Category: Peace Intelligence

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Journal: Strong Signals–Azerbaijan in Play

02 Diplomacy, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: We now know that no one briefed the White House on the fact that Iraq was deeply divided between Sunnis in power and Shi-ites under repression.  We have to ask ourselves if anyone has figured out that Azerbaijan is the other Shi'ite majority nation.

Shi'ites Rock On....

Iran starts to introduce visa-free regime with Azerbaijan on February 1 – Head of the press service of the Iranian Embassy

Earlier Iranian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mohammad Bagir Behrami said that any Azerbaijani citizen can travel to Iran without a visa and stay for one month.

The ambassador expressed hope that the Azerbaijani side will take a similar step.

ACNIS criticizes Azerbaijani president’s renewed threats of war

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS) Director Richard Giragosian issued a statement today criticizing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s renewed “threats of war.

Have Beard, Will Travel

Azerbaijani citizen arrested in Afghanistan on suspected link to al Qaeda

Baku. Elmin Ibrahimov-APA. Afghanistan National Security Directorate (NSD) has announced that a member of the al-Qaida network was arrested in the country’s eastern province of Khost.

Turkey urges Armenia to resolve problems with Azerbaijan

“Normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia is not enough,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Burak Özügergin told a press briefing on Wednesday. “If Armenia does not resolve Upper Karabakh dispute with Azerbaijan, stability in the Caucasus can not be established. This is quite clear.”


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Worth a Look: Israeli Connections to USS Cole & 9-11

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, 9-11 articles, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence, Worth A Look
Israel, USS Cole, 9-11

Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a look rather than a reference because we have not had time to evaluate it properly.  It most certainly is worth a look.  Israel is known to have attacked the USS Liberty, and similar to the USA being responsible for Abu Ghraib, such a crime against humanity cannot be forgotten.

We are especially troubled by the USS Cole allegation with respect to the Israeli's using a cruise missile.  Unfortunately, the US Government has a track record of covering up “friendly” attacks (USS Liberty) as well as “enemy” attacks (USS Scorpion) so the bottom line is that we have no reliable source of information on any of this.

Christopher Bollyn, Independent Journalist "Without Frontier"

This material furthers our deep interest in strategic public counterintelligence.  It is a certainty that no one is defending the USA from “white collar” domestic enemies, and we are generally doing more to incite foreign enemies than to contain them.  We are increasingly seeing the discipline of counter-intelligence as one that demands that we know ourselves–that we look deeply into our soul, and that we find and eradicate all those commiting treason against the Republic, including those who collaborate in the murder of Americans for “higher purposes.”

Separately Christopher Boyllyn, a self-described journalist “without frontier” who has standing with Prison Planet and Mike Ruppert, former LAPD who wrote Crossing the Rubicon, has posted a number of items also worth a look.

To that end, we respectfully post these two links for public consideration.

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Journal: Walking Into Al Qaeda’s Trap in Yemen

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Very important article from one of the very best reporters covering the Middle East

Walking Into the Al-Qaeda Trap

Touch Yemen, Get Burned

By PATRICK COCKBURN
December 31, 2009
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It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa’ida’s advantage. The real strength of al-Qa’ida is not that it can ‘train’ a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa’ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries. It is a formula which worked under President George W Bush and it still appears to work under President Barack Obama.

In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa’ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were “too big to fail,” so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole super power.

In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead to repeat them by intervening in other countries such as Yemen.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘ and ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘.

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Journal: Commentary on the Naked Emperor

Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Threats

Shelby Steele
Full Story Online

Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem

By SHELBY STEELE

I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.   . . .

Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.   . . .

On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the “rational” and “earnest” way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.

And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? . . .

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world

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Fouad Ajami

A Cold-Blooded Foreign Policy

By FOUAD AJAMI

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home.  . . .

It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment.   . . .

History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will.

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Journal: One World, Region by Region, Tribe by Tribe

02 China, 03 India, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Policies
Chuck Spinney

Phi Beta Iota: Chuck Spinney's flagging of the below piece supports the point we were making with the post on dynamic planning.  For fifty years the USA has been throwing its weight around on the basis of partisan, ideological, and often illegimiate purposes, and it has been able to get a way with it because in an Industrial Era, might does make right.  We are no longer in an Industrial Era.  We've entered an era in which information asymmetries are being extinguished, while power asymmetries are emergent–demographic power trumps everything else when you get right down to it.  This entire web site makes that point in the aggregate.  On a sidenote, Kashmir is about water but no one seems to acknowledge that.  Water is one of the things we are going to have to figure out how to do in a non-zero fashion.  Hence, for the USA to dig itself a grave in Central Asia without giving any thought to the ten high-level threats to humanity as a whole, and the twelve policies, and the eigth demographic challengers, and to calculate a non-zero course through this maze, is nothing more than idiocy on steriods.

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The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan

Graham Usher

Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.

See also:

Scott Atran

Scott Atran

Professor and author

Posted: December 30, 2009 11:57 AM

The Terror Scare

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Journal: MILNET Focus on Iraq

03 India, 04 Indonesia, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Threats

Full Story Online

In 2010, A World Of Turmoil

Yet Iraq could be the biggest success story

By David Ignatius

Will Iraqi democracy be 2010's big success story? Visiting Anbar province several weeks ago and listening to the governor of Ramadi talk about his big development plans, I found myself wondering if maybe the cruel Iraq story might have a happy ending after all. This was the province where al-Qaeda declared its first emirate, just a few years ago, and now the governor is handing out a special Financial Times report on business opportunities there.

When I meet Iraqis these days, they all want to talk politics: Which party is ahead in the March parliamentary elections? Can Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani or Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi unseat the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki? It's the kind of freewheeling political debate you can't find anywhere else in the Arab world. I want to believe it's real, even as the terrorist bombs continue to explode in Baghdad and other cities.

Phi Beta Iota: Although pedestrian and myopic in the extreme, courtier Ignatius provides one nugget on Iraq that is repeated above.  Despite huge mistakes at home (elective war based on 935 lies to the public, Congress believing Wolfowitz instead of Shinseki) and major opposition in theater (Syria, Iran), Iraq is on the verge of being a success story.  Here are the three things NOT happening in Iraq that need to be ramped up from January 2010:

1)  Information Operations (IO) getting every success story into the news.  Right now all we see in a thin stream of US Army press releases and US military base newspapers.  This is not just pathetic, it is a self-inflicted wound.

2)  US Whole of  Government Operations that are finely calibrated to deliver the maximum amount of peace goods in the shortest possible time.  March-July should see us FLOOD Iraq with all the stuff that should have been done during the Golden Hour.  Ideally 80% of the money should be spent LOCALLY, not on fat-cat beltway bandit perks.

3)  Multinational Engagement with a special focus on Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey providing “neutral” Muslim engineers, while Saudi Arabia pays the bill but is not allowed to send any of its demonizers into the country.  Using the Strategic Analytic Model and approaching all of Iraq as a test-bed for a new form of multinational effort guided by a Global Range of Needs Table down to the household level, with every gift (cause and effect) visible online, could create a new Gold Standard for multinational harmonized peaceful preventive and stabilziation measures.

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Journal: MILNET Focus on Afghanistan

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Military, Peace Intelligence
Full Story Online

Interview With Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif, Former Commander, Regional Command South

Phi Beta Iota: Read every word.  Highlights include:

;1)  Every province is difference (see General Zinni's characterization of the six different Viet-Nam wars in Battle Ready)

2)  Climate and Ops Tempo, not the Taliban, are the major challenge

3)  Taliban losing, resorting more to terror against civilians

4)  NATO works–could not have done AF without NATO C4I

5)  Not a single word about civilian stabilization & reconstruction assistance, which appears to be dead in the water with AID pulling back

Our Conclusion: Having tried and failed at everything else, we are now at the cusp of the “Brass Hour” in both IQ and AF but the military is failing to do the homework needed to present a compelling case for fur a “Berlin Airlift” into both countries that overwhelms the population with what we should have used the first time around: language-qualified Muslim engineers from Indonesia and Malaysia and Turkey, along with a mini-Marshall Plan that wages peace without end.  One Tribe at a Time, Yes, But Bring Peace Goods with You….

Journal: Afghanistan & Iraq–Opportunity Knocks for an Afghan Airlift and a Six-Month Muslim-Centered Multinational Multiagency “Advise & Assist” Transition Toward Departure from Both Countries

Other References:

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