While Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish vote at home, as well as being pressured to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground.
Here (portions of which are quoted below) is an editorial in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, describing one way the Israeli government continues to plant seeds for the eventual cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank by exploiting the paralysis it created in what is absurdly known as the “peace process.”
Discussions on Jerusalem were postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations, but it was never agreed that this interlude be exploited to create facts on the ground.
Haaretz Editorial, 7 December 2011
As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied. Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.
Spinny Note: My favorite translations of Sun Tzu's classic are Thomas Cleary's for a political/phlosophical orientation and Samuel B. Griffith's for a military orientation. Readers interested in a modern application of Sun Tzu's ideas, and especially the art of using Cheng & Ch'i operations to unravel an adversary's decision cycle, will find them embedded throughout Col. John Boyd's seminal study of conflict, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, especially Patterns of Conflict and The Strategic Game.
The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore
Michael Hirsh
National Journal, 4 December 2011
Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.
Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.
The West, especially the United States, and Israel are stoking the grand-strategic fires in Middle East by trying to intensify the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shias. As Patrick Seale explains in this important essay, our leaders are playing very a dangerous, and I would add, ‘dirty' game — but the United States are on the cusp of Presidential election year in the United States and Obama's narrow vision of triangulating the Republicans in the domestic politics of foreign policy [1] is trumping the criteria for shaping a sensible grand strategy.
It would be wise for the Arab states to look to their own interests in this matter, rather than follow the bellicose lead of the Western powers and Israel. The Arabs must surely be aware that a military clash between Iran and the United States or Israel could be disastrous for the Arab Gulf region. Sensitive installations such as oil terminals and desalination plants could come under fire. The achievements of recent decades could be wiped out.
Syria is heading for a bloody sectarian civil war. The mutual kidnappings, torture, beheadings and displacement of populations taking place between the Sunni and Alawi communities in the central city of Homs — often described as “the capital of the revolution” — send a fearsome signal of what might be in store for the rest of the country.
To avert this descent into hell must surely be the immediate priority of Arab leaders and the international community.
The Iraqi example next door is there for all to see. The Anglo-American invasion destroyed a major Arab country. The country’s institutions and infrastructure were shattered; sectarian demons were released, triggering a civil war. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes or forced to flee abroad. The country was dismembered as the Kurds established their own semi-independent statelet.
Syria needs the intervention of a high-powered, neutral, contact group to stop the killing on both sides.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The CIA's operations in Lebanon have been badly damaged after Hezbollah identified and captured a number of U.S. spies recently, current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. The intelligence debacle is particularly troubling because the CIA saw it coming.
Hezbollah's longtime leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, boasted on television in June that he had rooted out at least two CIA spies who had infiltrated the ranks of Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group closely allied with Iran. Though the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon officially denied the accusation, current and former officials concede that it happened and the damage has spread even further.
In recent months, CIA officials have secretly been scrambling to protect their remaining spies – foreign assets or agents working for the agency – before Hezbollah can find them.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA's long-standing dirty little secret has been the utter ineffectiveness of the Directorate of Operations (DO) that is a mix of lazy, arrogant, and inept when it comes to non-official cover (NOC) and persists in housing 90% of any Station, including the communicators, in the one official US Government building that can be found in most capitals. Now that they are all armed fortresses that walk-ins cannot penetrate, the CIA officers bouncing in and out all day and throwing money around like no other diplomat, stand out like sore thumbs. The fact is that CIA is blown around the world, the other countries simply have more fun running selected agents as doubles and keeping CIA busy lest it actually recruit someone important. Perhaps one day the US public will have a sane, competent intelligence community.
It always amazes me how the world's politicians and media spend most of their energy debating geopolitical prospects that are not going to happen, while ignoring major developments that are happening.
Here is a list of the most important coming non-events that we have been loudly debating and analyzing: Israel is not going to bomb Iran. The euro is not going to disappear. Outside powers are not going to engage in military action inside Syria. The upsurge of worldwide popular unrest is not going to fade away.
Meanwhile, to minimal serious coverage in the media and on the internet, the Nord Stream was inaugurated in Lubmin on Germany's Baltic Coast on Nov. 8 in the presence of Pres. Medvedev of Russia and the prime ministers of Germany, France, and the Netherlands, plus the director of Gazprom, Russia's gas exporter, and the European Union's Energy Commissioner. This is a geopolitical game-changer, unlike all the widely discussed non-events that are not going to happen.
The ultimate goal of the US is to take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block economic growth in China and Russia, thus taking the whole of Eurasia under control, author and historian William F. Engdahl reveals.
The crisis with the US economy and the dollar system, the conduct of the US foreign policy is all a part of breakdown of the entire superpower structure that was built up after the end of WWII, claims Engdahl.
“Nobody in Washington wants to admit, just as nobody in Britain a hundred years ago wanted to admit that the British Empire was in terminal decline,” claims the author, noting that “All of this is related to the attempt to keep this sole superpower not only intact, but to spread its influence over the rest of the planet.”
William F. Engdahl believes the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is a plan first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called “The Greater Middle East Project”.
