Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
US President Barack Obama's reversal on the bombing of Syria took the world by surprise. For a long time, he was talking about the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Al-Assad's regime being “a red line”. There was a feeling that Obama's talk about chemical weapons use in Syria was like a proverbial “Chekhov's gun” – in a well-written play, if a gun is seen in the first act hanging from a wall, in the last act it must shoot.
Obama certainly knew for a long time that most Americans and all others were against involvement in Syria. He himself said that he was not obliged to ask the Congress permission for a remote-control war. Then suddenly the reversal. It certainly looks like something happened that he did not expect.
Nobody in the mainstream media had analyzed technical aspects of the attack, and nobody to my knowledge doubted the ability of America's armed forces to execute it. Yet this author's analysis, based mainly on data from open sources and technical common sense, shows that the reason for this reversal can very likely be found in limitations in military capability to execute a “clean” overwhelming strike on Syria.
“Heroin trafficking is the lubrication that keeps the wheels of Western politics moving as intended.”
It was only a week ago that the US government released Eric Harroun, a former soldier who had been fighting with foreign backed al-Qaeda terrorists and the CIA against the Assad government in Syria.
This week, former Army sergeant Joseph Hunter and a group of other veterans, one from Germany’s armed forces, were arrested for much the same thing, offering “security services” for Colombian drug cartels.
Were worldwide press censorship to ease, the public would learn that America’s drone program is used more for maintaining control of drug production and distribution than terrorism. In fact, according to Russian officials, heroin from Afghanistan, all produced and exported under unspoken but very public approval of US officials, killed over one million people last year.
A car chase that began when a driver tried to breach a White House security barrier ended near the U.S. Capitol, with a confrontation that included shots fired and one Capitol Police officer injured.
The inability of the media and politicians to focus on the real issues never ceases to amaze.
The real crisis is not the “debt ceiling crisis.” The government shutdown is merely a result of the Republicans using the debt limit ceiling to attempt to block the implementation of Obamacare. If the shutdown persists and becomes a problem, Obama has enough power under the various “war on terror” rulings to declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. An executive branch that has the power to inter citizens indefinitely and to murder them without due process of law, can certainly set aside a ceiling on debt that jeopardizes the government.
The real crisis is that jobs offshoring by US corporations has permanently lowered US tax revenues by shifting what would have been consumer income, US GDP, and tax base to China, India, and other countries where wages and the cost of living are relatively low. On the spending side, twelve years of wars have inflated annual expenditures. The consequence is a wide deficit gap between revenues and expenditures.
Under the present circumstances, the deficit is too large to be closed. The Federal Reserve covers the deficit by printing $1,000 billion annually with which to purchase Treasury debt and mortgage-backed financial instruments. The use of the printing press on such a large scale undermines the US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the basis for US power. Raising the debt limit simply allows the real crisis to continue. More money will be printed with which to purchase more new debt issues needed to close the gap between revenues and expenditures.
The supply of dollars or dollar denominated assets in foreign hands is vast. (The Social Security system’s large surplus accumulated over a quarter century was borrowed by the Treasury and spent. In its place are non-marketable Treasury IOUs. Consequently, Social Security is one of the largest creditors to the US government.)
If foreigners lose confidence in the dollar, the drop in the dollar’s exchange value would mean high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s loss of control over interest rates. It is possible that a drop in the dollar’s exchange value could initiate hyperinflation in the US.
The real crisis is the absence of intelligence among economists and policymakers who told us for 20 years not to worry about the offshoring of US jobs, because we were going to have a “New Economy” with better jobs.
All following appears consistent with Dinesh DiSousa's books and the film that came from them, “2016: Obama's America,” which assert that POTUS is a rampant anticolonialist whose principal objective is to reduce America to the status of a Third World nation rather than to facilitate the nations of the Third World to achieving levels of political/social/economic development comparable to those of First World nations.
From: [RETIRED SENIOR US SPECIAL OPERATIONS OFFICER]
To: [REDACTED]
Sent: 02-Oct-13
Subj: A World Where No One Listens to America
Yes We Can. Maybe. Well,…I have to check with Wall Street…
What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known — repeatedly — and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.
In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America's waning power in that region. In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Africa that President George W. Bush and his neocon acolytes dreamed of thoroughly pacifying, turmoil is on the rise. Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world's last superpower. The list of defiant figures — from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians — is lengthening.
The signs of this loss of clout have been legion in recent years. In August 2011, for instance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ignored Obama's unambiguous call for him “to step aside.” Nothing happened even after an unnamed senior administration official insisted, “We are certain Assad is on the way out.” As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Similarly, in March 2010, Obama personally delivered a half-hour-long chewing out of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a politician Washington installed in office, on the corruption and administrative ineptitude of his government. It was coupled with a warning that, if he failed to act, a cut in U.S. aid would follow. Instead, the next month the Obama administration gave him the red carpet treatment on a visit to Washington with scarcely a whisper about the graft and ill-governance that continues to this day.
In May 2009, during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama demanded a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. In the tussle that followed, the sole superpower lost out and settlement expansion continued.
These are among the many examples of America's slumping authority in the Greater Middle East, a process well underway even before Obama entered the Oval Office in January 2009. It had, for years, been increasingly apparent that Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with several lesser campaigns in the Global War on Terror, were doomed. In his inaugural address, Obama swore that the United States was now “ready to lead the world.” It was a prediction that would be proven disastrously wrong in the Greater Middle East.
Afghanistan can qualify for the 2015 Cricket World Cup if they beat Kenya on Wednesday October 2nd and Friday October 4th in the final two games at the World Cricket League Championship in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Ireland has already qualified from the competition as the top team and although the Afghans are fourth in the table of eight sides they can overtake UAE and Netherlands with two One Day International (ODI) victories in Sharjah to take the second qualifying spot.
If Aghanistan does not win both games, UAE will go to the 2015 tournament in Australia and New Zealand.
The Afghans and Kenyans have met four times in ODIs and each won twice. Afghanistan has won seven of its 12 championship matches in Sharjah, while Kenya has won five, including victories over both Ireland and UAE.
The coach of the Afghan side, former Pakistan international Kabir Khan, is confident.
The bottom six teams in the Sharjah competition still have a chance of qualifying for the 2015 tournament alongside other squads at next year’s ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifier in New Zealand, which will determine the last two teams to go through.
Interplanetary Security Council — Resolution on Planet Earth
27 Mres'klon 4013
Following is an unofficial translation of the purported resolution of the Interplanetary Security Council regarding the Planet Earth. A corrected translation may be anticipated.
This unusual document appears to follow the pattern of earlier purported resolutions of the Interplanetary Security Council. It is made available here because of its extraordinary structural resemblance to the resolution agreed by the UN Security Council on 27 September 2013 — consequent on various calls for an exceptionally “strong resolution” (UK, US and France call for ‘strong' UN resolution on Syria, The Guardian, 16 September 2013). As with the earlier documents of the purported Planetary Security Strategy of the Nibiruan Union, and the Nibiru-drafted Resolution on Earth, it is unclear whether the UN Resolution (2013) is merely an adaptation of the following Nibiruan document — correspondingly “strong” in its wording regarding Planet Earth. As such it is unclear whether it is reflecting an implementation of the policy of the Nibiruan Union — or whether the document outlining the future intervention in Syria on behalf of the UN, engendered a Nibiruan articulation of its policy towards other planets such as Earth — in defence of its own sovereign interests. Such reciprocal articulation might then constitute a case of policy engendered by morphogenetic field resonance effects. This would also be consistent with the classical injunction displayed outside the UN Security Council: ‘Do Unto Others as You Would Wish That Others Should Do Unto You' and may be the principle underlying all interplanetary policy. It would also be consistent with a Hermetic aphorism: As Above, So Below.
