North Korea-US: Warning. Today's General Staff statement and the detection of an intermediate-range ballistic missile at an east coast site indicate the North Koreans are ready to launch a missile without additional warning. Miscalculation and misperception could lead to a missile firing.
The statement contains language in the official English translation that announces North Korea will take actual (also translated, practical) military measures to counter a list of US military deployments. It lacks the conditional language characteristic of prior statements. It also says North Korea has sent a strong message to the South Korean authorities, apparently a warning.
The detection of a single Musudan intermediate range ballistic missile at an east coast launch site, as reported by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, adds support to the statement about taking actual military countermeasures. The location of the missile on the east coast and the repeated mention of bombers from Guam provide some basis for concern that Guam could be a target. Guam is the closest US territory in range.
China-North Korea: China did not export any crude oil to North Korea in February, Reuters reported, citing customs data. It marks the first time since early 2007 that no deliveries were made.
Comment: China exports crude by means of a pipeline to North Korea's west coast refinery at Sinuiju. The pipeline has a throughput capacity of 1 million tons per year, but in the past few years it has carried about 500,000 tons, or just under 42,000 tons per month.
No other steady source of crude has been reported since before the end of the Warsaw Pact. Russian Far East companies send some crude to North Korea to have it refined at the east coast refinery and shipped back to the Far East, usually paying the North Koreans in kind.
The lack of Chinese crude supplies in February implies that North Korea has had to draw on fuel stocks to sustain the nationwide training. This is a chronic, strategic and systemic vulnerability of North Korea. China can make North Korea stop.
If China exports no crude in March, North Korean national readiness will have been degraded significantly because of the extra demands on supplies of food and fuel that are not being replaced. Whatever provocation North Korea plans must take place before the fuel runs low and the civilians begin to rebel or desert their mobilization stations. Contacts along the China border say the exercises will last until the US and South Korean exercises end.
China-North Korea: President Xi Jinping has sent a message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stressing that the two countries are “friendly neighbors,” according to the Korean Central News Agency on 21 March.
A Lebanese news website says it has obtained a documentary movie revealing a plot hatched by French and Turkish spy agencies to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Lebanese Asianews website says the movie, which has been produced by the well-known Syrian media activist Khedar Awarake, shows confessions by those who were on a joint mission to kill top Syrian officials.
According to the report, Syrian security organizations have recently defused assassination attempts by Turkey and France’s intelligence agencies on the lives of Assad and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem.
The report added that Turkish and French spy agencies have set up a joint operation room aimed at accomplishing the assassination mission. It added that their mission had overlapped with operations of security services of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US on many times.
The report said that they also had tried to recruit high-ranking officials in Syrian governmental offices, including the office of Muallem and the presidential palace in Damascus.
Syria accuses Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey as well as some Western countries of fanning the flames of violence that have erupted in the country since March 2011.
The Syrian government says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.
The Cairo Review of Foreign Affairs, February 10, 2013
Speaking to diplomats, businessmen and journalists at the British Foreign Office in November, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia emphasized the need for “norms and principles” in resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Why did President Yudhoyono, who was spending a week in London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II as the first leader to visit Britain during the year of her Diamond Jubilee, feel that he had to bring up the South China Sea disputes at such a time?
After a member of the audience asked what Indonesia, the leading nation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could do if China did not share his views, President Yudhoyono recalled what he had said to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at a summit conference in Bali and again to Chinese President Hu Jintao at a meeting in Beijing: without forward movement on a Code of Conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea, the whole region could “easily become a flashpoint.” He added that the two Chinese leaders had concurred with his assessment.
President Yudhoyono added, however, that he had become quite concerned after ASEAN foreign ministers failed to reach a CoC agreement at a meeting in Cambodia in July 2012. He did not mention the role played by China in getting the Cambodian government to sabotage the pact. He only said that since then, Indonesia has done its utmost to bring about a consensus among ASEAN nations on the issue. He also did not mention the fact that at an international conference on “Peace and Stability in the South China Sea and the Asia Pacific Region” held in Jakarta in September, most of the participants expressed pessimism as long as China continued to exert military and economic power in area within the U-shape line demarcating its self-declared zone of sovereignty.
The tale of what is going on in Syria reads something like this: an insurgency active since March 2011 has been funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and allowed to operate out of Turkey with the sometimes active, but more often passive, connivance of a number of Western powers, including Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. The intention was to overthrow the admittedly dictatorial Bashar al-Assad quickly and replace him with a more representative government composed largely of Syrians-in-exile drawn from the expat communities in Europe and the United States. The largely ad hoc political organization that was the counterpart to the Free Syrian Army ultimately evolved into the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (Syrian National Coalition) in November 2012, somewhat reminiscent of Ahmad Chalabi and the ill-starred Iraqi National Congress. As in the lead-up to regime change in Iraq, the exiles successfully exploited anti-Syrian sentiment among leading politicians in Washington and Europe while skillfully manipulating the media narrative to suggest that the al-Assad regime was engaging in widespread atrocities and threatening to destabilize its neighbors, most notably Lebanon. As in the case of Iraq, Syria’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was introduced into the indictment of al-Assad and cited as a regional threat.
If there was a model for what was planned for Syria it must have been the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or possibly the United Nations-endorsed armed intervention in Libya in 2010, both of which intended to replace dictatorial regimes with Western-style governments that would at least provide a simulacrum of accountable popular rule. But the planners must have anticipated a better outcome. Both Libya and Iraq have become more destabilized than they were under their autocrats, a fact that appears to have escaped everyone’s notice. It did not take long for the wheels to fall off the bus in Syria as well. As in Iraq, the Syrian exiles had no real constituency within their homeland, which meant that the already somewhat organized resistance to al-Assad, consisting of the well-established Muslim Brotherhood and associated groups, came to the fore. Al-Assad, who somewhat credibly has described[1] the rebels as terrorists supported by foreign governments, did not throw in the towel and leave. The Turkish people, meanwhile, began to turn sour[2] on a war which seemed endless, was creating a huge refugee and security problem as Kurdish terrorists mixed in with the refugees, and was increasingly taking on the shape of a new jihad as foreign volunteers began to assume responsibility for most of the fighting.
Mali: Update. French airstrikes targeted the fuel depots and desert hideouts of Islamic extremists in northern Mali on Monday. A military spokeswoman said that French forces plan to hand control of Timbuktu to the Malian army this week. Five hundred French soldiers left Timbuktu on Monday, beginning a staged withdrawal.
A group of Touareg rebels said they had captured Islamist leaders Mohamed Moussa Ag Mohamed and Oumeini Ould Baba Akhmed as they fled toward the Algerian border. Ibrahim Ag Assaleh, a spokesman for the MNLA rebels, who seek autonomy for Touareg tribesmen, confirmed the capture of the men, adding, “They have been questioned and sent to Kidal.”
Comment: Press sources reported that the men were important figures in the Islamist administration, charged with enforcing Sharia punishments, including amputations of hands and feet. They apparently are now in French custody.
