Booby-trapped Left-Overs
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Lurching to a finish, Decider George will leave the next president a foreign policy situation worse-than a can of big, ugly worms.
This particular can, however, is way-different, thus making the worms way-different — they’ve been trip wired, booby trapped, apt to explode when touched a certain way.
And they’re really, really slimy.
Worm One: Iraq, quickly becoming a much-bigger failure; Worm Two: Afghanistan, the Taliban more vicious and clever; Worm Three: Pakistan, ready to collapse; Worm Four: Somalia, pirates and al-Qeada; Worm Five: Syria, a non-lethal worm until just this week.
(Illustration found here).
A nasty legacy left for most-hopeful a President Obama.
And one of our favorite commentators, Rosa Brooks of the LA Times, worried pretty bluntly today about the booby trapped worms facing the next commander-in-chief (she also poses a President Obama) and how they could easily blow up in his face.
- But every new president is “tested” by national security crises, some predictable, some not.
And I’m a lot less worried about the tests “the world” may offer Obama than about the national security booby traps the Bush administration is leaving behind for him.
…
We can’t leave behind a stable Iraq without the cooperation of Iraq’s neighbors, but this week’s cross-border raid by Iraq-based U.S. troops into Syrian territory led Syria to break off high-level diplomatic contacts with U.S. officials — contacts that had only recently been resumed.
Heated negotiations over the future status of U.S. forces in Iraq have further increased tensions with Syria, Iran and the Iraqi government, which fear permanent U.S. military activities in the region.
The current impasse in status-of-forces negotiations also threatens to leave U.S. troops in Iraq with no legal basis for their presence when their United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31.
Happy New Year, Barack!
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The Bush administration followed early military successes with grandiose promises of democracy and prosperity, then mostly ignored Afghanistan for the next six years.
Meanwhile, the Taliban reconstituted itself, Al Qaeda leaders slipped away into Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal regions, and U.S. troops found themselves playing an increasingly deadly game of Whac-a-Mole against an elusive and ill-defined enemy.
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According to the latest national intelligence estimate, Afghanistan is now in a possibly irreversible “downward spiral.”More troops in Afghanistan might have turned things around if those troops — and a less stingy reconstruction package — had arrived five years ago, when Afghan hopes were high.
But after years of Bush administration malfeasance, increasing U.S. troop levels without an accompanying dramatic shift in regional strategy risks turning Afghanistan into another Iraq.
Or worse, because the Afghan booby trap is wired tightly to the Pakistan booby trap.
Pakistan is the proud but horrifyingly unstable possessor of a nuclear arsenal.
If the escalating conflicts in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions spin out of control, we could end up in another Iraq-like situation — only with weapons of mass destruction in the mix for real this time.
Brooks doesn’t say nothing about a ‘President McCain.’
She probably knows the very thought is too cruel — Jackboot John, with Sarah Palin at his elbows, attempting to defuse all those trip-wired, booby trapped worms (one that’s nuclear), and being stupid and arrogant, doing something wrong.
See, it is too cruel to contemplate.
And that’s just the foreign policy can of worms.
The new president will inherit a financial can all its own.
This evening from the New York Times comes bad news for the brand-new administration:
- “The economy has taken a turn for the worse, big time,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics, a consulting and forecasting group. “Consumption literally caved in. It is a prelude to much worse news on the economy over the next couple of quarters. The fundamentals around the consumer are all negative, and there are no signs of any help anytime soon, from anywhere.”
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Whoever captures the White House seems certain to inherit a starkly challenging economic picture. Thursday’s government report showed that consumer spending — which makes up more than 70 percent of American economy activity — dipped at 3.1 percent annual rate between July and September, after growing at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the previous three months.
That was the largest three-month drop since the second quarter of 1980, a contraction that was in some sense artificial: the Carter administration, seeking to suffocate inflation, imposed limits on bank borrowing.
Putting that episode aside, this year’s drop represents the sharpest decline in consumer spending since the end of 1974.
And how did the White House respond? By tossing out the old blame game.
- “Today’s G.D.P. report is weak, but it is not unexpected,” a White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino. “A number of things contributed to the slowing economy in the third quarter — record high energy prices, housing and credit concerns, two major hurricanes and a prolonged Boeing strike.
The president is taking forceful actions to return the economy to growth and job creation by early next year. While we continue to face serious challenges, the United States remains the best place to do business, and we’re positioned to bounce back.”
Decider George taking forceful actions? — Dana, you’re out of your tree!
The economy has more booby traps than an Afghan minefield.
Indeed, Happy New Year! Barack!
Piracy Now!
Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings | Leave a Comment
Shipping in and out of the Red Sea is undergoing some old-time, real-violent incidents with pirates, so much so there seems to be a crisis in an ability to handle it.
Information Dissemination, the best site for all things Naval, made note today on another freighter attacked by pirates as it tried to navigate through the Gulf of Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea.
The blog gave an account of the latest report from the International Chamber of Shipping, the principle trade association for the industry, which noted the ship’s escape was aided by the timely arrival of a military jet.
(Map found here).
The ICS reported some agonizing moments for a ship’s skipper and crew.
- Situation: Vessel was under full lockdown with anti-piracy lookout posted on both bridge wings night and day and navigating in Gulf of Aden safety corridor.
First attack took place at 08:00 in posn 13-26N, 48-27E. Three high speed craft approached with direct intent from port side 45degrees off the bow.
…
I called the company on the telephone, I made evasive maneuvers, mayday call on vhf, mustered all in our security muster station (conference room) and kept 3/O on the bridge with a helmsman.
We came under automatic small arms fire targeted at the bridge. No damage or injuries.
I was also sounding the air horn whilst making S-turns and calling Mayday on VHF16.
After about 10min the attackers gave up chase and stopped and re-grouped. We escaped.
And then again, after the captain had calmed the crew:
- The 2nd attack was more serious and came at 15:00 in posn 12-54N, 46-40E where 3 fast attack boats were seen departing from a mother ship fishing vessel white in colour.
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I immediately called Mayday on vhf, mustered crew in safe place and was again fired upon by automatic small arms fire but with more aggression lasting about 5 minutes into the accom block. Fortunately a coalition warship (Spanish Navy) heard my mayday call and responded by sending out a Russian aircraft to our scene which was patrolling the area.
…
I was very happy to see the echo on my radar of the inbound aircraft.
The pirates were within 100m when the small fixed wing Russian bomber arrived and gave a very low passing.
The pirates yielded. The aircraft then proceeded to drop ordinance on them.
The situation became safe very quickly with the bomber in attendance.
About 20min later a French attack helicopter arrived to check our situation was under control and we alerted him as to the estimated position of the pirate mother ship.
The report concludes:
- If evidence is needed of the lawless situation in this part of the world then the attached report provides it.
It illustrates both the effectiveness of organic defensive measures as well as the need for active military intervention.
A hairy-high-old-time had by all.
Piracy is becoming a major problem for shipping and for humanitarian aid to the Horn of Africa.
Each year about 16,000 ships use the Gulf of Aden, one of the most important trade routes in the world — the southern route to the Suez Canal.
The piracy has already caused insurance premiums for the Gulf of Aden to increase tenfold.
Oops.
As reported earlier this month by the Danger Room blog at Wired News:
- Resolving Somalia’s at-sea piracy crisis requires “the formation of a Somali government that can clear out pirates’ land bases,” I reported in a new piece for Popular Mechanics.
But there’s a twist: Somalia had just such a government only two years ago, and the United States helped destroy it.
Two years ago, the hardline Islamic Courts regime, allied with a number of regional warlords, had brought a measure of stability to Somalia after 15 years of civil war.
The Courts suppressed piracy to its lowest level in years.
But U.S. suspicions that the Courts were actively harboring Al-Qaeda operatives led the U.S. to sponsor an joint invasion by Ethiopia and an alliance of outside Somali clans, destroying the Courts and sparking a bloody, Iraq-style insurgency.
In the wake of the invasion, piracy flared up again.
McClatchy reported today on more blowback from US policy shit involving the old, time-tested suicide bomber routine:
- Five suicide blasts rocked government and international targets in northern Somalia on Wednesday, killing at least 31 people, according to international security officials, in the most highly coordinated terrorist strike in years in the troubled East African nation.
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A U.N.-backed transitional government was formed nearly five years ago to restore order to Somalia, but it’s split apart because of corruption, infighting and clan divisions.
With less than a year left in its mandate, its leaders have lost control of nearly all the country to militant groups such as al Shabaab, which have begun targeting African Union peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.
The lawlessness extends to the waters off Somalia, where pirates in speedboats have earned world headlines this year by capturing dozens of vessels and securing millions of dollars in ransom payments.
One seems to lead to another.
Another sad, side-show in Decider George’s Wide World War on Terror.
Treasure-Hearts of Darkness
Filed Under Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
Despite all, wars keep warring. In Africa’s heart, seemingly all-perpetual war keeps hacking away at history, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The machete-AK-47 adventure continued in earnest on Monday as UN peacekeepers attempt to mount a rescue of its aid workers trapped in the deep Congo jungle, caught in the pincer of an escalating advance of a vicious renegade Congolese warlord.
The tale is the worst of African pulp fiction in real time.
A back story can be found here and it’s updated here, but terror on the ground in eastern Congo has to be enormous.
(Map and Congo info found here).
This evening’s New York Times:
- But the attempt to evacuate roughly 50 aid workers trapped in the battle zone deep in the forest was halted after furious villagers attacked the armed convoy and blocked the road, United Nations officials said.
In the melee, even Congolese government forces fired on the convoy, the officials said.
“The situation was very chaotic,” said Ivo Brandau, a United Nations spokesman in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. “The convoy had to turn back.”
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Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence and insecurity for years and is home to the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world.
But the peacekeepers have seemed unable to stop one man, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese general, who is leading the rebel charge on Goma.
For the past several weeks, Mr. Nkunda’s troops have been gobbling up territory and forcing the Congolese government’s forces to retreat.
They are now within 10 miles of Goma, and they are employing new hit-and-run tactics that seem to be frustrating the United Nations peacekeepers who are working with the Congolese military to beat back the rebels.
The guy, Mr. Nkunda, is not a a real nice person — his army gained fame for rape murder and mass looting, all asshole/terror-proven veterans from the three or four Congo wars the past couple of decades.
A good look at the deteriorating situation can be found today in Time.
The current mess is just a continuing mess.
A snippet:
- Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have fled renewed fighting in the eastern part of the country in the past few weeks.
Government forces are pitted against rebel groups that have operated in the area since crossing the border from neighboring Rwanda at the end of the genocide there in 1994.
In some ways — such as how the conflict has sucked in armies from across Africa and how it has often descended into a fight over the region’s plentiful natural resources — the war in Congo is immeasurably more complicated than the one in Rwanda.
But in other ways, it’s a direct sequel.
The rebels now advancing on Goma, for instance, are led by General Laurent Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi fighting remnant Rwandan Hutu militias.
In all, according to humanitarian NGO the International Rescue Committee, the war in Congo — which escalated into a full-scale civil war in 1998 that lasted until 2003, and still erupts periodically, as now — has killed 5.4 million people, mostly through hunger and disease.
And what have our illustrious presidential candidates said about this horror?
Nothing except to conduct a course in political squabbling:
- After Obama’s promise in Israel this year to “never again” allow genocide to occur, the McCain camp quickly pounced, issuing a press release saying that if Obama were sincere in that statement, he would have voted to allow the troop surge in Iraq.
The media immediately published Obama’s response: “Well, look, if that’s the criteria [genocide or humanitarian crisis] by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done.”
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Friends of the Congo issued a strong response to Obama’s statement, objecting to the stereotypical notion that tribal bloodletting is responsible for this travesty.
The United Nations has termed the humanitarian crisis in Congo the “deadliest in the world since World War II.”
Nearly 6 million people have died in the region since 1996 due to the war and conflict related causes such as treatable disease, malnutrition and related violence, including the documented rapes of 200,000 women and children.
Doctors Without Borders has consistently reported that the Congo conflict is one of the top ten most under reported stories in the world.
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The central reason for the nearly six million dead in the Congo since 1996 is not ethnic strife but rather the scramble for Congo’s enormous treasure trove of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan, tin, timber and more,” says Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo.
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DRC harbors the richest, purest minerals in the world, many of them vital to the U.S. defense industry. There is not one person who is reading this article who does not benefit by mineral extraction and exploitation in DRC.
For example, Congo has from 64%-80% of the world’s reserve of coltan. Oil may arguably be the non-renewable resource which is front and center in every American’s mind, but coltan is found in cell phones, laptops, digital cameras, and video game consoles.
Coltan is the engine behind our communications systems, and 1500 people a day are dying in this region while Americans profit from corporate greed, take Congolese resources, turn our backs, and power-up our cellphones.
Maybe it’s time for US peoples to take a journey through the darkest heart of darkness.
Syria Now!
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Why now indeed?
After all these years, the US pulls a punch out of its bag of latent tricks and popped a farmhouse inside Syria on Sunday, supposedly chasing after some bad al-Qaeda types from inside Iraq.
Maybe one of Decider George’s final sword thrusts?
From Syria Comment:
- I think we can assume that this cross border raid was not inspired by Patreaus.
It has the finger prints of the White House.
Patreaus and Rice have consistently fought to improve relations with Syria in order to win better coordination on the border.
This would explain why press releases on this issue are being released from “sources” in Washington and not being made by boots on the ground in Iraq.
My hunch is that Centcom in Iraq is furious about being pressed to carry out this raid during the last minutes of Bush authority.
They understand that it will complicate any future efforts to improve Syrian-US relations, which is the only real way to get better cooperation on the border issue.
By ordering this raid, the Bush administration has administered a poison pill to US-Syrian relations and to Syrian-Iraq relations.
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The White House may be counting on Syria not to respond to this provocation, believing that Damascus will be constrained by its interest in cultivating a new relationship with an Obama administration.
There is much hope in Damascus that an Obama administration will resume dialogue and allow the Defense Department to re-establish intelligence sharing and allow the State Department to restore proper relations with Damascus.
Politics before life.
Yes, of course, the old ‘poison pill’ routine.
And this was a boots-on-the-ground operation.
From antiwar.com:
- In a report from local witnesses later confirmed by a Syrian government spokesman, Two US helicopters landed in the Syrian border town of Al-Sukkariya while others remained in the air and eight American soldiers exited.
The soldiers killed at least eight people in the attack, and wounded 14 others before reboarding the helicopters and returning to Iraqi territory.
Decider George will continue to shit out bile until the day he’s run out of the White House.
Juan Cole, an expert on this kind of war-political bullshit, says it all at Informed Comment:
- It seems to me more likely that the attack was aimed at making sure that what the administration calls “al-Qaeda in Iraq” did not have the means to mount a spectacular bombing or assassination campaign that would hurt McCain and help Obama.
I was told by NGOs when I was in Amman last summer that the Bush administration had for the first time pledged money to help Iraqi refugees, and that US officials had admitted to them that the reason was that the administration wanted the refugee crisis kept off the front pages this fall.
Scott McClellan has already told us that the Bushies are in campaign mode 24/7.
I’d say that every single thing they are doing, whether raiding Pakistan or raiding Syria, is intended in some way to help the Republican Party in the election, in addition to whatever local military goal the action had.
When Decider George is finally gone!
Blood Down the Oil Hole
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Iraq is the nightmare version of Alice’s surreal Rabbit Hole.
There’s blood on the walls.
(Illustration was found here).
When Decider George invaded Iraq in 2003 — carried out over the bodies of US GIs and countless numbers of Iraqi civilians — it was because Saddam Hussein was such a nasty sonofabitch and a threat to world peace.
As it has turned out, Decider George was/is the real nasty sonofabitch and the real threat to world peace.
Alan Greenspan, that grand OLD financial wizard, who this week is being grilled (and squirming) on Capitol Hill about the current Wall Street meltdown, earlier this year told a little bit of the truth when he said the reason for the Iraqi war was/is all about the oil.
And now with all the oil going elsewhere, Iraq is still Iraq — an endless, never-ending hell hole.
One of the best sites on the Internets for current affairs is TomDispatch and today posted a searing analysis on the horror of Iraq as a worse-than-failed enterprise.
TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz compiles a short essay off his current book, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context and paints an ugly picture of the reality of Decider George’s decision to invade.
The entire post can be found here.
A few snippets:
- By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment.
Meanwhile, the country’s agriculture, a key component of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling of government establishments and services.
The lush farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers suffered badly.
The once-thriving date palm industry was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations of pests when the occupation eliminated a government-run insecticide spraying program.
Even oil refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum activities were shuttered.
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The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons.
This, in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future reconstruction.
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The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society.
More than a million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality.
Education and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on earth.
Decider George has the touch of an anti-Midas and has created a deep, swallowing suck hole in the very midst of the Middle East.
And from the worse president in US history to the worse candidate for the Oval office — this sweet, SNL skit from last night tells it all.
See it here via HuffPost.
Alice would be scared shitless.