be surprisingly easy. I belly laugh at the prospect because, you see, we're not going to have much choice. Soon enough, driving 40 miles to save five bucks on t-shirts made by slave labor fed by slop troughs in some distant Work Zone is going to look exactly like what it is: stupid. We're going to live in a world where you can walk, float, or teleport to bars and stores. I'm not speaking from high moral terrain here. It's simply going to be cheaper than going through violent machinations and invasions to coax flammable goo from under far-off ground.

Iran Facts Update, Pt. II: Strategic Fulcrum & Schwerpunkt

(Note: big research credit owed to Church and Empire, since this is basically his post. I'm plagiarizing like crazy below, I'm just not entirely sure yet from whom.)

Washington has now shifted into full "All Iran, All The Time" mode. This should be a big tip-off to what may be coming next. Rumors circulate that an Executive Order has already been signed for attacking Iran. Someone with access to Cheney's office leaked the preferred scenario: an Israeli attack on the Natanz reactor project, followed by an Iranian response against Israel, followed by a "shock and awe" bombing campaign from the US targeting Iran's entire infrastructure, including bridges, utilities, pumping stations, and ports.

While you or I might not think it's a good idea to bomb a country which hasn't attacked anything since the 18th century, and while a bombing campaign is likely to provoke even the dissident Iranians into hating the US, it might be helpful to know why, under certain strategic analyses, "It Must Be Done." And now, I must hand the blog for a suitably brief period to Mr. Paul Wolfowitz:

"Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-99", Paul Wolfowitz

• "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union..."

The War Department is always looking to nip new threats in the bud. That's natural. But the focal point of its attention was further expanded as follows:

...to ensure that the United States - and no one else - controls the energy supplies of the Persian Gulf and adjacent areas of Asia.

The first part of that sentence has been the most basic precept of US foreign policy since the 1950s. In fact, written in invisible ink on the door of the Oval Office is this phrase: Don't Lose the Gulf, Dipshit! (It was a class trip, the tour guide looked away...what can I say?) Now, the Bush Doctrine goes much further. "Adjacent areas of Asia" covers a lot of ground. The Vulcans radically expanded the Carter Doctrine, and turned away from, even trashed, the Eisenhower Doctrine (better known as "Containment"). Amongst other things, the Bush Doctrine clearly stipulates that Iran has to knuckle under. Even if that's impossible.

In short, the Bush Administration wants access to all the oil and gas in the Caspian Sea, which is currently (mostly) under Russian control. Iran happens to be blocking the way of "our" pipelines with "their" pipelines. Even worse, Iran is undermining the Petro-dollar standard by selling its oil directly to countries, for example to Japan in exchange for Yen. Big no-no in Bush World. Chavez is a gnat in that mental sphere, whereas Iran is a bee-hive.

So, having secured the White House and a pretext for wars intended to control pipelines, BushCo wasted no time in taking its spiffy new Doctrine out for a spin in early 2001 by:

• unilaterally pulling out of the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
  
• announcing new high-tech arms sales to Taiwan

The Russians and the Chinese did not miss the significance of these gestures. How could they? Warm spit was dripping off their expression-frozen faces. The Cold War was back on, baby. Following these opening provocations, a sizable, sustained, and fairly successful effort was made to destabilize the goverments of the obscure new countries (sometimes referred to as "Trashcanistans") surrounding the Caspian basin. Then, on May 4, 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney went to Lithuania, and made some rather blunt public statements which could be considered hilarious, insane, or hypocritical, but probably above all rude. Among other things, he accused:

• Kremlin officials of "unfairly and improperly" restricting the rights of Russian citizens
  
• Russia using the country's abundant oil and gas supplies as "tools of intimidation [and] blackmail" against its neighbors
  
• Moscow of attempting to "monopolize the transportation" of oil and gas supplies in Eurasia
  

The next day, Cheney flew to Kazakhstan, urging them to:

• ship their plentiful oil through a US-sponsored pipeline to Turkey and the Mediterranean rather than through Russian-controlled pipelines to Europe.

In tag-team bonhomie, on June 3, 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went after China by pointing out:

• Beijing's "lack of transparency" with respect to its military spending "understandably causes concerns for some of its neighbors"
• plans for increased spending on the F-22A fighter and Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, weapons only useful in an Armageddon War for which there were just two possible adversaries - Russia and China

So they're right. This is a Long War. Whether it should be fought or not is a good question, but the economic prizes are considerable. If you look at a map of new US military bases in Africa and Asia, the correlation with proximity to oil assets is nearly perfect. For its part, China has been extremely aggressive in securing energy resources, often paying unbelievable sums of cash (dollars, of course) for lease and development rights. After Kerry fumbled in '04 they went around the world signing deal after deal...it was like watching Mike Tyson and his entourage on a shopping spree for new bling-bling, only instead of being the youngest heavyweight champion of all time, China is the world's oldest civilization, with trillions of suddenly accumulated dollars to get rid of. In addition, it is willing to fight proxy wars in pursuit of energy reserves and is addressing its biggest military gap by:

• use of arms transfers and other military aid as inducements to such countries as Iran and Sudan to gain access to energy reserves
  
• acquiring warships "that could serve as the basis for a force capable of power projection" into the oil-producing regions of the planet

Where's Iran in all this? Stuck right between the US, Russia, and China. Geographically, the country:

• spans from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, positioning Tehran to play a significant role in the two areas of greatest concern to the nuclear powers
• owns part of the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz - a narrow waterway from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean, the bottleneck which moves over one-quarter of the world's oil every day
• is the most obvious transit route for the delivery of oil and natural gas from the Caspian countries to global markets, especially those in Europe, India, and Japan

• supposedly possesses the world's second-largest reserves of petroleum - an estimated 132 billion barrels (11.1% of the world's known reservoirs); and also the second-largest reserves of natural gas - 971 trillion cubic feet (27.5 trillion cubic meters, or 15.3% of known reservoirs)

Bush policies seem almost intentionally designed to drive Iran into Russia and China's arms. China, in particular, benefits from the US shunning and sanctioning Iran:

• US firms are barred from investing; European companies face US economic penalties if they do so
  
• China signed a US$50 billion cash deal in 2004 to develop the massive Yadavaran gas field
  
• China signed deal to purchase 10 million tons of Iranian liquefied natural gas annually for 25 years.

Russia's designs on Iran are primarily defensive, but the two countries have extensive ties. Russia's perspective:

• major strategic loss if Iran falls under US control
  
• primary supplier of nuclear equipment and technology, future role in developing Iran's energy infrastructure
• Russian firms are completing the construction of a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southwestern Iran
  

So if the US could pull off regime change in Iran, it would hit another "Trifecta." Not only would complete control of the Persian Gulf be ensured for a generation, but oil companies would (continue to) make more money than God, and the US would be able to...umm....what was that Cheney phrase again? Oh, yeah: "use abundant oil and gas supplies as tools of intimidation and blackmail."

Now wouldn't those be handy tools to have? A self-respecting Empire wouldn't be caught dead without them. The only flaw in all this brilliant logic is that the Bush Doctrine's distinctive flair for execution has been, to be kind, dubious and underwhelming:

• Long-term US prospects in Central Asia have seriously dimmed
  
• US-European relations weakened, halting if not tenuous
  
• The Coalition of the Swilling sham doesn't hide that Europe stayed on the sidelines
• Our closest allies are interested in securing Iran's oil flows for themselves
• Turkey has refused to provide airbase support for bombing Iran
• Encouraging a separate Kurdistan gives Turkey and Iran a common interest
  

Bottom line, the American Corporate State is bankrupt. By its leaders' calculations, however, taking Iraq's oil cost only a trillion dollars and is worth thirty trillion. A return of 3,000%! The Empire is saved. (Chipmunks demonstrate better math competency.) The pink-red areas on the map above represent ethnic Shia populations. How happy will they be if Iran is bombed...for not having The Bomb? Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese are solvent, right next door to Iran, and accumulating increasingly large gobs of cash. My friend Jon in Wisconsin recently quoted his drinking buddy Sun Tzu, who summed up the Bush Doctrine and dumb-assed Vulcans pretty well:

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, and then seek to win."