Yet, instead of reducing or even just freezing levels of U.S. military aid to Israel, President Obama wants to provide Israel with $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons next year, an increase from $3.075 billion in 2012, making the State Department’s claim that this budget request “maintains last year’s record funding levels” for Israel both immodest and inaccurate. By comparison, of the nine other Near Eastern countries receiving U.S. military aid, the budget request for eight of them is unchanged from last year’s budget while the request for Tunisia declined.
The last time oil went in this direction, it caused a slowing in the global economy that led to a global financial panic.
What's causing it? Peak oil, Chinese growth and lots of potential oil disruption. Pretty much the same factors that caused it last time.
The pipeline disruption is a little different this time.
Israel
The headline player is Iran due to its nuclear program. But Iran isn't actually disrupting the production system, they are merely making threats.
If you unwind this a bit, it's pretty clear that the countries actually sending shockwaves of fear through the markets are Israel and the US. However, of the partners in this relationship, Israel is in the drivers seat. They are calling the shots on the timing of an attack on Iran and they will take the world along for a ride.
Sun Tzu or Bismarck: Who will Prevail in the 21st Century?
[Note: this first appeared in Time's Battleland Blog (here)],
The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”
The fundamental problem in the American military and foreign policy elite lies in an incestuously amplifying, self referencing orientation that makes it ignorant of both of Master Sun’s categories of knowledge. (I explain how incestuous amplification hijacks a decision cycle in this essay.) Briefly, the American policy elite’s self-referencing Orientation causes it to Observe what it wants to see.
This kind of one-way shaping isolates the decision-making mind from what is really going on in its external environment. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, Decisions flowing out of an Orientation that overwhelms Observations become disconnected from reality, and therefore, the Actions consequent to those decisions inevitably become irrelevant at best, and more often counterproductive, in that they amplify themselves to drive the collective decision cycle or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops ever further away from reality.
Left uncorrected, the result is an inexorable descent into disorder, and eventually a magnification into chaos leading to overload and collapse. (Interested readers will find a short summary of Boyd’s theory in the last part of this essay. A more extended description of the man and his work can be found in Robert Coram’s excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, now in its 7th printing. Boyd’s entire Discourse on Winning and Losing — his art of conflict — can be downloaded here.)
Self-referencing behavior is clearly evident with regard to ourselves, for example, in the entirely predicable — and predicted — chaos of the Pentagon’s uncontrollable long-range budget plan (which is grounded on a combination of inwardly focused power games as well as a deliberately corrupted accounting system — explained here, here, and here). Put bluntly — we know that we do not know ourselves — indeed the evidence I compiled during my 25+ years of research in the the Pentagon’s pathological decision making practices, while employed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggests we do not want to know ourselves and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so (unclassified reports can be found here).
Not only does our elite not want to understand itself, it also does not know its adversaries. That was clearly the case in Vietnam and Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. Consider this farcical, were it not so serious, report in Sunday’s New York Times; it describes how the Taliban and impostors are scamming us in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, this report is just the tip of a huge iceberg of evidence describing the self-inflicted — dare I say incestuously delusional — ignorance: see, for example, like that described by Lieut. Colonel Daniel Davis in his 87 page report, “Dereliction of Duty II” (a summary by ace investigative journalist Gareth Porter can be found here).
But Sun Tzu is a voice from 500 B.C., and his musing may be irrelevant in the 21st Century. Perhaps that’s because, as Otto von Bismarck is alleged to have predicted, just before he died in 1898, there is a “special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” As Francis Urquhart would say: “You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
When Spies And Gadgets Come Up Short In The War On Terror
By Dina Temple-Raston
INTEL WARS The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror. By Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury, 261 pp., $28
When American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and her Dutch counterpart were freed from a makeshift Somali pirate camp last month, the helicopter flight to the safety of a U.S. military base in East Africa was a brief one. The Black Hawk lifted off under cover of darkness and flew straight to the East African nation of Djibouti, landing at a small American base called Camp Lemonnier.
Matthew M. Aid’s new book, “Intel Wars,” reveals that the base is more than just a dusty, desert lily pad from which to launch covert missions. It is also home to the kind of U.S. intelligence assets that have transformed the way the United States is battling terrorism around the world. Camp Lemonnier, just a small compound next to the Djibouti airport, has a U.S. Air Force/CIA Predator drone detachment and a listening station that, one intelligence official told me, “allows us to blanket Somalia with surveillance.”
According to “Intel Wars,” Somalia is only the beginning.
Camp Lemonnier allows the United States to track “the movement of illegal narcotics between Yemen and Somalia,” the Lord’s Resistance Army in southern Sudan and small guerrilla groups in Ethiopia. Aid says that for the past two years, U.S. intelligence has used Lemonnier to detect “the presence of foreign Muslim fighters claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda fighting alongside Janjaweed militia groups against local separatists” in Darfur, Sudan. The breadth of intelligence Lemonnier provides goes a long way toward explaining how U.S. Special Forces were able to find two lone aid workers and rescue them from that pirate camp in Somalia.
Every chapter in the book is braided with intelligence nuggets. Aid weaves together original reporting, volumes of unclassified documents and his expertise. The book's chapters on Afghanistan and Pakistan are particularly engrossing, although they don't put the intelligence community in a particularly good light.
Aid writes that after 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the United States still doesn’t understand the enemy. “We did not know how many Taliban we were fighting, where they came from or why they were against us,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Aid in 2010. “Intel did not even have a good bio for Mullah Omar,” the Taliban leader, and “we did not even know who was on our side and who was on theirs.”
In my Foreign Policy column, I discuss whether Admiral William McRaven's request for greater operational freedom for Special Operations Command will extend to an unconventional warfare campaign in Syria.
This week, the New York Times reported on a draft proposal circulating inside the Pentagon that would permanently boost the global presence and operational autonomy of U.S. special operations forces. According to the article, Adm. William McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and who is now the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), is requesting additional authority and independence outside of the normal, interagency decision-making process.
After the successful direct action strike against bin Laden and SOCOM's important role in training allied security forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere, it is easy to understand how McRaven's command has become, as the New York Times put it, the Obama administration's “military tool of choice.” A larger forward presence around the world and more autonomy would provide McRaven's special operations soldiers with some of the same agility enjoyed by the irregular adversaries SOCOM is charged with hunting down.
Ed Lansdale specialized in false flag terrorism and false flag bombings for the CIA in the Philippines and then in Viet-Nam. Source.
Israel specializes in car bombings — mostly as primers (pun intended) to sell a lot of security to the paranoid, but sometimes, we speculate, to influence its “host” the USA.
Anyone willing to attack the USS Liberty and murder and maim U.S. sailors is capable of any crime against humanity. Source.
Today, against the Capitol, an FBI-enabled individual carried a suicide vest that was disabled beforehand — we suspect the FBI actually constructed the vest, reminding us of CIA giving the Iranians the complete plans for building a nuclear bomb. Source.
Below is a useful compilation of warnings about a false flag terrorism set focused in enabling an Israeli attack on Iran with US drawn in.
Most interesting is Zbigniew Brzezinski's coming over to the side of the angels.
The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister
American and Israeli officials admit that they have repeatedly carried out terrorism and then blamed it on Arabs (and see this)
Special Operations forces have long enjoyed an elite position in the United States military, and achieved something like folk-hero status when Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May. The admiration is well-deserved, but an article in Monday’s Times drew attention to the power they’ve accrued of late, and raised questions about just how much independence they should have.
Carol Giacomo, who covers foreign affairs for the editorial board, says that the Obama administration has increasingly made Special Operations Forces its military tool of choice to handle threats overseas. It plans to rely on them even more widely as it draws down conventional troops from Afghanistan.
Eventually, Special Ops Forces will make up the bulk of any residual force left in Afghanistan, hunting down militants and helping train Afghan security forces. Administration and military officials are also talking about using them in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, including Asia (the Philippines, specifically), Africa and Latin America.
The article on the front page of Monday’s Times reported that the top Special Operations officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, is now seeking authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels. The proposal has not been fully explained publicly but The Times reported that it would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.
Among congressional, staff—who have not yet been briefed on the proposal—there are questions about how such new authority might affect operations. “What problem are they trying to solve?” one aide asked. A Pentagon official, who spoke on background, insisted that Admiral McRaven “is not trying to fix something that’s broken. The proposal is anticipating what the future will be for these guys and getting ahead of it.”
The Pentagon official stressed that Admiral McRaven “is not looking for complete autonomy unanswerable to anybody” and that Special Operations Forces would still be ordered on specific missions by the regional four-star commander. But one concern is that the new plan would cut out the State Department. In the past, some ambassadors in crisis zones have opposed increased deployments of Special Operations teams, and they have demanded assurances that diplomatic chiefs of missions will be fully involved in their plans and missions.
The “global war on terror” has been used to justify a lot of things. But not everything changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Civilian control of the military is one thing that did not change. I can’t imagine a circumstance under which it should.
