From Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis:
“The US will wreck itself if it continues to fight these ruinously expensive wars against the jihadis. IMO the IS wants to build a salafist state across the Middl East and South Asia. To that end they must achieve control of the assets now possessed by Saudi Arabia.
Would IS welcome a chance to inflict as many casualties on the US as possible? Certainly they would but that would be a means to an end and not the end itself.”
“Ever since Syrian government forces withdrew from the Syrian Kurdish enclaves or cantons on the border with Turkey in July 2012, Ankara has feared the impact of self-governing Syrian Kurds on its own 15 million-strong Kurdish population.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would prefer Isis to control Kobani, not the PYD. When five PYD members, who had been fighting Isis at Kobani, were picked up by the Turkish army as they crossed the border last week they were denounced as “separatist terrorists”.
Turkey is demanding a high price from the US for its co-operation in attacking Isis, such as a Turkish-controlled buffer zone inside Syria where Syrian refugees are to live and anti-Assad rebels are to be trained. Mr Erdogan would like a no-fly zone which will also be directed against the government in Damascus since Isis has no air force. If implemented the plan would mean Turkey, backed by the US, would enter the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels, though the anti-Assad forces are dominated by Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate.”
“Why doesn’t Ankara worry more about the collapse of the peace process with the PKK that has maintained a ceasefire since 2013? It may believe that the PKK is too heavily involved in fighting Isis in Syria that it cannot go back to war with the government in Turkey. On the other hand, if Turkey does join the civil war in Syria against Assad, a crucial ally of Iran, then Iranian leaders have said that “Turkey will pay a price”. This probably means that Iran will covertly support an armed Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Saddam Hussein made a somewhat similar mistake to Mr Erdogan when he invaded Iran in 1980, thus leading Iran to reignite the Kurdish rebellion that Baghdad had crushed through an agreement with the Shah in 1975. Turkish military intervention in Syria might not end the war there, but it may well spread the fighting to Turkey.”
Kim Jong-un hasn’t been seen in a while. His sister seems to be in control in his absence. Entrance and exit permits are reportedly revoked in Pyongyang. North Korea and China are not happy with each other, so top North Korean government officials are visiting South Korea to talk about re-unification again. They do this as a threat to China, which needs a pliant North Korea on its border, not a western-leaning unified state. Of course, the U.S. also doesn’t want re-unification. It needs the relationship between the south and the north to be always on the edge in order to keep its control over the south. Tension between China and North Korea cause sympathy for the north in South Korea.
Lots of good background on the “hermit kingdom” from Justin Raimondo here:
From Carroll Quigley’s history of the 20th century, Tragedy and Hope:
British motivations for appeasement are divided into four groups, listed from most to least influential:
1. Anti-Soviet (and anti-French/pro-German)
2. Atlantic bloc supporters
3. Appeasers
4. Those wanting “peace at any price”
The first group was led by Lord Curzon after World War 1 and worked to end Germany’s reparations payments and to allow German re-armament. They also worked against French militarism as the strongest obstacle to Germany in Western Europe.
The second group was led by the Round Table Group, which controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, several British newspapers and policy journals, and Chatham House, among others. They differed from the first group in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a Europe dominated by Germany in the west, Japan in the east, and an Atlantic bloc consisting of the British Commonwealth and the United States. The first group simply wished to destroy the Soviets.
The anti-Soviet group was determined to tear France down as a potential rival to Germany, and sought secret cooperation, led by Lord d’Abernon, between Britain and German military leaders against the Soviets. As British ambassador to Germany from 1920 to 1926, D’Abernon blocked inspections of German re-armament.
These two groups worked together in the mid-1920s to craft the Dawes Plan, which called for an end to the Allied occupation of the Ruhr Valley and an easier system of reparations, and the Locarno pacts, which sought to normalize relations with Germany. The moderate wing of the Round Table Group, led by Lords Lothian, Brand, and Astor, aimed to weaken the League of Nations as a collective security organization, which would allow Germany more freedom of movement in its re-armament and increased ability to stand against both the Soviets and the French. With Europe turned over to German control, the British would be able to focus on the creation of the Atlantic bloc.
The Atlantic-German-Soviet three bloc world idea was predicated on the belief that Germany would be forced to keep the peace, after taking over much of Europe, as it would be between the Alantic bloc and the Soviets, who would in turn be checked by Japan on one side and Germany on the other. In this way it was hoped that the balance of international power could be maintained to the satisfaction of all parties.
The anti-Soviet group and the Round Table Group cooperated on this goal and dominated the British government from 1937-1939. The two groups split, however, in late 1939/early 1940 when Lords Halifax and Lothian turned against Germany, which they came to view as insatiable. Neville Chamberlain and others remained committed to using Germany for their anti-Soviet plans.
Wielding far less power than the first two groups were the appeasers and the peace at any price group. The appeasers focused on Germany’s poor treatment by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles, and believed that if Germany were allowed to regain military parity, re-militarization of the Rhineland, and union with Austria, then European stability and peace could be maintained. When Germany remained unsatisfied after achieving these aims, the appeasers realized that Germany could only be controlled by allowing it to move east, at the expense of Czechoslovakia and Poland, thereby coming into contact with the Soviet Union. Many appeasers moved to the anti-Soviet group at this point.
The peace at any price group was easily manipulated by government propaganda exaggerating German military strength and playing down British strength. A sense of panic was instilled by hyping the threat of a German air attack and by fitting all citizens for gas masks. The panic this created pushed the British population to accept the German destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938, in exchange for which Chamberlain received from Hitler a letter allowing Chamberlain to proclaim the achievement of peace “in our time.”
When this peace proved short-lived, British public opinion turned against Germany in 1939-1940, but Chamberlain could not publicly espouse the anti-Soviet or three bloc rationale for appeasing Germany. Instead, he acted as if Britain was resisting, but still worked to bring Germany up to the Soviet border behind the scenes.
“El Salvador is a recent example of corporate domination in U.S. foreign aid. The United States will withhold the Millennium Challenge Compact aid deal, approximately $277 million in aid, unless El Salvador purchases genetically-modified seeds from biotech giant, Monsanto. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is “a U.S. foreign aid agency that was created by the U.S. Congress in January 2004,” according to Sustainable Pulse, and serves as a conduit for foreign aid funds. MCC’s unethical aid conditions would force El Salvador to purchase controversial seeds from the American biotech corporation instead of purchasing non-GMO seeds from the country’s local farmers – an action that would have negative effects on El Salvador’s agricultural industry in addition to presenting serious health and environmental risks.”
Is the current conflict in the Middle East the result of Western blunders, or part of a plan to create chaos in which different groups are divided, fight each other to exhaustion, and controlled? From Daniel Sanchez:
Who’s going to give baya to whom?
ISIS favors cleansing the Sunni population through violence, as well as fighting non-Sunnis, while al-Qaeda prefers to treat local populations less harshly, slowly ramping up their strict interpretation of sharia after consolidating gains.
In depth explanation of the split between the seemingly consanguine groups, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement
The unanswered question: why is Iran so important to US foreign policy?
“In an astonishing shift of geopolitical realities, America finds itself, literally, at war with itself. Though Syria and Iraq are consistently presented as two separate stories – the one in Syria as a hopeful rebellion; the one in Iraq as a terrorist uprising – the protagonist of the first story is the same character as the one cast as the antagonist in the second.”
With the U.S. government using its influence in the international financial system and the worldwide use of the dollar as weapons, this kind of shift away from this system is likely to increase. The dollar’s value is supported by, among other things, its use in international energy and illegal drug deals. Pepe Escobar writes:
“… talking about anxiety in Washington, there’s the fate of the petrodollar to consider, or rather the “thermonuclear” possibility that Moscow and Beijing will agree on payment for the Gazprom-CNPC deal not in petrodollars but in Chinese yuan. One can hardly imagine a more tectonic shift, with Pipelineistan intersecting with a growing Sino-Russian political-economic-energy partnership. Along with it goes the future possibility of a push, led again by China and Russia, toward a new international reserve currency – actually a basket of currencies – that would supersede the dollar (at least in the optimistic dreams of BRICS members).”
Streetwise Professor is not impressed:
Putin travels to China this week, and the big item on the agenda is the supposed signing of a long-awaited gas deal.
“I’ve seen this show many times before, going back to 2004. Much fanfare ahead of the meeting! A deal is signed! But the price is TBD. Meaning there is no real deal. And then the charade occurs again a couple of years later.”
From Chuck Spinney:
“An economically weakened, war weary United States is now careening toward a New Cold War with Russia. But this time, the march of folly is not accompanied by pretentious calls to bipartisanism or even patriotism. On the contrary, it is clear to the entire world, if not the American people, that the stampede is being driven by the vitriolic excesses of America’s deeply dysfunctional domestic politics.”
From Robert Parry: