WAR 02-07-2015-to-02-13-2015_____THEWINDSofWAR

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

(148) 01-10-2015-to-01-16-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...16-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(149) 01-17-2015-to-01-23-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...23-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(150) 01-24-2015-to-01-30-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...30-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(151) 01-31-2015-to-02-06-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...06-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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Main Russia/Ukraine invasion thread - NATO: Russian Tanks and Artillery Enter Ukraine
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ian-Tanks-and-Artillery-Enter-Ukraine/page370

Pentagon 2008 study claims Putin has Asperger's syndrome
Started by Kathy in FL‎, 02-04-2015 07:48 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...dy-claims-Putin-has-Asperger-s-syndrome/page2

Russia's nuclear strategy raises concerns in NATO
Started by JohnGaltfla‎, 02-04-2015 03:57 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ia-s-nuclear-strategy-raises-concerns-in-NATO

China Voices Concern About US Missile Defense in South Korea
Started by imaginative‎, 02-04-2015 02:49 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ncern-About-US-Missile-Defense-in-South-Korea

FUNG ADVISORY : North Korea Vows Final DOOM for CONUS....
Started by doctor_fungcool‎, 02-04-2015 06:16 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...DVISORY-North-Korea-Vows-Final-DOOM-for-CONUS....

Russia Plans Joint Military Drills with N.Korea
Started by imaginative‎, 02-03-2015 07:01 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463278-Russia-Plans-Joint-Military-Drills-with-N.Korea

Obama Admits US Role in 2014 Ukraine Coup
Started by Possible Impact‎, 02-01-2015 05:29 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463165-Obama-Admits-US-Role-in-2014-Ukraine-Coup

China, India, Russia Call For 'New World Order'
Started by Dozdoats‎, 02-03-2015 04:16 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463230-China-India-Russia-Call-For-New-World-Order

China Announces New 'Silk Road' Through Russia, India
Started by Possible Impact‎, 02-02-2015 10:49 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Announces-New-Silk-Road-Through-Russia-India

Gertz: "Top China analyst: Beijing has been duping the US since Mao"
Started by Used Camels‎, 02-03-2015 08:36 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...Beijing-has-been-duping-the-US-since-Mao-quot

IRAN MOVES TO CONTROL SUEZ CANAL AND YEMEN 1-21-2015
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-CONTROL-SUEZ-CANAL-AND-YEMEN-1-21-2015/page3

Pentagon loses control of US arms and military equipment worth $400m to Yemeni rebels
Started by JohnGaltfla‎, 02-05-2015 02:15 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ilitary-equipment-worth-400m-to-Yemeni-rebels

The Iran game (all of it)
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?439024-The-Iran-game-(all-of-it)/page13

ISRAEL heating up again... update posts 335/338
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ating-up-again...-update-posts-335-338/page14

ISIS announced death of American girl (they're saying she was killed in Jordanian strikes)
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ng-she-was-killed-in-Jordanian-strikes)/page2

Video of the Royal Jordanian Air Force doing the Job Obama Won’t Do against ISIS
Started by JohnGaltfla‎, 02-05-2015 06:05 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...rce-doing-the-Job-Obama-Won’t-Do-against-ISIS

BREAKING: As Promised, Jordan Says Will Execute All ISIS Prisoners Tonight LINK post # 14
Started by MC2006‎, 02-03-2015 05:07 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...All-ISIS-Prisoners-Tonight-LINK-post-14/page3

Isis kills Jordan pilot by burning in a cage, 20mins to die
Started by Old as dirt‎, 02-03-2015 10:16 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ilot-by-burning-in-a-cage-20mins-to-die/page4

ISLAM: ISIS Burns Jordanian Pilot Alive in Cage On Video
Started by Intestinal Fortitude‎, 02-03-2015 12:08 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Burns-Jordanian-Pilot-Alive-in-Cage-On-Video

Main Islamic State (ISIS) thread
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?451597-Main-Islamic-State-(ISIS)-thread/page46

The Book " Day of Wrath" By william Forstchen, is chilling,what isis will do to children
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...hen-is-chilling-what-isis-will-do-to-children

Enemy in the Gates - Thursday, 02/05/2015
Started by Ragnarok‎, 02-05-2015 07:04 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463367-Enemy-in-the-Gates-Thursday-02-05-2015

Matt Bracken: Ending Islam's Threat To Humanity In One Simple Step
Started by Dozdoats‎, 02-05-2015 05:32 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...s-Threat-To-Humanity-In-One-Simple-Step/page2

Egyptian Magazine: "Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrates Obama Administration"
Started by Trainman-2‎, 02-04-2015 05:34 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...herhood-Infiltrates-Obama-Administration-quot

BREAKING NEWS: 2 large explosions in central Cairo, #Egypt. (sound bombs? = 2 IEDs)
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ntral-Cairo-Egypt.-(sound-bombs-2-IEDs)/page4

Islam and Appeasement
Started by Trainman-2‎, 02-05-2015 02:42 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463353-Islam-and-Appeasement

Perpetrators of Sudan’s Genocide Invited to the National Prayer Breakfast
Started by fairbanksb‎, 02-04-2015 03:51 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...cide-Invited-to-the-National-Prayer-Breakfast

9/11 Conspirator Admits Saudi Royal Family Funded Al-Qaeda Attacks (Reuters...)
Started by Possible Impact‎, 02-04-2015 08:07 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...Royal-Family-Funded-Al-Qaeda-Attacks-(Reuters...)

Getting Out Of Afghanistan: The Logistical Nightmare
Started by Dozdoats‎, 02-03-2015 07:39 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...g-Out-Of-Afghanistan-The-Logistical-Nightmare

Obama’s Taliban Tools and Treachery By Michelle Malkin
Started by BREWER‎, 02-02-2015 09:38 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...aliban-Tools-and-Treachery-By-Michelle-Malkin

Greece: Are You Finally Ready to Do the Right Thing and Leave the Euro?
Started by Dozdoats‎, Yesterday 03:24 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...eady-to-Do-the-Right-Thing-and-Leave-the-Euro

Security alerts and pipe bombs in Northern Ireland
Started by Lilbitsnana‎, 02-05-2015 05:50 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ity-alerts-and-pipe-bombs-in-Northern-Ireland

Security confab focuses on ‘collapse of global order’
Started by imaginative‎, 02-05-2015 07:39 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-confab-focuses-on-‘collapse-of-global-order’

Draft of Arrest Request for Argentine President Found at Dead Prosecutor’s Home
Started by BREWER‎, 02-03-2015 09:53 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ine-President-Found-at-Dead-Prosecutor’s-Home

Mexican opium farmers expand plots to supply US heroin boom
Started by BREWER‎, 02-02-2015 08:30 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...farmers-expand-plots-to-supply-US-heroin-boom

How is it "workplace violence" if Army to award Purple Hearts to victims of Ft. Hood?
Started by mzkitty‎, Yesterday 08:27 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...to-award-Purple-Hearts-to-victims-of-Ft.-Hood

How big a nuclear arsenal do we really need?
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...big-a-nuclear-arsenal-do-we-really-need/page3

Measles Alerts
Started by Plain Jane‎, 01-29-2015 05:39 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?462983-Measles-Alerts/page2

MAIN EBOLA DISCUSSION THREAD February 2015
Started by BREWER‎, 02-05-2015 04:24 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?463396-MAIN-EBOLA-DISCUSSION-THREAD-February-2015

'Medical mystery' still stumps doctors amid outbreak of poliolike paralysis - KC
Started by Coulter‎, 02-03-2015 04:16 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ctors-amid-outbreak-of-poliolike-paralysis-KC
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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/the-white-house-releases-a-new-national-security-strategy/

The White House Releases a New National Security Strategy

The new document is meant to explain the purpose and promise of American power in the years ahead.

By Franz-Stefan Gady
February 07, 2015

Today, the Obama White House released its second and final national security strategy (NSS), outlining in broad strokes the strategic vision of the U.S. president and his national security team. Overall, the white paper places a premium on U.S. leadership in the world: “The strategy sets out the principles and priorities that describe how America will lead the world toward greater peace and a new prosperity.” The New York Times notes that the words “lead” and “leadership” are used almost a hundred times in the document, a hint that the administration is consciously trying to refute accusations by critics that the White House lack assertiveness on the international stage.

The NSS emphasizes that it is meant to clarify “the purpose and promise of American power.” The 29-page document, required by Congress, differs from its 2010 predecessor, which mostly centered on ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, finding a way out of the global financial crisis, and“resetting” the relationship with Russia. Today, in an event at the Brookings Institution, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, presented the NSS to the broader American public, and stated that, “2015 is a whole new ballgame [and] much has changed in the past five years (…) [yet] what’s missing in Washington is often a sense of long-term perspective.”

Consequently, the focus of the 2015 NSS is on long-term challenges such as cybersecurity, global health, climate change, failing states, and energy security. The strategy also lays out in broad strokes the United States’ commitment to rebalancing to Asia and the Pacific region, pursuing a stable Middle East and North Africa by “reducing the underlying sources of conflict,” eliminating global poverty within 15 years, strengthening global alliances (especially with NATO and European allies given the Ukraine crisis and the worsening relationship with Russia), maintaining multilateral partnerships, reinforcing/updating international norms and institutions, preventing “mass atrocities,” and pushing nuclear non-proliferation.

In detail, the document mentions that the Obama Administration will endeavor to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, persist in the fight against al-Qaeda, ISIL, and their affiliates, pursue the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), carry on its campaign to battle Ebola through the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), continue to confront “the urgent crisis of climate change,” support countries such as Tunisia and Burma that are transitioning from authoritarianism “ in their quest towards democracy,” and “impose costs on malicious cyberactors,” among a host of other priorities. The strategy also calls for an end to “draconian cuts imposed by sequestration that threaten the effectiveness of our military and other instruments of power.”

As expected, the document does not outline detailed strategies and plans to accomplish the national security priorities mentioned in the publication. “It serves as a compass for how this administration, in partnership with Congress, will lead the world through a shifting security landscape toward a more durable peace and a new prosperity,” according to Bernadette Meehan, the National Security Council spokeswoman. “In their aspirations, generalities and rhetoric, they often resemble most a really, really long speech,” states a former White House official quoted by Reuters. Over at Foreign Policy, two former National Security Council staffers note that national security strategies “tend to lack the traditional attributes of strategy — that is, they do not spell out desired objectives, articulate the steps needed to achieve those ends, and then describe the resources necessary to carry out those steps.”

Yet, they also notes that the publication of the document is not a waste of time,”because drafting and publishing a National Security Strategy is one governmental exercise in which the process matters more than the product. In producing a NSS, foreign policy officials from across a variety of agencies and departments are forced to think deeply, if not always strategically, about the grand sweep of U.S. action in the world.”

However, pundits and organizations continue to criticize the absence of a proper national security strategy document, which they see as emblematic of a much larger problem. The Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), notes in a report that “the time pressures that an overburdened White House faces almost guarantees an inability to do deliberate, careful strategy formulation.” The report further notes: “Taken together, the basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed, and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House from effectively controlling the system. The White House bottleneck, in particular, prevents the system from reliably marshaling the needed but disparate skills and expertise from wherever they may be found in government, and from providing the resources to match the skills.” Thus, perhaps it is no accident that the document fails to deliver specific plans how to implement the White House’s strategic vision.

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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2014/02/united-states-wheres-the-strategy/

United States: Where’s the Strategy?

Looking for a coherent national vision? The National Security Strategy is not it.

By Andy Zelleke and Justin Talbot Zorn
February 05, 2014

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In our troubled times, the White House’s imminent publication of its National Security Strategy might warrant some buzz—if not at the level of a new iPhone release or a Super Bowl commercial, at least that of a major presidential policy address. So where’s that buzz? A clue can be found in Bob Gates’ dismissive account in his memoirs: “Personally, I don’t recall ever having read the President’s National Security Strategy when preparing to become Secretary of Defense…. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures.”

President Barack Obama may yet surprise in his second National Security Strategy document, expected any day. But recent history suggests that, whatever the document’s other merits, it won’t actually contain a strategy. Nor the plausible vision for which such a strategy would aim.

In recent years, Washington’s National Security Strategies have been a cross between laundry list—the many activities in which the U.S. is presently engaged—and wish list—numerous additional activities it behooves the nation to undertake, and the goals they support. It’s no doubt useful to have, in one place, a list of the president’s goals in important domains (such as a homeland secure from WMD attack, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a denuclearized Korean peninsula, and a competitive and growing economy that can support a prominent global role); and a list of many things the government is doing and intends to do in support of those goals. But this isn’t strategy.

A serious national strategy would start from a cold-blooded assessment of the global landscape, and of the most likely (but unknowable) futures that may emerge. It would also start from an equally dispassionate assessment of the nation’s capabilities—its strengths and weaknesses—and how these may plausibly change over time.

It would prioritize ruthlessly among the many desirable policy goals; as strategy scholar Richard Rumelt has put it, “Good strategy works by focusing attention and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes….” A genuine strategy would address head-on the inevitable hard choices and tradeoffs to be made in the pursuit of the most-high value objectives; as strategy guru Michael Porter has emphasized, the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Moreover, a serious strategy would link these hard choices to budgetary consequences. The strategy would also scrutinize commitments made long ago, in different circumstances—including alliances—to ensure that they remain value-creating for the U.S. And it would anticipate other actors’ likely responses—and systemic reverberations—arising from the contemplated U.S. actions, starting from a deep understanding of those actors’ perceived interests and steering clear of overly sanguine assumptions.

And this strategy would explicitly support an achievable—and articulable—vision of the future.

The Obama 2010 National Security Strategy—like many of its predecessors—fell well short on these criteria. It contained little in the way of alternative futures—despite the National Intelligence Council’s extensive work on this. Perhaps most conspicuously, the 2010 NSS left a reader with the impression that China was (and was expected to be) nothing more than a “21st century center of influence” on par with India and Russia. While the 2010 NSS correctly emphasized that rebuilding the American economy and its competitiveness would be essential to global leadership, it simply listed the “to-dos” (improve education, get fiscal house in order, and so on) on the agenda—without considering a scenario in which a sizable gap between U.S. and competitor growth rates persists for many years.

There is little in the 2010 NSS that would offend or disappoint anyone, save for Al Qaeda, the Taliban and “Axis of Evil” governments. Part of Gates’ thinly veiled disdain for the generic NSS was, he noted, the fact that it was the outcome of a bureaucratic process in which many cooks needed to sign off on the broth. That reality—together with the fact that the NSS is prepared for Congress under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, and released to the public—makes it an inherently political document, inclining presidents to steer clear of controversy. It’s not surprising that a serious strategy statement is unlikely to emerge from this process.

The problem for the nation, though, is far bigger than a poorly titled document. After all, there could be a classified version of the NSS that would do, strategy-wise, what the public NSS doesn’t. While the Goldwater-Nichols Act calls on the President to submit both a classified and unclassified version of the document, there’s no indication that any administration has produced a classified version in recent years. We suspect that, if a classified version existed, it would be in the White House’s interest to acknowledge it (as it does many other classified documents that don’t get released to the public).

Of course, there can be a full-fledged strategy without a document memorializing it; and in the era of WikiLeaks, there is risk in reducing anything to writing. But can Americans be confident that there’s a strategy—something befitting the title “National Security Strategy”—anywhere in the White House, even if it’s unwritten and resides in a small number of senior officials’ heads?

We are skeptical, for one principal reason. The formulation of a coherent, holistic National Security Strategy would almost certainly require a substantial process. And had such deliberations taken place, we believe the Administration would have made the public aware of that fact—as it did in enabling, as one example, The New York Times’ extensive reporting on the Obama Administration’s deliberations leading to the troop surge in Afghanistan.

Perhaps not since the Eisenhower Administration’s “Project Solarium” has a White House deliberated extensively at the “grand strategic” level as part of a structured process. We believe this is a serious mistake.

Crises from all corners of the globe come flying at presidents, and these shouldn’t be managed on an ad hoc and best efforts basis. Washington’s actions should be informed by a strategic concept in which a president has conviction and confidence—derived not from in-the-moment intuition, but from first-rate strategic thinking.

What would that process look like? It would create space for the president and his senior national security team to step back from the crises du jour: to raise questions rarely asked, challenge unexamined assumptions and “sacred cows,” draw on the best data from varied sources, hear unconventional perspectives, think creatively, reflect, and prioritize. In doing so, the White House can take some cues from other governments, and from the private sector.

Singapore, for example, has devoted impressive attention to national strategy. It employs diverse teams of civil servants—individuals with backgrounds ranging from computer science to fiction writing—to think rigorously about alternative futures and analyze data for signals about national risks and opportunities. The city-state’s Strategic Policy Office, located in the Prime Minister’s Office, is employed to “manage the commons” of futures thinking taking place throughout the government and create useful decision-making tools—like national scenarios, serious games, and SWOT analyses—for senior leaders.

And, as we proposed in an article in Foreign Policy in 2012, a new Chief Strategy Officer role could be adapted from the corporate sector—not a Kissingerian “grand strategist,” but rather a process-focused individual charged with owning and managing the strategy formulation process. This process would facilitate the president’s and senior team’s ability to draw on all relevant analytical tools and perspectives, to challenge assumptions, and to identify blind-spots in national strategy development. The appointment of a CSO would address a core problem with strategy development in the U.S. government: that nobody below the president—who has a fair amount on his plate—or the national security advisor—often consumed with crisis management—actually “owns” the responsibility to orchestrate whole-of-government strategy.

Obama recently told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that he’s not interested in a new grand strategy, adding “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now.” While he may not need a grand strategist, like most presidents he could use better process for asking and answering core questions about the nation’s direction. Americans can live with a published National Security Strategy that disappoints. But they will be hurt if the White House lets itself make new high-stakes decisions—or mindlessly perpetuate old ones—without the benefit of a clear and achievable guiding vision and the best possible strategic thinking.

Andy Zelleke is the MBA Class of 1962 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Justin Talbot Zorn is a legislative director on Capitol Hill, and researched public sector strategic planning as a Fulbright Scholar in Singapore.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

Hummm........

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=70082

First Published: 2015-02-07

Nuclear War and Clashing Ukraine Narratives
America and Russia have two nearly opposite narratives on Ukraine, which is more an indictment of the U.S. news media which feigns objectivity but disseminates what amounts to propaganda. These divergent narratives are driving the world toward a possible nuclear crisis, writes Robert Parry.

Middle East Online

The U.S. government and mainstream media are swaggering toward a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine without any of the seriousness that has informed this sort of decision-making throughout the nuclear age. Instead, Official Washington seems possessed by a self-righteous goofiness that could be the prelude to the end of life on this planet.

Nearly across the U.S. political spectrum, there is a pugnacious “group think” which has transformed what should have been a manageable political dispute in Ukraine into some morality play where U.S. politicians and pundits blather on about how the nearly year-old coup regime in Kiev “shares our values” and how America must be prepared to defend this regime militarily.

Though I’m told that President Barack Obama personally recognizes how foolhardy this attitude is, he has made no significant move to head off the craziness and, indeed, has tolerated provocative actions by his underlings, such as neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s scheming with coup plotters to overthrow Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.

Obama also has withheld from the American people intelligence information that undercuts some of the more extreme claims that his administration has made. For instance, I’m told that he has detailed intelligence reporting on both the mysterious sniper attack that preceded the putsch nearly a year ago and the shoot-down of the Malaysia Airlines Flights 17 that deepened the crisis last summer. But he won’t release the findings.

More broadly over the last year, Obama’s behavior – ranging from his initial neglect of the Ukraine issue, as Nuland’s coup plotting unfolded, to his own participation in the tough talk, such as boasting during his State of the Union address that he had helped put the Russian economy “in tatters” – ranks as one of the most irresponsible performances by a U.S. president.

Given the potential stakes of nuclear war, none of the post-World War II presidents behaved as recklessly as Obama has, which now includes allowing his administration officials to talk loosely about sending military support to an unstable regime in Kiev that includes neo-Nazis who have undertaken death-squad operations against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove, who is commander of NATO, declared last November that – regarding supplying military support for the Kiev government – “nothing at this time is off the table.” Breedlove is now pushing actively to send lethal U.S. military equipment to fend off an offensive by ethnic Russian rebels in the east.

I’m told that the Russians fear that U.S. officials are contemplating placing Cruise missiles in Ukraine or otherwise introducing advanced weaponry that Moscow regards as a direct threat to its national security. Whether or not the Russians are being alarmist, these fears are affecting their own decision-making.

None of the nuclear-age presidents – not Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush – would have engaged in such provocative actions on Russia’s borders, though some surely behaved aggressively in overthrowing governments and starting wars farther away.

Even Ronald Reagan, an aggressive Cold Warrior, kept his challenges to the Soviet Union in areas that were far less sensitive to its national security than Ukraine. He may have supported the slaughter of leftists in Central America and Africa or armed Islamic fundamentalists fighting a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, but he recognized the insanity of a military showdown with Moscow in Eastern Europe.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, U.S. presidents became more assertive, pushing NATO into the former Warsaw Pact nations and, under President Clinton, bombing a Russian ally in Serbia, but that came at a time when Russia was essentially flat on its back geopolitically.

Perhaps the triumphalism of that period is still alive especially among neocons who reject President Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russia’s national pride. These Washington hardliners still feel that they can treat Moscow with disdain, ignoring the fact that Russia maintains a formidable nuclear arsenal and is not willing to return to the supine position of the 1990s.

In 2008, President George W. Bush – arguably one of the most reckless presidents of the era – backed away from a confrontation with Russia when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a neocon favorite, drew the Russians into a border conflict over South Ossetia. Despite some war talk from the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain, President Bush showed relative restraint.

Imbalanced Narrative

But Obama has failed to rein in his administration’s war hawks and has done nothing to correct the biased narrative that his State Department has fed to the equally irresponsible mainstream U.S. news media. Since the Ukraine crisis began in fall of 2013, the New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have provided only one side of the story, openly supporting the interests of the pro-European western Ukrainians over the ethnic Russian eastern Ukrainians.

The bias is so strong that the mainstream media has largely ignored the remarkable story of the Kiev regime willfully dispatching Nazi storm troopers to kill ethnic Russians in the east, something that hasn’t happened in Europe since World War II.

For Western news organizations that are quick to note the slightest uptick in neo-Nazism in Europe, there has been a willful blindness to Kiev’s premeditated use of what amount to Nazi death squads undertaking house-to-house killings in eastern Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]

The Russian government has repeatedly protested these death-squad operations and other crimes committed by the Kiev regime, but the U.S. mainstream media is so in the tank for the western Ukrainians that it has suppressed this aspect of the crisis, typically burying references to the neo-Nazi militias at the end of stories or dismissing these accounts as “Russian propaganda.”

With this ugly reality hidden from the U.S. public, Obama’s State Department has been able to present a white-hat-vs.-black-hat narrative to the crisis. So, while Russians saw a constitutionally elected government on their border overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup last February – and then human rights atrocities inflicted on ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine – the American people heard only about wonderful pro-American “reformers” in Kiev and the evil pro-Russian “minions” trying to destroy “democracy” at Putin’s bidding.

This distorted American narrative has represented one of the most unprofessional and dangerous performances in the history of modern U.S. journalism, rivaling the false conventional wisdom about Iraq’s WMD except in this case the media propaganda is aimed at a country in Russia that really does have weapons of mass destruction.

The Russians also have noted the arrival of financially self-interested Americans, including Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, reminding the Russians of the American financial experts who descended on Moscow with their “shock therapy” in the 1990s, “reforms” that enriched a few well-connected oligarchs but impoverished millions of average Russians.

Jaresko, a former U.S. diplomat who took Ukrainian citizenship in December 2014 to become Finance Minister, had been in charge of a U.S.-taxpayer-financed $150 million Ukrainian investment fund which involved substantial insider dealings, including paying a management fund that Jaresko created more than $1 million a year in fees, even as the $150 million apparently dwindled to less than $100 million.

Jaresko also has been involved in a two-year-long legal battle with her ex-husband to gag him from releasing information about apparent irregularities in the handling of the U.S. money. Jaresko went into Chancery Court in Delaware to enforce a non-disclosure clause against her ex-husband, Ihor Figlus, and got a court order to silence him.

This week, when I contacted George Pazuniak, Figlus’s lawyer about Jaresko’s aggressive enforcement of the non-disclosure agreement, he told me that “at this point, it’s very difficult for me to say very much without having a detrimental effect on my client.”

With Jaresko now being hailed as a Ukrainian “reformer” who – in the words of New York Times’ columnist Thomas L. Friedman – “shares our values,” one has to wonder why she has fought so hard to shut up her ex-husband regarding possible revelations about improper handling of U.S. taxpayer money. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Made-in-USA Finance Minister.”]

More Interested Parties

The Russians also looked askance at the appointment of Estonian Jaanika Merilo as the latest foreigner to be brought inside the Ukrainian government as a “reformer.” Merilo, a Jaresko associate, is being put in charge of attracting foreign investments but her photo spreads look more like someone interested in some rather kinky partying.

The Russians are aware, too, of prominent Americans circling around the potential plunder of Ukraine. For instance, Hunter Biden was named to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, which is a shadowy Cyprus-based company linked to Privat Bank.

Privat Bank is controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the Kiev regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine. Kolomoysky has helped finance the paramilitary forces killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

And, Burisma has been lining up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures. As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis.”]

So, the Russians have a decidedly different view of the Ukrainian “reforms” than much of the U.S. media does. But I’m told that the Russians would be willing to tolerate these well-connected Americans enriching themselves in Ukraine and even having Ukraine expand its economic relations with the European Union.

But the Russians have drawn a red line at the prospect for the expansion of NATO forces into Ukraine and the continued killing of ethnic Russians at the hands of neo-Nazi death squads. Putin is demanding that those paramilitary forces be disarmed.

Besides unleashing these right-wing militias on the ethnic Russians, the Kiev government has moved to punish the people living in the eastern sectors by cutting off access to banks and other financial services. It also has become harder and more dangerous for ethnic Russians to cross into territory controlled by the Kiev authorities. Many are turned back and those who do get through face the risk of being taken and killed by the neo-Nazi militias.

These conditions have left the people in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas – the so-called Donbass region on Russia’s border – dependent on relief supplies from Russia. Meanwhile, the Kiev regime — pumped up by prospects of weapons from Washington as well as more money — has toughened its tone with vows to crush the eastern rebellion once and for all.

Russia’s Hardening Line

The worsening situation in the east and the fear of U.S. military weapons arriving in the west have prompted a shift in Moscow’s view of the Ukraine crisis, including a readiness to resupply the ethnic Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and even provide military advisers.

These developments have alarmed European leaders who find themselves caught in the middle of a possible conflict between the United States and Russia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande rushed to Kiev and then Moscow this week to discuss possible ways to defuse the crisis.

The hardening Russian position now seeks, in effect, a division of Ukraine into two autonomous zones, the east and the west with a central government that maintains the currency and handles other national concerns. But I’m told that Moscow might still accept the earlier idea of a federated Ukraine with greater self-governance by the different regions.

Putin also does not object to Ukraine building closer economic ties to Europe and he offered a new referendum in Crimea on whether the voters still want to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, said a source familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking. But Putin’s red lines include no NATO expansion into Ukraine and protection for ethnic Russians by disarming the neo-Nazi militias, the source said.

If such an arrangement or something similar isn’t acceptable and if the killing of ethnic Russians continues, the Kremlin would support a large-scale military offensive from the east that would involve “taking Kiev,” according to the source.

A Russian escalation of that magnitude would likely invite a vigorous U.S. response, with leading American politicians and pundits sure to ratchet up demands for a military counterstrike against Russia. If Obama were to acquiesce to such bellicosity – to avoid being called “weak” – the world could be pushed to the brink of nuclear war.

Who’s to Blame?

Though the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media continue to put all the blame on Russia, the fact that the Ukraine crisis has reach such a dangerous crossroads reveals how reckless the behavior of Official Washington has been over the past year.

Nuland and other U.S. officials took an internal Ukrainian disagreement over how quickly it should expand ties to Europe – while seeking to retain its historic relations with Russia – and turned that fairly pedestrian political dispute into a possible flashpoint for a nuclear war.

At no time, as this crisis has evolved over the past year, did anyone of significance in Official Washington, whether in government or media, stop and contemplate whether this issue was worth risking the end of life on the planet. Instead, all the American people have been given is a steady diet of anti-Yanukovych and anti-Putin propaganda.

Though constitutionally elected, Yanukovych was depicted as a corrupt tyrant who had a pricy sauna in his official mansion. Though Putin had just staged the Winter Olympics in Sochi, signaling his desire for Russia to integrate more with the West, he was portrayed as either a new-age imperial czar or the second coming of Hitler – if not worse because he occasionally would ride on a horse while not wearing a shirt.

Further, the U.S. news media refused to conduct a serious investigation into the evidence that Nuland and other U.S. officials had helped destabilize Yanukovych’s government with the goal of achieving another neocon “regime change.”

Nuland, who personally urged on anti-Yanukovych protests in Kiev, discussed with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in early February 2014 who should lead the new government – “Yats is the guy,” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk – and how to “glue this thing.”

After weeks of mounting tensions and worsening violence, the coup occurred on Feb. 22, 2014, when well-organized neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias from western Ukraine overran presidential buildings forcing officials to flee for their lives. With Yanukovych ousted, Yatsenyuk soon became Prime Minister. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “When Is a Putsch a Putsch.” ]

Many ethnic Russians in southern and eastern Ukraine, who had strongly supported Yanukovych, refused to accept the new U.S.-backed order in Kiev. Crimean officials and voters moved to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move that Putin accepted because of Crimea’s historic ties to Russia and his fear that the Russian naval base at Sevastopol might be handed to NATO.

The resistance spread to eastern Ukraine where other ethnic Russians took up arms against the coup regime in Kiev, which responded with that it called an “anti-terrorist operation” against the east. To bolster the weak Ukrainian army, Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov dispatched neo-Nazi and other “volunteer” militias to spearhead the attacks.

After the deaths of more than 5,000 people, a shaky cease-fire was announced in September, but — amid complaints about neo-Nazi death squads operating in government-controlled areas and with life deteriorating in rebel-controlled towns and cities — the ethnic Russians launched an offensive in January, using Russian-supplied weapons to expand their control of territory.

In reaction, U.S. pundits, including columnists and editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, called for dispatching U.S. aid to the Kiev forces, including proposals for lethal weaponry to deter Putin’s “aggression.” Members of Congress and members of the Obama administration have joined the chorus.

On Feb. 2, the New York Times reported “With Russian-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, American officials said. … President Obama has made no decisions on providing such lethal assistance.”

That same day, the lead Times editorial was entitled “Mr. Putin Resumes His War” and continued with the theme about “Russian aggression” and the need “to increase the cost” if Russia demands “a permanent rebel-held enclave.”

On Feb. 3, the Washington Post ran an editorial entitled “Help for Ukraine. Defensive weapons could deter Russia in a way sanctions won’t.” The editorial concluded that Putin “will stop only if the cost to his regime is sharply raised – and quickly.”

A new war fever gripped Washington and no one wanted to be viewed as “soft” or to be denounced as a “Putin apologist.” Amid this combination of propaganda, confusion and tough-guy-ism – and lacking the tempering wisdom about war and nuclear weapons that restrained earlier U.S. presidents – a momentum lurched toward a nuclear showdown over Ukraine that could put all life on earth in jeopardy.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iran/us-wants-iran-nuke-deal-outline-by-end-of-march-1.1452725

US wants Iran nuke deal outline by end of March

Kerry and Zarif agree to meet again soon

AP
Published: 13:59 February 7, 2015
Gulf News

Munich: US Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday pressed Iran’s foreign minister on the Obama administration’s desire to reach the outline of a nuclear deal by the end of March, in keeping with a target set by negotiators last year.

Kerry delivered the message to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during a two-hour meeting on the sidelines of an international security conference in Munich, according to a US official. Kerry “reiterated our desire to move toward a political framework by the end of March”, the official said. “They agreed to stay in close touch and that they would try to meet again soon.” The official was not authorised to discuss the meeting publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany will resume negotiations with Iran soon, with an eye on the March target they set in November after missing two earlier deadlines. Their ultimate goal is to reach a final agreement by July that would, in exchange for a lifting of sanctions, address international concerns that Iran may be using a civilian atomic energy programme as cover to try to develop nuclear weapons.

Despite assurances from the administration that it will not accept any deal with Iran that allows the capability to construct a bomb, the prospect of an agreement that may only keep Iran on the threshold of such a step has alarmed many allies, including the Israeli regime and the Gulf Arab states, along with many in Congress.

Meeting later with foreign ministers and senior officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — Kerry pledged anew that “no deal is better that a bad deal”, according to senior US officials who attended the session.

The officials said the Gulf state representatives and Kerry also discussed the situation in Yemen, where Iranian-linked Al Houthi rebels dissolved parliament and declared themselves in charge of the country earlier Friday. The Gulf Arabs expressed interest in the international community taking a stronger position on the developments, which the United States and others have already denounced, the officials said.

Kerry “challenged” the ministers to also speak publicly about their stances and urged them to remain in contact with various factions on the ground, the US officials said.

_____

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http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iran/iran-says-rouhani-s-fate-hinges-on-nuclear-talks-1.1452720

Iran says Rouhani’s fate hinges on nuclear talks

Western officials share Iran’s concerns but are wary of its intentions

Reuters
Published: 13:48 February 7, 2015

Ankara/New York: Iran’s foreign minister has warned the United States that failure to agree on a nuclear deal would likely herald the political demise of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani, Iranian officials said, raising the stakes as the decade-old stand-off nears its end-game.

Mohammad Javad Zarif pressed the concern with US Secretary of State John Kerry at several meetings in recent weeks, according to three senior Iranian officials, who said Iran had also raised the issue with other Western powers. Zarif’s warning has not been previously reported.

Western officials acknowledged that the move may be just a negotiating tactic to persuade them to give more ground, but said they shared the view that Rouhani’s political clout would be heavily damaged by the failure of talks.

The warning that a breakdown in talks would empower Iran’s conservative hardliners comes as the 12-year-old stand-off reaches a crucial phase, with a March deadline to reach a political agreement ahead of a final deal by June 30.

The agreement aims to end sanctions in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear programme, though hard-to-bridge differences remain, particularly on the timing of the relief on economic sanctions and the duration of the deal.

Both US President Barack Obama and Rouhani, who Iranian officials say has staked his career on the deal, are facing stiff domestic opposition to an agreement, narrowing the scope for compromise.

A senior US official denied that any such warnings had been received from the Iranians. “We’ll leave assessment of Iranian politics to the Iranians but this rumour is untrue,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

But the Iranian officials insisted that Zarif had raised the concern with Kerry. The two have met repeatedly in recent weeks in an attempt to break the impasse, most recently on Friday when they talked for over an hour on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

“As Rouhani is on the frontline, naturally he will be more harmed,” said one of the officials, who has direct knowledge of Zarif’s discussions with Kerry.

Other Western officials said the Iranian delegation had raised the same concern in talks recently. If the talks fail, Rouhani would likely be sidelined and his influence dramatically reduced, giving hardliners like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps an upper hand, Iranian officials and Western analysts say.

A comprehensive nuclear deal is seen as crucial to reducing the risk of a wider Middle East war, at a time when Iran is deeply involved in conflicts in Syria and Iraq. After nearly a year of talks, negotiators failed for the second time in November to meet a self-imposed deadline for an agreement.

Iran rejects allegations it is developing the capability to produce atomic weapons. But it has refused to halt uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work, leading to US, European Union and UN sanctions that have hobbled its economy.

The key sticking point in the talks at the moment is Iran’s demand that Western powers agree to the quick end of oil and banking sanctions, Western and Iranian officials say.

One of the Iranian officials, who also had direct access to the talks, said the Americans were talking in terms of years for the sanctions relief while Iran wanted curbs on oil and banking to be lifted within six months.

Rouhani was elected in 2013 on promises of ending the crippling Western sanctions, improving the economy and reducing the country’s diplomatic isolation.

But he faces a worsening power struggle with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has said Iran should immunise itself against sanctions, suggesting that he is prepared to live with them. Khamenei has the final word on any deal.

Rouhani has warned that the Islamic Republic needs to end its isolation to help its economy, which has also been hit hard by plunging oil prices.

Just as Iranian negotiators say privately that their room for compromise is narrowing, so too is that of the United States and European delegations, Western officials say.

The United States, officials familiar with the talks say, has already compromised on the issue of how many centrifuges Iran would be allowed to operate.

Obama could temporarily suspend many of the harshest unilateral US sanctions against Iran but permanent removal would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, where there is little appetite for sanctions relief.

The Senate is finalising a bill for tougher sanctions if there is no final nuclear deal by June 30. Obama has vowed to veto any new Iran sanctions bill.

Another Western official said Rouhani appeared to have underestimated the resolve of Washington and Europe to demand limitations on Iranian nuclear activities for a decade or more in exchange for sanctions relief.

“Rouhani thought that by speaking nicely and not calling for Israel’s destruction, Western powers would rush to sign a deal, any deal, with Iran,” the official said. “He miscalculated. The Western powers may also want an agreement but they’re also constrained by Congress, Israel and Saudi [Arabia].”

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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http://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...ash-over-potential-deal-with-russia-1.2094749

Kiev could face backlash over potential deal with Russia

Ukraine has many historical reasons to mistrust both East and West when it comes to deciding its fate

Daniel McLaughlin
Sat, Feb 7, 2015, 01:00
Comments 13

As Angela Merkel and François Hollande flew to Moscow to discuss Ukraine with Vladimir Putin yesterday, a Twitter post showed the trio’s faces superimposed on those of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the historic Yalta summit.

Exactly 70 years ago, the Allied leaders met in Crimea to establish Europe’s post-war order, and Stalin secured a Soviet “sphere of influence” from the Baltic to the Black Sea that would last until the collapse of communism in 1989.

The nations of eastern Europe get nervous when major powers go over their heads to discuss their fates; this is one reason why countries from Estonia to Bulgaria so value their seats around the table at the European Union and Nato.

Ukraine belongs to neither bloc and still resides, as its old Slavic name suggests, “on the edge”, between a western world dominated by the US and EU, and a Eurasia of mostly autocratic former Soviet states grouped around a resurgent Russia.

Ukraine has many reasons to mistrust both sides, the latest being the failure of Russia, the US and Britain to honour a 1994 pledge to protect it from aggression in return for its relinquishment of nuclear weapons.

After Merkel and Hollande unexpectedly arrived in Ukraine bearing a new peace plan for Ukraine’s ravaged east, and then flew on to Moscow without making its contents public, Ukrainians suspected a sell-out.

Merkel insisted she would “never deal with territorial questions over another country” and Ukraine’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin told compatriots: “Don’t worry. They’re not pressuring Ukraine. France and Germany are helping us restore peace.” But Ukrainians’ fears are well-founded.

They know the EU is split over how strongly to punish Russia for annexing Crimea and supporting the separatists, and that the chance of sanctions being dramatically tightened shrank with Greece’s election of Moscow-friendly Syriza.

Ukrainians also know Nato will not defend them, and US president Barack Obama is reluctant to arm a military which, while improving, is still riddled with incompetence, corruption and suspected Russian spies.

French opposition
In the midst of a conflict that has convinced many Ukrainians that only accession to Nato can protect them from Russian aggression, they heard Hollande reassure “Russians who are worried” that France staunchly opposes Ukraine’s membership of the alliance.

Above all, Ukrainians who back its pivot towards the West find it hard to imagine a compromise deal that would be acceptable to them and to Putin and the militants, who rely on Russia for diplomatic and financial support and delivery of everything from tanks and rockets to food and medical supplies.

Ukrainians observe that Moscow fabricated a threat to the country’s Russian-speakers to justify seizing Crimea and fomenting war in the east. However, while Putin was happy to annexe the relatively small and desirable Black Sea peninsula, he does not want the subsidy-guzzling rustbelt of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Rather than eyeing a further land-grab, Putin appears to view the conflict as a means to an end: the destruction of the new, still-shaky order in Ukraine; and the demoralisation of pro-western movements in Russia and neighbouring states that may seek to mimic the protests that ousted Kiev’s previous Kremlin-backed regime.

Many Ukrainians believe Putin is implacable, that sanctions have not softened his stance, and that any deal he offers will contain a trap.

If, as some reports suggest, Hollande and Merkel were in Moscow to discuss giving the rebels more land, or more autonomy, than Ukraine has previously offered in exchange for a ceasefire, then it could backfire brutally on Kiev.

Corrupt officials
Ukrainians are deeply frustrated by the slow pace of reform and the resistance of corrupt officials to demands for a cleaner, fairer society that were at the heart of the Maidan protests.

These problems – along with bloodshed in the east that is made more galling by tales of incompetence, graft and treachery among the top brass – are eroding faith in oligarch- turned-president Petro Poroshenko and his government.

Western leaders may encourage him to make major concessions in return for a Russian promise of peace, but he knows it could trigger a revolt by opponents – including battle-hardened volunteer battalions – who would see compromise with Russia and its proxies as a betrayal of those killed in the east and on Maidan square.

Such a pact would be especially hard to present to Ukrainians now, in the run-up to the anniversary of the deadly climax of the Maidan rallies and the loss of Crimea.

With his country isolated and struggling economically, Putin is likely to use next month’s celebration of Crimea’s “reunification” with Russia to claim victory in the current crisis.

Any deal that Putin would accept now, therefore, could be expected to inflict considerable pain on Poroshenko; at best, it may temporarily “freeze” the conflict, staunching bloodshed for a while without healing the deep wound between Ukraine and Russia.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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http://www.ibtimes.com/north-korea-...hip-rocket-set-be-deployed-across-its-1808740

North Korea Test-Fires ¡¥Ultra-Precision¡¦ Anti-Ship Rocket Set To be Deployed Across Its Navy

By Kukil Bora †y@KukilBora on February 07 2015 1:46 AM

North Korea has test-fired a newly developed ¡§ultra-precision¡¨ intelligent anti-ship rocket, which will be deployed across the country¡¦s naval units, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the North¡¦s state-run news agency, reported Saturday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was present at the location where the new ¡§cutting-edge¡¨ rocket was test-fired by the navy¡¦s East Sea fleet. According to the KCNA report, Kim watched the exercise from an observation post where he was briefed about the tactical and engineering data of the rocket.

¡§As the head of the East Sea Fleet ordered the test-firing, the ultra-precision anti-ship rocket blasted off from a rocket boat. The intelligent rocket precisely sought, tracked and hit the 'enemy' ship after taking a safe flight,¡¨ KCNA reported, without providing details about the location or date of the event.

According to the report, the new anti-ship rocket is expected to be deployed soon across the country¡¦s military ships in an effort to strengthen the navy¡¦s defense capabilities to better ensure the safety of its territorial waters. The authorities also claim that the new equipment will help the navy strongly react to any military attack by the enemy's fleets of warships.

Kim, who was satisfied with the ¡§perfect development¡¨ of the new rocket, called for the production of ¡§more tactical guided weapons of high precision and intelligence.¡¨

The nuclear-capable country has been developing new ballistic missiles and rockets, despite heavy sanctions imposed on Pyongyang by other countries, the Agence France-Presse reported, adding that the North is believed to have been working on missiles that could threaten the U.S. mainland.

Meanwhile, two U.S. lawmakers submitted a new bill on Thursday, calling for strengthening sanctions against North Korea over the communist nation¡¦s alleged involvement in a massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November, South Korea¡¦s Yonhap News Agency reported Friday.

The bill is targeted to control Pyongyang¡¦s access to hard currency and other goods. It also asks the U.S. government to use all possible means to impose sanctions on North Korea, as well as other countries and companies that help the nation in developing nuclear weapons.

¡§North Korea continues to threaten the United States and our close allies with its nuclear, missile, and now cyber capabilities,¡¨ Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement, adding that the bill is introduced ¡§to step up the targeting of those financial institutions in Asia and beyond that are supporting this brutal and dangerous regime.¡¨

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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http://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...-calls-to-supply-weapons-to-ukraine-1.2095530

Merkel dismisses calls to supply weapons to Ukraine

German chancellor applauded at Munich security conference after meeting with Vladimir Putin

Derek Scally, Isabel Gorst
Sat, Feb 7, 2015, 11:21

German chancellor Angela Merkel has dismissed calls to supply weapons to Ukraine to resist pro-Russian rebels in its eastern regions, saying international efforts should concentrate on diplomacy and economic measures.

Heading back from her Moscow meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Dr Merkel earned applause at the Munich Security Conference for arguing that, to date, the flow of weapons to eastern Ukraine had not yet brought peace.

But the German leader came under attack from conference participants, particularly US delegates, who recalled Frederick the Great’s remark that “diplomacy without weapons is like music without notes”.

The chancellor responded that that, as someone who grew up in East Germany, she understood the international community’s decision not to intervene militarily when East Germany erected the Berlin Wall in 1961.

“I don’t blame anyone for the realistic assessment at the time that it would not be succesful,” she said.

“The problem (today) is that I cannot imagine a situation in which improved arming of the Ukrainian army impresses Putin so much that he thinks he will lose militarily.”

Her outspoken remarks came ahead of a meeting with US President Joe Biden and growing pressure from Washington for Europe to back efforts to improve Ukraine’s defensive capability.

The German leader conceded she was of a different opinion on the arms issue to Ukraine’s president Petro Poroschenko, sitting in the front row in Munich, but promised instead to push diplomacy and to improve the economic situation of ordinary Ukrainians.

With growing risk of a transatlantic rift on the issue, the German leader said the EU would continue to act together to oppose the forcible shift of borders on the continent.

“Nobody is interested in a new division of Europe, even less an uncontrolled escalation (in Ukraine),” she said.

Russia’s actions in Ukraine had violated the post-war order, she said, and stood in contradiction to its international obligaions.

Aware of growing US impatience, Dr Merkel conceded that Europea - and Germany - were often slower to act in international conflicts but that their approach in the past had proven to be sustainable in the long term.

The Ukraine conflict is the headline issue at this year’s Munich Security Conference, with backroom diplomacy taking place in parallel to high-profil panel discussions.

Dr Merkel will hold trilateral talks with Mr Poroschenko and Mr Biden, after which the US vice president will give the Munich gathering his thoughts on the conflict and the Moscow mission of the German and French leaders.

Thos talks ended on Friday last night without an agreement on how to prevent an escalation of the Ukraine conflict but were described by a Kremlin spokesman as “substantive and meaningful”.

Dr Merkel and Francois Hollande, the president of France, had embarked on the high-stakes peace mission to Moscow as the US and Europe debate the best strategy in a convlict that has already claimed more than 5,000 lives.

After arriving in Moscow yesterday evening Ms Merkel and Mr Hollande were whisked to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s residence in the Kremlin for behind-closed-doors negotiations that lasted for five hours.

The talks wound up just before midnight in Moscow and the three leaders agreed to continue to work towards a joint document implementing the ceasefire deal brokered in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, last September. That agreement has collapsed amid renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The three leaders were expected to continue talks by telephone tomorrow, said Mr Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Mr Putin, who held a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Thursday to discuss the conflict in Ukraine, appeared relaxed during a brief photoshoot with Ms Merkel and Mr Hollande in the Kremlin yesterday.

Russian political commentators said he saw no need to compromise on Ukraine.

“Russia’s position is that we are stronger than Ukraine and can dictate terms to Kiev,” said Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian historian and journalist, told told the Echo Moskvy radio station. The Kremlin did not believe that Nato would risk going to warn with a major nuclear power like Russia, he added.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/cctv-released-after-beheading-threat-8590775

CCTV released after beheading threat to cadets outside Gateshead Territorial Army Centre

18:30, 6 February 2015
By Michael Marsh

Two men threatened to behead the teenage girls as they left the TA centre late at night, sending shockwaves through the community

Two men are being hunted by police after teenage cadets were threatened with beheading outside a Tyneside Army reserve base.

The chilling verbal attack was yesterday been described as “horrendous” by community leaders.

The two girls, both aged under 18, were targeted as they left the Territorial Army centre in Gateshead.

Police believe they were threatened by two men in a car with what appeared to be Dutch number plates on Alexandra Road near the centre.

Officers have released CCTV images of two Asian or black men in a car who they wish to speak to in connection with the incident.

The threats were said to include beheading.

It is understood the girls were not in uniform at the time but the incident has once again sparked debate about public visibility of those connected to the armed forces.

Northumberland and North East Fusilier Association chairman Major Chester Potts said: “It’s a sad state of affairs that people feel they can threaten innocent young people on the streets of Britain.”

Former RAF serviceman John Murray, 83, from North Tyneside, said the incident was “deplorable” and called for more support for forces personnel.

Babaji Davender Ghai, president of the Newcastle-based Anglo Asian Friendship Society, said: “There should be no place for this in society. They should be punished.

“We need to go into schools and educate our young people on integration because this sort of behaviour is happening far too often all over the world.”

Krishan Kant Attri, a Hindu chaplain to the armed forces, said the actions of the “mindless” few makes his “blood boil.” Mr Attri, of Chapel House in Newcastle, said: “It is a horrendous incident which is going to shock the whole community. I am sure it is only a handful of mindless people who are causing these things.

“People need to be aware of what is going on.”

He added: “These children are not interested in party politics, it must be terrifying for them.

“It makes my blood boil to think about what has happened.”

In 2013, Fusilier Lee Rigby was attacked and killed by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, London.

The Chronicle understands that cadets at some centres are asked to cover their uniform while walking to and from the squadron, but the Ministry of Defence said there is no ban in place.

The parent of a 16-year-old air training corp cadet, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons, said: “It’s alarming if the threat of terrorism is touching the lives of teenagers in this way. It is a sad indictment of the times we live in.

“The cadet organisation is not a recruiting ground for the military.

“Some do choose to join up later, but cadets are not members of the armed forces.”

An Army spokesman said the safety of young people is paramount and added: “There remains no ban on wearing uniforms in public, for example, when travelling to and from cadet activities, but nobody should feel forced to do so.

“We are aware of an incident allegedly involving members of the ACF – this is a matter for the police and we cannot comment further. Any witnesses are urged to contact the police.”

Northumbria Police said the men were in a silver Vauxhall Zafira when the incident happened at 9.15pm on Wednesday, January 21.

The threats are understood to have been “graphic and nasty” and included a comment about beheading, although the teenagers were unharmed.

Gateshead Supt Richie Jackson said it is believed to have been an isolated incident and added: “The men made no attempt to make any physical contact with the girls or get out of the car, and shouted the comments while driving away from the scene.

“Inquiries are ongoing to establish the exact nature of what was said and we have spoken to the two teenage girls, viewed CCTV footage from the area and have identified the vehicle and inquiries are ongoing to trace the driver.”

The driver was described as black or Asian, in his 40s, of plump or muscular build, with a black bushy beard and dark clothes. His passenger was described as black or Asian, in his 30s, with short black hair and stubble.

Officers say extra patrols are being carried out in the area. Anybody with information should contact 101, ext 69191.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://basnews.com/en/economy/2015/02/02/islamic-state-exports-100-tankers-of-crude-oil-daily/

Islamic State Exports 100 tankers of Crude Oil Daily

The Oil is being extracted from Hamrin oil fields in Southern Kirkuk

Basnews | Pola Shwani
02.02.2015 18:54

KIRKUK

The Hamrin oil fields located in southern Kirkuk province in northern Iraq, are considered to be a vital financial source for Islamic State (IS), which produces and exports 100 tankers of crude oil every day.

But the Iraqi government and coalition partners have not taken any serious steps to prevent them.

Hamrin, in the south of Kirkuk province, is one of the richest oil fields in Iraq. The US has previously warned that IS is using oil as a major source of funds.

An Iraqi army officer, who declined to be identified, told BasNews that IS militants have taken control of the oil fields.

He said, “They export and sell crude oil through local traders. They use the road from Hawija to Mosul and then to Syria”.

The officer added,“They sell one barrel for just $10. But the Iraqi Government has not taken any proper steps to stop them, and coalition airstrikes are not preventing them so far”.

IS has had control of about 33 oil fields in Hamrin since last year.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-deba...abia-so-concerned-about-iran-for-good-reason/

Analysis & Opinion | The Great Debate

Iran is using Israel to distract from its real aims in the Persian Gulf

By Anthony H. Cordesman
February 5, 2015
Comments 19

It has become conventional wisdom that most sectarian conflicts in the Middle East today are fueled, to some extent, by Iran and Saudi Arabia. The worsening political situation in Yemen — which led to Shi’ite Houthi rebels ousting President Abrabuh Mansour Hadi on Jan. 22 — was described by some military experts as the result of a purported Saudi-Iran “proxy war” in Yemen. That these two countries are enemies has been taken for granted by most, but is rarely examined or questioned.

It is time the West takes a hard look at exactly why Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are so concerned about the Iranian threat. Much of the Western commentary on the strategic threats in the Middle East focuses on violent jihadist threats from non-state actors and the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. The reality is far more complicated and involves the vital strategic interests of the United States, Europe, and Asia.

To begin with the nuclear issue, it is important to remember that Iran has no nuclear weapons at present and that Israel is a mature nuclear weapons state with thermonuclear armed missiles that can reach any city or key target in Iran. At the same time, Iran has every reason to focus its political rhetoric on Israel as a threat and a target. Like its support of Gaza and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the nuclear question deflects Arab fears of Iran’s growing ability to threaten Arab states, divide the Arab world, and lever Iran’s ability to threaten the flow of Gulf petroleum exports.

Iran already has large missile and rocket forces that can reach any target in the Gulf and most targets in the Middle East. But these forces lack the accuracy and lethality to do great damage to targets in the Arab Gulf states and other neighboring states with conventional warheads. Iran’s air force is aging, worn, and lacks anything like the capability of Saudi, United Arab Emirates, and other Arab forces — which have far more capable aircraft, surface-to-air missile forces, and missile defenses supplied by the West — as well as support from U.S., British, and French air and naval forces and the forces they can project forward in an emergency.

If Iran can acquire nuclear warheads, however, this would radically shift the balance against Arab states that lack nuclear weapons. It would greatly increase the threat Iran can pose, and help deter its Arab neighbors and their allies from using their advantage in air power. This is why Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are so concerned about the P5+1 negotiations with Iran. Their governments do not see an Iranian threat to a nuclear armed Israel; they see a nuclear threat to the Arab world.

And, this is only part of the story. The Arab Gulf states see a major Iranian build-up in air, missile, anti-ship missile patrol boats and forces, smart mines, submarines, and other threats like Iran’s Marines and Special Forces to shipping in the Gulf, and their offshore and coastal facilities. Iran’s forces can now reach out into the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean.

This Iranian threat is as real and serious to the Arab Gulf states — and to the flow of petroleum exports to the global economy — as its nuclear threat. It is the reason why Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states — as well as the United States, Britain, and France — have built up their naval, air, mine warfare, and missile forces in the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia and other key Arab states like the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Egypt have equal reason to fear Iran’s expanding role in the region and Iran’s efforts to divide the Arab world. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq destroyed its ability to deter and contain Iran. It brought Shi’ites with strong ties to Iran to power, gave Iran far more influence in Iraq, and allowed Iran’s Quds Force and Revolutionary Guards to gain serious influence over Iraq’s military forces and Shi’ite militias. Iraq is still far from an Iranian satellite, but the struggles between its Sunnis and Shi’ites, the need for Iran’s support in fighting Islamic State, and its deep political divisions give Iran a major opportunity.

Iran has also reached out to Shi’ites in Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and to the Alawites and Assad regime in Syria – as well as Palestinian Sunnis in Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Like Iraq, none of these groups are “proxies” in the sense that Iran has the ability to dictate or command their actions. Iran can still, however, threaten Arab states by encouraging Shi’ite minorities to oppose the regime and training and arming small factions within them.

Iran has provided massive transfers of weapons like missiles and rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon and some arms and funds to the Houthis in Yemen. Both are Shi’ite forces that have own leadership and show little interest in supporting Iran’s Supreme Leader or becoming Iranian satellites, but give Iran the ability to play a spoiler function in dividing the Arab world and expanding its influence. The same is true of Iran’s support for the Assad regime, which had forced much of the Arab world to take on both the Assad regime and ISIS as threats. Iran does not have to care about Hamas or the Palestinians, or really care about Israel, to use them to create new Arab-Israel tensions, and serve a major strategic distraction.

These are the reasons why Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states are buying over $50 billion worth of new arms from the Gulf. They are equally critical to Western interests and are the reason why the United States keeps major air, missile defense, naval, and special forces capabilities in the Gulf, and why Britain and France are creating new naval bases there. Iran poses a far more complex mix of threats than simply its nascent nuclear capabilities, and most will remain in place regardless of the outcome of the P5+1 negotiations.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

Well so much for dropping the curfew....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/02/07/mideast-crisis-iraq-attack-idINKBN0LB09D20150207

At least 34 killed in three bombings in Baghdad

BAGHDAD Sat Feb 7, 2015 5:38pm IST

(Reuters) - At least 34 people were killed in three bombings around Baghdad on Saturday, police said, hours before the government was due to lift a long-standing night-time curfew on the capital.

At least 50 people were wounded in the blasts, the officials said.

In the first attack, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive belt inside a restaurant in the Shi'ite neighbourhood of New Baghdad, leaving 22 dead, police told Reuters.

In the second attack, two bombs ripped through the bustling Sharqa market district, killing 10 people.

In a third attack, a bomb killed two and wounded another seven in the Shi'ite section of Abu Sheir in Baghdad's Dura neighborhood, police said.

The interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan said he did not believe the blasts were linked to the decision to lift the curfew.

The Iraqi government announced on Thursday that the decade-old curfew in the capital would end on Saturday at midnight and that four neighbourhoods would be "demilitarised".

The moves are part of a campaign to normalise life in Iraq's war-blighted capital and to persuade residents that Baghdad no longer faces a threat from Islamic State, the militant group which seized large areas of northern and western Iraq last year.

Some form of curfew has been in place since the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, hindering commercial and civilian movement. The midnight (2100 GMT) to 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) curfew has been in place for more than seven years.

(Reporting By Ned Parker and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/07/us-ukraine-crisis-casualties-idUSKBN0LB0C420150207

Russian-backed rebels massing to attack key Ukrainian towns: Kiev

By Pavel Polityuk
KIEV Sat Feb 7, 2015 7:44am EST

(Reuters) - Pro-Russian separatists have intensified shelling of government forces on all front lines and appear to be amassing forces for new offensives on the key railway town of Debaltseve and the coastal city of Mariupol, Ukraine's military said on Saturday.

Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 26 wounded in fighting in the past 24 hours, spokesman Volodymyr Polyovy told a briefing.

Separatist gains against Kiev government forces in eastern Ukraine, particularly a rebel advance on Debaltseve to the northeast of the regional center of Donetsk, have given impetus to a Franco-German initiative to try and strike an 11th hour deal with Russia to end the Ukrainian crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who along with French President Francois Hollande met Russia's Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin late on Friday, told an international security conference in Munich on Saturday that there was no guarantee that the peace initiative would work.

But she voiced opposition to the West supplying arms to the Ukrainian government to help them to defend themselves against separatists who Kiev says are supported by Russian arms and Russian troops. Moscow denies this is so.

More than 5,000 civilians, Ukrainian soldiers and pro-separatist fighters have been killed since a separatist rebellion erupted in Ukraine's eastern territories in April.

A peace deal was struck last September in Minsk, Belarus, but the agreed ceasefire was almost immediately violated and attempts to revive it have failed.

Artillery and mortar fire on populated areas of the east including the big city of Donetsk itself have taken a huge toll on civilian lives, while more than 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.

The present focus on the battlefield is the town of Debaltseve, a vital rail and road junction which lies in a pocket between the two main separatist-controlled regions.

Ukrainian government forces express confidence they have enough firepower to hold the town even though the rebels have steadily encroached in surrounding towns and villages.

A Reuters correspondent who was in Debaltseve on Friday said Ukrainian forces kept up a steady barrage of mortar or howitzer fire from the town even as an operation to evacuate civilians was underway.

Another source of concern for the Ukrainians is Mariupol, a southeastern city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, which lies between rebel-controlled areas and the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia last March.

Mariupol's vulnerability was exposed last month when 30 civilians were killed there in intense rocket attacks from rebel-controlled areas.

"The situation remains tense. The adversary is carrying out attacks across all the separation lines," military spokesman Polyovy said on Saturday.

"The Russian terrorist forces are gathering strength for further offensives on Mariupol and Debaltseve. An increase in the number of tanks and armored vehicles in Debaltseve ... has been noticed," he said.

(Writing by Richard Balmforth; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/07/us-mideast-crisis-toll-idUSKBN0LB0DY20150207

Syria death toll now exceeds 210,000: rights group

AMMAN Sat Feb 7, 2015 6:56am EST

(Reuters) - The death toll after nearly four years of civil war in Syria has risen to 210,060, nearly half of them civilians, but the real figure is probably much higher, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.

The Observatory, which is based in Britain and has a network of activists across Syria, said that 10,664 children and 6,783 women were among the dead.

Peaceful protests against four decades of rule by President Bashar al-Assad's family in March 2011 degenerated into an armed insurgency following a fierce security crackdown, with the sectarian nature of the conflict echoing across the Middle East.

The Observatory's toll could not be independently verified by Reuters. The rights group said it had counted 35,827 Syrian rebels killed and 45,385 from Assad's army.

But the group's chief, Rami Abdul Rahman, said the true toll on both sides was likely to be much higher -- perhaps by more than 85,000.

Abdul Rahman said all the cases included in its 210,000 death count were those it could verify with either name and identification documents, or pictures or videos.

Groups on both sides try to hide their casualties, he said, making the fighter death toll very difficult to gauge.

Syria had a population of some 23 million before the outbreak of the war. Beside the dead and injured, the United Nations says some 3.73 million Syrians have fled the country and officially registered as refugees abroad.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Crispian Balmer)

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/07/us-yemen-security-idUSKBN0LB07220150207

Blast in Yemeni capital as thousands protest militia takeover

By Mohammed Ghobari
SANAA Sat Feb 7, 2015 7:45am EST

(Reuters) - A bomb exploded outside the republican palace in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Saturday and wounded three Shi'ite Muslim militiamen guarding it, eyewitnesses said.

The attack raised tensions a day after the Houthi Shi'ite militant group dissolved parliament and formally took power of the impoverished and strife-torn Arabian Peninsula country.

Once the home of the resigned Yemeni prime minister, the republican palace now houses Mohammed al-Houthi, a top official in the Iranian-backed movement's military wing whose gunmen hold sway over much of Yemen.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, but Sunni Muslim militants in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have repeatedly clashed with the increasingly powerful Houthis, raising fears of an all-out sectarian war.

Separately, thousands of demonstrators gathered in three cities in central Yemen to protest the Houthis seizing power. Houthi gunmen dispersed dozens of activists near the capital's main university by firing into the air.

Protesters chanted slogans calling the Houthi moves a "coup" and demanded the group withdraw its forces from major cities.

The Houthis entered Sanaa in September and began to fan out into more cities in Yemen's south and west. Armed Houthi personnel were out in force after their Friday announcement, manning checkpoints around key government buildings.

Their spread has destabilized the country's fragile security forces and stoked anger among tribal fighters allied to AQAP.

Four Houthi fighters were killed in a suspected AQAP attack in the southern al-Bayda province on Friday, while army forces clashed with tribesmen and AQAP fighters in a neighboring district on Saturday.

(Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150207/lt--mexico-violence-da5f12ce6f.html

Mexico border Televisa station suffers grenade attack

Feb 7, 12:37 AM (ET)

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (AP) — A Tamaulipas state official says a Televisa station in the border city of Matamoros suffered a grenade attack that injured two guards, one seriously.

State spokesman Rafael Luque says the two men were at the parking lot entrance late Friday when they were hit by shards of an exploding grenade.

Luque said Friday that accomplices blocked roads after the explosion so attackers could escape. They detonated another device but it did no damage.

The attack came after a week of violence in the city across from Brownsville, Texas. Enrique Juarez Torres, editor of El Manana in Matamoros, was kidnapped and released on Wednesday, a warning he said from the Gulf Cartel for reporting on gunfights that killed nine people. Fifteen people reportedly have died since last weekend in cartel violence.

Housecarl · Feb 7, 2015

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/us-and-russia-clash-over-ukraine-s-sovereignty-1.2095619

US and Russia clash over Ukraine’s sovereignty

Sergey Lavrov attacks US ‘obsession’ with global dominance and EU’s ‘connivance’ in region

Derek Scally
Sat, Feb 7, 2015, 18:19

Washington and Moscow went head-to-head in Munich on Saturday, accusing each other of undermining global security and Ukrainian sovereignty.

While US vice president Joe Biden warned Moscow that the US and Europe would stand united behind Kiev, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov attacked US “obsession” with global dominance and the “connivance” of the EU in the region.

In a day of robust public exchanges and frantic closed-door diplomacy, Ukrainian president Petro Poroschenko made an impassioned plea to western leaders to boost Kiev’s defence capabilities, saying Ukraine “had a right to defend our people”.

His remarks openly contradicted German chancellor Angela Merkel who dismissed defensive weapons for Ukraine, an issue that will dominate her trip to Washington on Monday.

Mr Biden recalled his Munich address seven years ago to offer Russia a “reset” in bilateral relations that resulted in nuclear arms reductions and closer co-operation at the UN.

“We all invested in a type of Russia we hoped and still hope will emerge one day,” he said. “Unfortunately Mr Putin has chosen a different path.”

Now he said Moscow repressed critics at home, disrespected others’ territorial integrity and disregarded Russia’s own international commitments on both fronts.

Balanced message

Amid heated discussion on whether to arm Ukraine in its battle against pro-Russian separatists, Mr Biden delivered a carefully balanced message. He welcomed the Franco-German diplomatic effort in Moscow and echoed Chancellor Merkel’s doubt that a military solution was possible.

But with an eye on the heated debate in Washington, which spilled over to Munich, he added: “We believe the Ukrainian people have a right to defend themselves.”

After tri-lateral talks with Mr Biden and Dr Merkel, Mr Poroschenko said the current deterioration in eastern Ukraine was the result of “a lack of defence capability”.

“We are not going to use these weapons to kill people but to make our defence more efficient,” he said.

Sitting on a panel with Mr Poroschenko, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite urged western allies to use “all means necessary” to support Ukraine against Russia.

“If we betray Ukraine we betray ourselves, after Ukraine, we will be next,” said Dr Grybauskaite.

Robust attack

Earlier, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a robust attack on the US and EU framing of the Ukraine crisis.

Mr Lavrov said US-EU “interference” in Ukrainian sovereign affairs was part of a wider, long-term pattern of undermining of international agreements and, with it, global security.

The EU “under US influence” had worked to escalate the Ukraine conflict by closing the door on a common security talks and refusing to include Moscow in EU-Kiev talks on an association agreement.

“Our western partners issued indulgences and pardoned Kiev forces who started revolutionary efforts,” he said, “dubbing terrorists all citizens who were not in agreement with the anti-constitutional coup d’etat.”

In an angry speech, as translators struggled to keep up, Mr Lavrov said Crimea’s accession to the Russian federation “complies with the UN Charter on self-determination” – prompting snorts from the Munich conference hall.

After a meeting with Mr Lavrov, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg spoke for many delegates in Munich by saying “we assess the situation in Ukraine in very different ways”.

Be Well · Feb 8, 2015

That is quite a list of headlines up on the top....

I think in a sense, we are all boiled frogs. It's accelerating so much but still no bombs blowing up in the US, EBT cards still working so no crazed starving mobs, no lines at failed banks, etc.

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-arms-for-ukraine-may-spur-backlash-for-obama

Merkel Objection to Arms for Ukraine May Spur Obama Backlash

by Sangwon Yoon and John Walcott
5:44 PM PST February 7, 2015

(Bloomberg) -- Germany’s rejection of supplying weapons to Ukrainian forces fighting pro-Russian rebels may heighten the domestic pressure on a reluctant U.S. President Barack Obama to deliver the arms.

Increasing numbers of senior military and State Department officials are joining Republican lawmakers in a push to arm Ukraine -- an option the commander-in-chief personally opposes, according to three people familiar with the dynamics in the Obama administration. They asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who pleaded against shipping lethal military support in a Saturday speech at the Munich Security Conference, will brief Obama in Washington on Monday on the issue and the German-French push for a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Secretary of State John Kerry said he’s confident Obama will make his decision “soon” after the meeting.

Obama’s delay in making his move until after Merkel’s visit reflects not only the gravity of the situation and the dueling arguments, but his emphasis on international alliances, his own deliberative nature and the degree to which he’s concentrated power on foreign policy in the White House.

Obama won’t authorize weapons deployment if Merkel signals that she won’t publicly condemn individual nations from arming Ukraine, the three people said. If she opposes any unilateral supplying of weapons, Obama will explain his decision to follow her lead by citing the importance of keeping a united front against Putin and the risk of triggering a proxy war with Russia, the people said.

Key Decision

A U.S. official who is also close to the debate declined to predict what Obama will decide after meeting with Merkel. The official, who also requested anonymity, added that Obama’s decision may prove to be one of the most important of his presidency.

The debate comes as the International Monetary Fund discusses a new financing package for Ukraine to plug its need for about $15 billion in additional financing and the Russian ruble plummets in value amid falling crude oil prices and the sanctions.

Merkel’s position “may be somewhat convenient” in enabling Obama to choose not to send the weapons, said Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is attending the Munich conference as part of a congressional delegation.

“I hope that’s not the case,” said Corker. “We had the same thing happen with the Syrian opposition: we cheered them on, our ambassador was out with them and we left them hanging.”

Public Pressure

“I hope that the president and the administration has learned from that,” Corker said.

Senior U.S. officials who disagree with Obama’s reservations on supplying weapons to Ukraine have privately reached out to lawmakers, urging them to amplify their appeals to and intensify pressure on the White House to take the step, the three people said.

The officials highlighted to the members of Congress the importance of rallying as much public support as possible by more vaguely referring to the increased aid to Ukraine as providing that country defensive assistance, rather than lethal weapons, the people said.

An official with the National Security Council declined to comment on rifts within the administration on the issue, saying only that Obama values Merkel’s judgment and her focus on marshaling European support for economic sanctions that have been imposed on Russia and maintaining trans-Atlantic unity throughout the Ukraine crisis.

Merkel’s Position

“The progress that Ukraine needs cannot be achieved by more weapons,” Merkel said in her Saturday speech.

Instead, she evoked the perseverance of the U.S. and European diplomatic efforts in confronting the Soviet Union during four decades of Cold War that ended with collapse of communism. That approach needs staying power and unity, said Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany.

“The problem is that I cannot envisage any situation in which an improved equipment of the Ukrainian army leads to a situation where President Putin is so impressed that he will lose militarily,” she said, reiterating the importance of a negotiated peace without military intervention. “I have to put it in such a blunt manner.”

Facing Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the audience, she said: “There’s no way to win this militarily -- that’s the bitter truth. The international community has to think of a different approach.”

Defense, Diplomacy

Poroshenko made a rebuttal in his own speech later in the day, arguing that the better-armed Ukrainian military will encourage Russia to accept a political resolution.

“The stronger our defense, the more convincing is our diplomatic voice,” he said, adding that his government wants only defensive, not offensive, weapons to counter Russian artillery, radars and tanks.

U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon also rejected arming the Kiev government, citing fears of escalating the conflict.

Republican senators attending the conference expressed outrage at Merkel’s position and said weapons must be delivered to Ukraine regardless of what Merkel’s diplomatic efforts yield.

“She’s undercutting the ability of the Ukrainian people to have the best, last chance to keep their country intact,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters. “So can friends disagree? That’s what all this is about.”

‘Horribly Wrong’

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the head of the congressional delegation in Munich, called Merkel’s position “unacceptable” and “horribly wrong.”

“I know the Ukrainians; I know that they’re being slaughtered by the Russians with Russian weapons,” McCain said in an interview with German newspaper Bild-Zeitung.

McCain also told TV channel ZDF that German government seems as if “it has no clue, or it doesn’t care, that people are being slaughtered in Ukraine.”

The U.S. has so far committed to providing training and non-lethal equipment to Ukraine’s fight against the separatists in its eastern region, a conflict that began almost a year ago.

Gen. Philip Breedlove, the top U.S. military commander in Europe, Ashton Carter, Obama’s pick to be the next U.S. defense secretary, and a list of former U.S. envoys to Ukraine and NATO are publicly supporting arming Ukraine. “I’m very much inclined in that direction,” Carter said at his confirmation hearing before McCain’s committee last week.

The Pessimists

Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden are increasingly associating with this group, termed the pessimists by the U.S. official who declined to predict what Obama will decide. The official used the term because of this group’s doubts that the U.S. and European economic and diplomatic efforts can alone deter Putin.

This camp has concluded that Putin is determined to reverse some of what he considers NATO and European aggression against a Russia weakened by irresolute leaders before he came to power, such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, said the official.

The group also thinks Putin believes it’s the U.S. and its allies that are weak now, bled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing economic disunity within the EU and indecision about how to fight Islamic extremism.

Pushing Back

The pessimists argue that it’s important to push back hard against Putin in Ukraine and elsewhere to prevent the conflict from escalating out of control, the official said. The debate over arming Ukraine masks a much deeper analytical split about relations with Russia within the administration and NATO, he added.

The official described another camp as the diplomats, which he said so far includes Obama, Merkel and French President Francois Hollande but few other U.S. officials outside the White House. It views Putin as a bully and not someone who would preside over an economic collapse. They believe he will ultimately respond to mounting economic pressure, perhaps coupled with a greater NATO presence in eastern Europe, the official said.

Some U.S. military and intelligence officials assess that Putin’s current strategic objective is a land link from Russia to Crimea through Mariupol, and that a major offensive against the port city of 500,000 is inevitable.

Debaltseve Offensive

The recent push at Debaltseve, they said Saturday in Washington, appears to be simultaneously a test of the Ukrainian military and NATO’s response, a diversion from the real objective and a move to pre-position Russian-backed forces for a two-pronged assault on Mariupol from the east and north.

At the same time, said three U.S. officials who all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified assessments, Russia has significantly stepped up the quality of some of the equipment it’s supplying to the separatists, especially communications gear, surveillance equipment and air defenses.

That move creates a new dilemma for the U.S. and its allies as they debate sending more and better equipment to Ukraine. Only the most up-to-date gear is capable of defeating what the Russian allies are now using in Ukraine, and sending such equipment risks it being captured or sold by corrupt or disloyal Ukrainians.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sangwon Yoon in Munich at syoon32@bloomberg.net; John Walcott in Washington at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net Paul Abelsky, Rob Verdonck

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/08/boko-haram-stages-assault-on-niger-border-town/

Boko Haram stages assault on Niger border town

Published February 08, 2015
Associated Press

NIAMEY, Niger – Boko Haram staged an overnight assault on a border town in Niger, residents said Sunday, the second time the West African nation has come under attack by the Nigeria-based extremists since Friday.

The attack on the town of Diffa began Saturday night, and fighting between Boko Haram and Niger's army lasted until 5 a.m. toward the town's southern entrance before the extremists were forced to flee and calm was restored, Diffa resident Adam Boukar said.

Officials could not immediately be reached to confirm residents' accounts or give casualty figures.

The fight against Nigeria's Boko Haram has taken on an increasingly regional dimension in recent months, with the extremists staging attacks in both Cameroon and Niger last week alone.

Nearly 100 people were killed and some 500 wounded in an attack on the town of Fotokol in Cameroon on Wednesday and Thursday that saw Boko Haram fighters raze mosques and churches and use civilians as human shields, Cameroon officials said.

On Friday, Boko Haram reached into Niger, attacking Diffa and Bosso, another border town. Chad and Niger troops responded to the assault in Bosso, while Niger's army pushed Boko Haram out of Diffa, inflicting "heavy losses," Niger Defense Minister Mahamadou Karijo said.

All told, 109 Boko Haram fighters were killed during the response to the attacks, while four Niger soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded, Karijo said. The figures he provided could not be independently verified.

On Saturday, regional and African Union officials meeting in Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, unveiled a proposal for a force of as many as 8,750 members to combat Boko Haram. The manpower would come from Nigeria and its four neighbors. Chad and Nigeria would each contribute 3,500 troops each, while Cameroon and Niger would contribute 750 each and Benin would contribute 250.

Officials said they envisioned deploying the force as early as next month, though the effort could be delayed for lack of funds. The United Nations has so far promised logistical and technical support.

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/02/08/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-nuclear.html?_r=0

Middle East

Iran Leader: No Nuclear Deal Better Than Bad Deal

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
FEB. 8, 2015, 5:04 A.M. E.S.T.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's top leader says no deal is better than a bad deal when it comes to negotiations with world powers over the country's disputed nuclear program.

In remarks posted on his website Sunday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all major decisions, says Tehran agrees with Washington that no agreement is better than an agreement that doesn't meet its interests, without elaborating.

Iran insists it has the right to enrich uranium and has demanded the lifting of crippling international sanctions. Tehran insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful despite Western suspicions it has a military component.

Iran and the six-nation group — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany —hope to reach a rough deal by March and a final agreement by June 30.

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/w...&contentCollection=Middle East&pgtype=article

Middle East
Shiite Militia Drives Back Islamic State, but Divides Much of Iraq

By KAREEM FAHIM
FEB. 7, 2015

CAMP ASHRAF, Iraq — At their victory rally, the Shiite militiamen used poetry, song and swagger to sweeten their celebration of an ugly battle.

More than a hundred fighters from the militia, the Badr Organization, had been killed in the farms and villages of Diyala Province in recent fighting against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State. During the battle, thousands of residents had been forced from their homes — including Sunni families who accused Shiite paramilitary groups like Badr of forced displacement and summary executions.

But the militias had pushed the Islamic State back from key areas in a crucial battle. So on Monday, the Badr Organization convened in a mosque at Camp Ashraf, its base in Diyala, to celebrate its “liberation” of the province — and to serve notice that it was the vanguard force battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Speaking at the rally, to an audience that included giddy fighters barely past their teens, the head of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Ameri, boasted of the towns his men and allied militias had set free. “These were big operations that others must learn lessons from,” he said.

But even as Mr. Ameri was fishing for broad support and recognition, his group stands among the most divisive in Iraq, accused of atrocities against Sunnis and known for its close ties to Iran. The new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, which has promised to rule inclusively, has been under pressure to distance itself from retaliatory attacks against Sunnis by both Shiite and Kurdish militiamen.

At the same time, Mr. Ameri’s boast rings true: His militia has been among the most effective fighting forces against the Islamic State, gaining ground even as the Iraqi Army has faltered in many places despite support from American airstrikes and trainers.

Now, the Badr Organization’s leaders have asserted that their fighters and other allied militias — organized under the banner of “popular mobilization” forces — are ready to advance to neighboring provinces and other Iraqi cities menaced by the Islamic State: a shadow army to Iraq’s official security forces, flush with its own success.

At their celebration on Monday, the militia’s leaders were feeling expansive. Tribal sheikhs had been invited to Camp Ashraf from around the country, some milling around a small photo exhibit of the Diyala battles. Journalists had been asked to join as well, to listen to speeches and to tour the liberated villages.

A group of young fighters in fatigues gathered in a circle, singing religious hymns, and broke to join the mob that formed around Mr. Ameri, the guest of honor.

Standing in front of a backdrop that said “Diyala Wins. Iraq Wins,” Mr. Ameri lightly admonished supporters who chanted his name, telling them to praise Iraq instead. He reached out to Sunnis, pledging that Diyala would be a “safe area,” and responded to the accusations of atrocities by his fighters, warning that there would be consequences for abuses, including kidnappings and killings, though he did not explicitly acknowledge that they had happened.

“We are determined to complete our mission,” Mr. Ameri added, listing other Iraqi provinces that his fighters would liberate soon. “God willing, we will defeat Daesh in Iraq,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

His fighters seemed to be spoiling for the coming battle. Haidar Aidan, 25, described eight days of grueling work in the village of Mansouriya, dodging snipers and defusing explosive devices. Twenty-five other Badr fighters, he said, had been killed there.

Families had been displaced, but Mr. Aidan seemed confident that they would be able to return soon, echoing the assurances of his superiors. Now that Mr. Ameri had declared the province free of Islamic State militants, “we will go find other places to liberate,” he said.

Ali Jassim Kadham, another fighter, also said it was important to return Sunni families to their homes. But his talk of reconciliation faded as he spoke about Sunni tribes who he asserted were allied with the Islamic State.

Collaborators were worse than the terrorists, he said, warning, “Their punishment will be more severe than Daesh’s.”

Fears of retaliation by the militias in Diyala grew last month after residents of the Sunni-majority village of Barwanah accused Shiite militiamen of executing 72 people. Mr. Ameri and other Badr officials have denied that their fighters were responsible, even as they have promised to clamp down on abuses.

A local Badr leader in Diyala, Harath al-Rubai, said he had been in Barwanah on the day the executions occurred, checking the identity cards of refugees from other villages.

He said he had heard about the killings only the next day. “I don’t know how and when they were killed,” he added. The government has promised a full investigation into the allegations.

Erin Evers, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said it was dangerous for the government to outsource military operations to Badr and other militias in Diyala, a mixed province home to Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Turkmen.

“It’s a place where anywhere you light a match, it’s guaranteed to start a fire,” she said. She said her organization had received reports that the militias, with the cooperation of some Iraqi security forces, had been “disappearing” people in the province for at least the last year and a half.

Salah al-Jabouri, a Parliament member from Diyala, said there had been attempts by “bad people” in the militias to alter the province’s demographic balance by not allowing Sunnis to return to their homes. “Violations against Sunni society in Diyala will weaken the strength of the popular mobilization and make Daesh stronger,” he said.

But there were few signs of tension as Badr militiamen, accompanied by Iraqi security forces, led journalists on a tour of the province in a heavily armed convoy on Monday. A militia anthem blared from speakers on a truck toward the head of the convoy, catchy but dark, a warning to Badr’s enemies: “Fight them!” men sang. “Kill them!”

The fighters proudly showed off the Sudour irrigation dam, which the Sunni extremists had taken over, causing water shortages in the region. The water was flowing again, and a bridge over the dam that was damaged had been temporarily repaired, allowing passage over the waterway.

The Badr Organization’s signs were freshly planted along the roads of Muqdadiya District, in a show of authority.

Things appeared to be slowly returning to normal even in villages like Al Aqoud, where a battle between the militias and militants had left stores burned and some homes in rubble.

One shopkeeper, Hafiz Hussein, said that some of the residents, especially Sunni neighbors, were frightened by the Shiite militias and had fled. He said he hoped they would return.

For many who had stayed, the militias had brought only relief. “Daesh was like hell,” he said.

Falih Hassan contributed reporting.

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

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http://www.e-ir.info/2015/02/07/afg...al-calculus-and-pakistans-detrimental-impact/

Afghanistan in India’s Regional Calculus and Pakistan’s Detrimental Impact

Djan Sauerborn, Feb 7 2015

Pakistani-Indian relations in the past have hardly been amicable. However, the post 9/11 landscape offered both nations an opportunity to renew their political and diplomatic ties with more positive overtones. However, this did not occur.

In the Pakistani-Indian context, the tragedies of 9/11, the fluid nature in global politics and the regional security environment acted as catalysts in further deteriorating the relationship between these two countries. India’s influence in Afghanistan has suffered under Pakistan’s successful attempts at positioning itself as the core mediator between the Taliban and the West, while at the same time instrumentalizing radical elements to maintain its strategic advantage.

India

In the early stages of the post 9/11 era, India’s main focus regarding Afghanistan was solely centered on the threat of an influential and heavily involved Pakistan on India. This was of particular concern to India due to the US support of Pakistan (Price 2013:3). Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of Operation Enduring Freedom, India had a favorable position in Afghanistan. This stemmed from the fact it had close ties to key elites of the victorious Northern Alliance. However, influence decreased over time as the United States favored Pakistan as its main node for the War on Terror (Chaudhuri 2010: 206). As such, India’s influence in Afghanistan has deteriorated under Pakistan’s strategy of positioning itself as the core mediator between the Taliban and the West. It can be argued that this strategy is being implemented while Pakistan simultaneously utilizes radical elements to maintain to strategic advantage.

From the perspective of India’s policy makers, the worst-case scenario that could have emerge in the post 9/11 era was a rise in Pakistani hegemony in Afghanistan. The fear was that such hegemony would result in the creation of an Islamabad controlled client regime, which would allow the Pakistani security apparatus to revamp its military presence on the border with India (Roy 2011: 69). New Delhi was thus concerned that a strong Pakistani strategic footprint would rekindle ties with the Taliban (Yadav/Barwa 2011:117). Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have also used Afghanistan to equip and train terrorist elements and instrumentalize them as asymmetrical tactical assets against India in Jammu and Kashmir. This highlights that Afghanistan can be regarded as a domestic issue for India as well. Even though reducing Pakistan’s influence is still a core issue and essential to India’s regional approach, it should not be reduced to and only seen in the light of Indo-Pak rivalry. India has also reanimated the commitment towards its regional role as a benign power investing in social and economic development of its immediate neighborhood, reminiscent of the ‘Gujral Doctrine’ of the mid-19990s. (Price 2013:4)

Integrating Afghanistan into South Asian regional dynamics became a strategic imperative for India. At the 14th Summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2007 in New Delhi, Afghanistan was granted full membership (Sharma 2011: 112). As such, the economic realm of India’s Afghanistan approach has been increasing ever since. Although intra-regional trade in South Asia is extremely low, the admittance to SAARC was aimed at paving the way for economic reconstruction initiated by Indian support. The generated economic benefits would lead to political capital, reestablishing India’s historically positive linkages with Afghanistan and demonstrating to the world community that India, although a developing country itself, was able to live up to its great power aspirations (Pattanaik 2012:572). The economic realm of India’s Afghanistan strategy is not however detached from the Pakistan and Taliban factor as Yadav and Barwa highlight:

By drawing Afghanistan away from its economic and geo-political dependence on Pakistan, India hopes to weaken the resources base of the Taliban or at least provide alternative sources of income and resources for the Karzai regime. (Yadav/Barwa 2011: 116)

Increasing economic growth, providing humanitarian assistance, improving capacity building measures are all part of India’s soft power strategy of “reviving the traditional role of Afghanistan as a land bridge, connecting South Asia with Central Asia and West Asia.” (Roy 2011: 70) This notion was reiterated by Shri S.K. Lambah, the special envoy of India’s prime minister at the Afghanistan conference in Moscow in 2009:

Historically, Afghanistan has prospered when it has served as the trade andtransportation hub between Central and South Asia. If we were to implement the projects and activities on the anvil, which allow greater commercial and economic exchanges by removing barriers to investment, trade and transit, this would transform not just Afghanistan but other regional countries as well.

Afghanistan is not only relevant from a security perspective, but also as an essential gateway to hydrocarbon rich Central Asia. This region, if made accessible could improve the resource portfolio of an energy thirsty economy, while reducing the dependency of supplies from the Middle East. Moreover, it would allow India to chime in to the concert of other nations, such as Russia and China, seeking to exert influence in Central Asia and exploit energy hotspots. (Sharma 2011:111)

Overall, India’s Afghanistan focus is aimed at curbing terrorism, containing and decreasing Pakistan’s influence, pursuing an aid, development and economic integration policy with the goal of being recognized as a major power globally and general good will locally, within the Afghan population. In addition, it is also keen on exploiting energy sources in Afghanistan and developing it into a hub for accessing Central Asian resources.

The Pakistan Factor

India and Pakistan have had ‘a relationship of unremitting hostility’ as Ganguly writes, which reached its low-point four times, in 1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999 where both former nations of British India went to war (Ganguly 2013:1). The issues of state construction, Jammu and Kashmir, cross-border terrorism, alliances with extra-regional powers and water disputes continue to have cast a cloud over potential reapproachment and have fostered deeply entrenched patterns of ‘enmity’ (Ganguly 2013:6). Moreover, Pakistan has been the main obstacle of Indian hegemony, through nuclearization, but also due to Islamabad’s ability to force alliances or deep cooperation with other powers such as China or the United States. As a result, India’s ambition to gain global status continues to be “curbed by the ongoing conflict with Pakistan” (Tadjbakhsh 2011:49). The competition over influence in Afghanistan also exemplifies the hostile nature of this troubled relationship. (see Chatterjee 2013)

As India’s footprint started growing in Afghanistan, so too was Pakistan’s will to curb Indian engagement in its backyard. The Iraq war in 2003 diverted the attention of the United States and Pakistan utilized the reemergence of the Taliban as a welcome entry point to reestablish itself as the prime partner for Washington in the War on Terror, as well as, foster its ties with radical non-state proxy elements (Pant 2013:48). For example, India lost its standing in the Afghan peace negotiations whereas Pakistan “positioned itself as a vital player in any Afghan reconciliation process” (Hanauer/Chalk 2012:29). The disjuncture between India’s position and that of other nations became evident at a 60 nation London conference on Afghanistan in 2010, where New Delhi was alone on its ‘zero-tolerance’ stance towards the Taliban (Pant 2013:50). Pant attributes the dwindling perception amongst international stakeholders that India should play a more pro-active in Afghanistan to successful Pakistan lobbying:

So when London decided that the time had come to woo the ‘moderate’ section of the Taliban back to share power in Kabul, it was a signal to India that Pakistan seemed to have convinced the West that it could play the role of mediator in negotiations with the Taliban-thereby underlining its centrality in the unfolding strategic dynamic in the region. (Pant 2013:50)

Pakistan has also stifled the efficiency of Indian trade and transport to Afghanistan. Due to the fact that both nations are in competition for the same consumer goods in the Afghanistan and because Islamabad wants to prevent an integration of Indian and Afghan markets, Pakistan has not allowed India to transit its territory (Ved 2008:77). Although Pakistan did not veto the admittance of Afghanistan to SAARC, it is not interested in a regional integration of Kabul into Central and South Asia. While one could make the argument that Indo-Pak levels have improved, at least in the realm of trade, since Pakistan granted India a ‘most favored nation’ status in 2011, it has not altered the rationale of Islamabad’s stance towards Afghanistan. While Afghan goods can enter India, Indian products cannot reach Kabul through Pakistan (Hanauer/Chalk 2012:31). As a response India has built rail and road links from Afghanistan to Iranian border cities, where goods are transported to ports at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar and then shipped to Indian harbors (Torjesen/Stankovic 2010:26). Although Pakistan has been heavily subsidized by the United States it still fears alliances that undermine its position in Afghanistan as Rashid and Rubin argue:

The Pakistani security establishment believes that it faces both a US-Indian-Afghan alliance and a separate Iranian-Russian alliance, each aimed at undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and even dismembering the Pakistani state. Some (but not all) see armed militants within Pakistan as a threat-but largely consider it one that is ultimately controllable. (Rashid and Rubin 2008: 36-37)

With regards to India, Pakistan has accused its neighbor of using its four consulate in Afghanistan, especially the ones in Kandahar and Jelalabad, close to Pakistani territory as Indian intelligence gathering facilities aimed at destabilizing Afghanistan. (Ved 2008:75)

Conclusion

India’s influence in Afghanistan has suffered under Pakistan’s successful attempts at positioning itself as the core mediator between the Taliban and the West, while at the same time instrumentalizing radical elements to maintain its strategic depth vis-a-vis New Delhi. Pakistan has intentionally redirected activities of Kashmiri extremists to Afghanistan, especially the Lakshar-e-Taiba, which has worked closely with the ISI to is recruiting militants from mosques and madreassas in Peshawar (Hanauer/Chalk 2012: 29). Islamabad’s optimal scenario would include a pro-Pakistani state, which would function as a rear base, in which it could train Islamist militants such as Harakat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Lakshar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani network. This would keep extremist forces outside of Pakistan, creating a safe haven in Afghanistan, which in turn would allow Islamabad to refute accusations of state-sponsored terrorism (Hanauer/Chalk 2012:29). It does not seem that this strategic modus vivendi will soon be altered, for “as India continues its rise, Pakistan’s reliance upon Islamic militancy, the only tool it has to change India’s trajectory, will increase, not decrease” (Fair 2011:6). With NATO troops leaving Afghanistan, an increased presence of Chinese involvement and the entrenched patterns of enmity between India and Pakistan, to use a term of Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, it will be interesting to observe how India pursues its stakes in the Hindu Kush.

References

Chatterjee, Shibashis. 2013. “International Relations Theory and South Asia.” In International Relations Theory and South Asia, E. Sridharan, 2. Ed., 53–70. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chaudhuri, Rudra. 2012. “Dealing with the Endgame: India and the Af-Pak Puzzle.” In Grand Strategy for India 2020 and Beyond, V. Krishnappa and Princy Marin George, 204–18. New Delhi: Pentagon Security International.

Fair, Christine. 2011. “2014 and Beyond: U.S. Policy Towards Afghanistan and Pakis- tan, Part I”. Report for House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. Washington, D.C.

Ganguly, Sumit. 2013. Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pant, Harsh V. 2013. “India’s Changing Afghanistan Policy: Regional and Global Implications.” In India in Africa and Afghanistan, Cameron Buzatto (ed.). New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Pattanaik, Smruti S. 2012. “India’s Afghan Policy: Beyond Bilateralism.” Strategic Analysis 36 (4): 569–83.

Price, Gareth. 2013. “India’s Policy towards Afghanistan.” Chatham House (ASIA ASP), Nr. 4 (August): 1–10.

Roy, Meena Singh. 2010. “Afghanistan and Regional Strategy: The India Factor.” In China and India in Central Asia: A New “Great Game?”,Marlene Laruelle, Jean-Francois Huchet, Sébastien Peyrousse, und Bayram Balci (eds.), 61–80. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rubin, Barnett R., and Ahmed Rashid. 2008. “From Great Game to Grand Bargain.” Foreign Affairs, December, 33–41.

Sharma, Raghav. 2010. “China’s Afghanistan Policy Slow Recalibration.” China Report 46 (3): 201–15.

Tadjbakhsh, Shahrbanou. 2011. “South Asia and Afghanistan: The Robust India- Pakistan Rivalry.” Afghanistan in a Neighbourhood Perspective. Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

Torjensen, Stina, and Tatjana Stankovic. 2010. “Regional Change: How will the rise of India and China shape Afghanistan’s stabilization process?” Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Ved, Mahendra. 2008. “India’s Afghanistan Policy.” In India’s Foreign Policy: Continuity and Change, 70–81. World Focus Series 2. New Delhi: Academic Excellence.

Yadav, Vikash, und Conrad Barwa. 2011. “Relational Control: India’s Grand Strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” India Review 10 (2): 93–125.
About The Author (Djan Sauerborn):

Djan Sauerborn has a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Political Science and Government & Anthropology from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg / University of Heidelberg . He is a research assistant at the University of Heidelberg, Co-editor of International Security Observer and Editor in Chief of South Asia Democratic Forum at the University of Heidelberg.

Housecarl · Feb 8, 2015

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http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/mackinder-revisited-will-china-establish-eurasian-empire-3-0/

Mackinder Revisited: Will China Establish Eurasian Empire 3.0?

China has emerged as a new contender for control over Mackinder’s “Heartland.”

By Artyom Lukin
February 07, 2015

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In 1904 the founder of geopolitics Sir Halford Mackinder famously pronounced the end of “the Columbian epoch” – that of the dominance of the Western sea power – and the advent of the age of land power, in which the Heartland of Eurasia, or “the pivot area,” would hold the key to the world domination. The pivot area largely corresponded to the territory of the then Russian Empire – occupying central and northern Eurasia.

Mackinder’s main concern was that a rapidly industrializing and expansionist Tsarist Russia could successfully challenge the West’s sea-power-based primacy, taking advantage of the Heartland’s geostrategic centrality and harnessing the huge potentialities of Inner Eurasia’s vast landmass. In actuality, Russia was never able to pull off such a feat – neither under the Tsar, nor in its Soviet reincarnation. It seems even less capable of achieving it now, being reduced to a rump of its former imperial glory and struggling with a shaky economy.

Nevertheless, it may be a little bit too early to write off Mackinder’s prophecies. For there has emerged another contender for the control over the Heartland: China. Although Beijing is making inroads in places as far away as Africa and Latin America, its main game is in Eurasia. We can only guess if Chinese leaders have read Mackinder, but the strategies they are pursuing are more or less in line with the British geographer’s theory.

For one thing, Beijing is aggressively seeking to (re)create the Silk Road that is envisioned as Eurasia’s superhighway – running through the Heartland and reliably linking China with other parts of the continent, such as Europe, the Middle East, Southeast and South Asia. In order to fund this grand design, new financial institutions are being created by China like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund.

In the new Silk Road, railways will play the key role. China is rapidly expanding its own railway network and has become the world’s leader in building high-speed lines, while also expanding into neighboring countries. Central Asia has so far been the main target of this multi-billion dollar push to upgrade and construct rail lines, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure. Another possible trunk of the twenty-first-century Silk Road will run from China further north. One section of it, a planned high-speed railway stretching some 7,000 kilometers, will connect Moscow and Beijing, cutting the travel time between the two cities from the current six or more days to about 33 hours.

If successful in this “rail offensive,” the Chinese may finally prove correct Mackinder’s assertion that “trans-continental railways are…transmuting the conditions of land-power, and nowhere can they have such effect as in the closed heart-land of Euro-Asia.” Emphasizing the advantages of rail over ship, Mackinder argued that “the continental railway truck may run direct from the exporting factory into the importing warehouse.” In contemporary economic parlance, this is called a seamless transportation system. And China obviously wants to be the designer and the principal hub of an emerging Eurasian connectivity web. Importantly, this continental Eurasian network will largely be out of reach for the United States, whose naval forces command global sea lanes, causing anxiety in Beijing over a possible blockade of China’s trade, still predominantly sea-borne.

Supplementing China-centered transcontinental rail network are planned oceanic routes emanating from Chinese ports and hugging Eurasian shores. Foremost among them is Maritime Silk Road, traversing the seas of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Kra Canal across an isthmus in Southern Thailand, whose construction, funded by Chinese, may begin soon, will draw the Maritime Silk Road closer to China-friendly countries, such as Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, reducing the significance of Malacca Strait controlled by the U.S. Navy. China is also eying the Northern Sea Route, which is passing via the Arctic areas controlled by Moscow, Beijing’s increasingly close “strategic partner.”

In China’s Eurasian vision, economic considerations are intertwined with geo-strategic. Economically, China will benefit from establishing a huge integrated area under its leadership. Strategically, this continental zone of Chinese influence will be largely impregnable to hostile U>S. interventions, should a grave crisis occur in Sino-American relations. The U.S., possessing unrivaled naval capabilities, may well inflict damage upon the maritime margins of China’s geo-economic empire, but it will hardly be able to strike at its terrestrial core centered around Eurasian Heartland.

Russia – China’s Own Canada?

China will not be able to create its Eurasian fortress without collaboration, or at least acquiescence, from the other great Eurasian power – Russia. Although a far cry from the heydays of the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, Russia still controls much of the crucial Heartland areas – as its own territories in northern Eurasia and zones of political influence in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

It looks increasingly likely that Moscow, despite erstwhile Eurasian ambitions of its own, will not stand in the way of Beijing’s grand designs. Locked in a bitter fight with the West over Ukraine and other issues, Russia has no choice but to move closer toward China. In particular, plunging oil prices and Western sanctions are threatening to ruin Russia’s financial system. Beijing seems ready to come to the rescue. In October 2014, the central banks of the two countries signed a currency swap agreement worth 150 billion yuan ($25 billion), allowing Russia to draw on China’s renminbi in case of need. In December 2014, Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced that China was willing to help Russia, if needed. The question is what political and economic strings Beijing is going to attach to any assistance it might be willing to extend to a struggling Russia. The price tag will likely include privileged access to Russia’s natural resources and military technologies, as well as Moscow’s consent to China-led economic schemes in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Even those in Russia’s China-watching community who are quite sympathetic toward Beijing, acknowledge that the new Silk Road is motivated “not only by its future economic benefits, but also geopolitical calculations, hopes to create in Eurasia a ‘growth base’ for a future great Eurasian power.” However, it is far from clear what long-term implications this would have for Russia and whether it would be at all possible for the two great-power Eurasian projects to co-exist peacefully.

As Russia’s leading analysts point out, China’s Silk Road initiatives may consume Moscow’s own cherished project of Eurasian Union. According to Dmitri Trenin, “What might be expected . . . is an energy, investment and industrial-technological partnership between China and Russia which will reshape and rebalance Eurasia, whose center of gravity will now move from Moscow to Beijing.”

If Russia is lucky it may eventually become China’s own “Canada” – a vast storehouse of natural resources catering for a powerful southern neighbor, while retaining a degree of sovereignty. However, in the worst-case scenario, Russia will end up as a vassal within a Chinese empire. It is striking that, back in 1904 Mackinder anticipated the possible incorporation of Russia into the Chinese domain and the danger that could pose to the West: “Were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent…” He was only mistaken about the Japanese. Rather than “organizing” a China-led empire in Eurasia, Tokyo is now trying to prevent an entente between Moscow and Beijing for fear of facing a powerful hostile bloc.

Three Eurasian Empires

Historically, there have been two attempts to create an empire that would span Eurasian landmass from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The first empire was established by Mongol conquests in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, extending from the Sea of Japan and South China Sea to the Mediterranean. The largest land empire in history, it did not last very long as a unified entity, stumbling on factors such as internal strife over succession. Both China and Russia were part of this nomadic empire, which was ruled from the capital Karakorum on the steppes of inner Mongolia. Importantly, China’s and Russia’s further evolution as states and their geopolitical thinking were, and still are, influenced by that experience of Mongol dominion.

It is often said that Russia shares equally in the heritage of the Byzantine emperors and Genghis Khan. So it was the Russian Tsars who tried to build another Euro-Asian empire stretching from the Baltic and the Bosphorus to Manchuria and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. They were only partly successful, as they never came close to being the dominant force on the continent – resisted by European powers to the west, Turkey to the south, and Japan to the east. The Soviet Union that succeeded the Russian Empire, though geographically a Eurasian country, had, due to its universalist ideology, global rather than Eurasian aspirations. Moscow has now returned to the concept of Russia-centric Eurasianism, but clearly lacks resources to turn this vision into reality.

It is now China’s turn to try and create its own version of “Eurasian empire.” Unlike Mongol and Russian dominions, which were primarily based on military force and coercion, the Chinese are deploying economic power. At present, it is simply impossible to know what kind of empire this one is going be. It could be a benevolent China-centric economic integration zone similar to the German-led EU or Brazil-led Mercosur. But one cannot rule out an attempt by Beijing to assert political hegemony in Eurasia in a more traditional imperial sense.

Beijing’s endeavors to integrate Eurasia under Chinese aegis are seen as a serious challenge by many in Washington – a threat even. As Mackinder’s Britain viewed with alarm Russia’s growing clout in the continental heartland, today American policymakers are concerned that much of Eurasia will come under the sway of an Asian power whose ways are starkly different from the West’s and whose future strategic intentions are at best uncertain.

The U.S. attempts to provide alternatives to the China-led economic order in Eurasia have thus far proved underwhelming. The much vaunted Trans-Pacific Partnership has not yet gotten off the ground, mired in seemingly endless negotiations. The U.S.-sponsored “New Silk Road,” which aimed to link Central and South Asia through Afghanistan, has led nowhere. On the strategic front, efforts to enlist India as Asia’s main counterweight to China have also been less than successful, with New Delhi reluctant to make any alignment with Washington that could be interpreted as a containment of Beijing.

Yet, despite the seemingly inexorable rise of Chinese power, it would be premature to proclaim the advent of a new Eurasian empire. The lessons from Mackinder’s epoch are perhaps useful here again. In the early 20th century Imperial Russia seemed to many, both at home and abroad, on track to become the world’s preeminent power – along with the United States. In 1907, Russia’s reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin famously said that all Russia needed to achieve greatness was “twenty years of internal and external tranquility.” In 1911, Stolypin was assassinated by a radical socialist. In 1914, Russia entered a Balkan conflict which became World War I. In 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed.

China is facing similar risks of internal and external tribulations that could disastrously end its spectacular rise. For Beijing, in the next fifteen to twenty years, maintaining domestic stability while avoiding dangerous external crises may well prove to be a far more daunting task than constructing a Eurasian dominion.

Artyom Lukin is associate professor at the School of Regional and International Studies, Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

Missed this one......

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http://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-arabia-and-pakistans-nuclear-weapons-pact-2015-2

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan may have just renewed a secret nuclear weapons pact
The Washington Institute For Near East Policy

Simon Henderson, The Washington Institute For Near East Policy

Feb. 4, 2015, 10:28 AM
Comments 41

The visit by the chairman of Pakistan's Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee will likely prompt concern in Washington and other major capitals that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have reconfirmed an arrangement whereby Pakistan, if asked, will supply Saudi Arabia with nuclear warheads.

The main meeting on Gen. Rashid Mahmoud's itinerary was with King Salman — the topics discussed were reported as "deep relations between the two countries and ... a number of issues of common interest."

General Rashid also saw separately Defense Minister Prince Muhammad bin Salman — who presented him with the King Abdulaziz medal of excellence — as well as Deputy Crown Prince and Interior Minister Muhammad bin Nayef and Minister of the National Guard Prince Mitab bin Abdullah.

The only senior Saudi absent from the meetings appears to have been Crown Prince Muqrin.

For decades, Riyadh has been judged a supporter of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, providing financing in return for a widely assumed understanding that, if needed, Islamabad will transfer technology or even warheads.

It has been noticeable that changes in leadership in either country have quickly been followed by top-level meetings, as if to reconfirm such nuclear arrangements. Although Pakistani nuclear technology also helped Iran's program, the relationship between Islamabad and Riyadh has been much more obvious.

In 1999, a year after Pakistan tested two nuclear weapons, then Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan visited the unsafeguarded uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta outside Islamabad — prompting a US diplomatic protest.

Last year, as Riyadh's concern at the prospect of Iranian nuclear hegemony in the Gulf grew, Pakistan's chief of army staff, Gen. Raheel Sharif, was a guest of honor when Saudi Arabia publicly paraded its Chinese CSS-2 missiles for the first time since they were delivered in the 1980s.

Although now nearly obsolete, the CSS-2 missile once formed the core of China's nuclear force. Pakistan's first nuclear devices were based on a Chinese design.

Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, visited the kingdom January 23 for the funeral of King Abdullah and had also been there a couple of weeks earlier to pay his respects to the ailing monarch.

The civilian leader and his military commanders have an awkward relationship — in an earlier term of office, Nawaz Sharif was overthrown in a military coup and sent into exile in Saudi Arabia — but Pakistan's nuclear program seems above any civil-military partisanship.

The visit by General Rashid comes a day after Pakistan announced the successful flight-testing of its Raad air-launched 220-mile-range cruise missile, which reportedly is able to deliver nuclear and conventional warheads with pinpoint accuracy.

While chairing his first cabinet meeting as prime minister yesterday, King Salman announced there would be no change in Saudi foreign policy.

In its own way, today's top-level meetings with the Pakistani military delegation seem to confirm this statement, adding perhaps an extra awkward complication to the Obama administration's effort to secure a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.

Simon Henderson is the Baker Fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at The Washington Institute.
More from The Washington Institute For Near East Policy:

Nuclear Nuances of Saudi-Pakistan Meeting
Princely Personalities Sidelined in Saudi Arabia
Riyadh Rendezvous: Obama to Meet with New Saudi King
Coup in Yemen: Saudi Arabia's Nightmare
Saudi King in Hospital: Succession Crisis Looms

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

Hummm.......

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http://original.antiwar.com/murray-polner/2015/02/08/are-you-ready-to-fight-putins-russia/

Are You Ready To Fight Putin’s Russia?
by Murray Polner, February 09, 2015

"Who came down from the mountain and said the U.S. must police the globe from the South China Sea to the jungles of Peru"? ~ Eric S. Margolis

For my sins, I’ve just finished reading the latest report by three of Washington’s centrist think tanks, "Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression." From their peaceful, safe and posh offices they urge President Obama to get tough with Moscow and supply "defensive" weapons to Ukraine, while sanctimoniously concluding, as LBJ and Bush Junior’s echo chambers did in 1965 and 2003, that "assisting Ukraine to …. defend itself is not inconsistent with the search for a peaceful political solution."

As if Iraq, Syria, ISIS, Iran, Cuba, Yemen, Obama’s anti-China "pivot to Asia," and the Republican train wreckers who now control Congress aren’t enough, there’s a permanent taste for war among the Imperial City’s hawks, now ready to fight with your kids (never theirs) to teach that bastard Vladimir Putin a lesson and show him who’s boss. We did it to Grenada and Panama and we can do it again.

According to the think tankers, "The West has the capacity to stop Russia. The question is whether it has the will," sounding exactly like the blind and arrogant men who took us into Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aside from the fact that, given Russia’s military backing, sending in weapons cannot defeat the Eastern Ukrainian separatists, and that we’ve never had any vital interest in Crimea or the Donbass region, what then? Our think tankers are banking on the delusion that Putin, no bargain he, but no Hitler – as Hillary Clinton once mindlessly blurted out, thereby cementing her hawkish credentials for the 2016 run – will cravenly commit to a settlement because of "defensive" weapons. If that doesn’t tame the feral Putin maybe our "Indispensable Nation’s" volunteer military, National Guard, Reserves, even conscripts?

The truth is that every Cold War leader feared a U.S.-Soviet hot war. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, refused to intervene in the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 because, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote, "Eisenhower knew that there were limits to his power and Hungary was outside those limits." Ike also shut down the Korean War. Who in authority now speak of "limits" and mean it? Like it or not, Ukraine is historically within Moscow’s sphere of influence, just as all Latin America has been in Washington’s sphere of influence, at least since 1823 and its unilateral Monroe Doctrine. In 1962, the US was ready to fight a nuclear war to keep the Reds out of Castro’s Cuba, "our Cuba," the playground of foreign exploiters and the Mafia.

The truth is US and NATO instigated the Ukrainian civil war by brazenly drawing ever closer to the Russian border. Unanswered is why Obama has exerted no control over Joe Biden, John Brennan and John Kerry’s alleged State department subordinate Victoria Nuland, all of whom spent time in secret negotiations with Kiev.

Mikhail Gorbachev, no friend of Putin, is adamantly opposed to shipping weapons to Ukraine. He has repeatedly said that in 1990 Bush senior promised him (never put into writing but never denied by the US) that, in return for allowing German unification to proceed and the former satellite states to go their own way, NATO would never approach Russia’s borders. A nation that had lost some 20 million civilians and soldiers after yet another western invasion, remains understandably sensitive about foreign armies camped on their doorstep. Those who dare to speak of this today are often smeared as Putin-lovers and worse.

Then too, the presence of neo-Nazis among the Ukrainian military is rarely if ever reported by our conforming mass media. For that you need to read the British press, where Suemas Milne of the liberal Guardian has been on the scene since the Maidan Square uprising. He wrote, "The role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda." And more: "By what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of NATO, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality. It has none, of course."

The Guardian too liberal for you? Then try Tom Parfitt in the conservative Daily Telegraph, who reported that the Azov Battalion, one of a number of Ukrainian militias involved in the Eastern Ukrainian war, "uses the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites."

And then there’s this final consideration which somehow escaped the think tankers: Russia has almost as many nuclear bombs as we do. Sending American military "trainers" and eventually more and more into a killing zone next door to Russia means that an unexpected blunder leading to an exchange of nukes could happen. Sarajevo anyone?

For now, despite intense pressure to "Do Something," Obama is offering no hint what he will do. There are of course peaceful alternatives, among them establishing Ukraine as a neutral state, unattached to any one side. But now more than ever, he needs to sit down and talk to some antiwar people who helped elect him but who he has snubbed. Andrew Bacevich for one. A West Pointer, Vietnam War veteran, recently retired professor of history and International relations whose son was killed in Iraq, he’d be an excellent partner for a private chat in the Oval Room. Maybe Bacevich could bring along his valuable book Washington Rules, which ends this way: "Promising prosperity and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the United States toward insolvency and perpetual war. Over the horizon a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits…. To willfully ignore the danger is to become complicit in the destruction of what Americans profess to hold dear. We, too, must choose."

Call him, Mr. President. It’s getting late.

Murray Polner wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, Disarmed & Dangerous, a dual biography of Daniel & Philip Berrigan (with Jim’O’Grady), and We Who Dared Say No To War (with Thomas Woods Jr.).

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ed9748-af26-11e4-8876-460b1144cbc1_story.html

Kerry rules out extension of Iran nuclear talks

By Carol Morello February 8 at 10:30 AM Follow @CMorelloWP
Comments 346

MUNICH — Secretary of State John F. Kerry said in an interview broadcast Sunday that it would be “impossible” to extend nuclear negotiations with Iran if an agreement on fundamental principles is not reached in the coming weeks.

Using more categorical language than he has employed previously, Kerry definitively precluded a third extension to talks with Iran about reducing its ability to make a nuclear bomb or easing sanctions.

In November, when no deal could be struck by a self-imposed deadline, a temporary agreement, which had been in place for a year and had been extended once before, was pushed to late June. Kerry said at the time that the major points of agreement would have to be reached by late March. In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” taped Saturday in Munich where he was attending an international security conference, Kerry appeared to close the door on another extension.

“Well, the only chance I can see of an extension at this point in time would be that you really have the outlines of the agreement,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview. “You understand exactly what you’re doing.”

One reason for an extension, Kerry added, would be to flesh out complex details spelled out in numerous footnotes known as “annexes.”

“But if we’re not able to make the fundamental decisions that have to be made over the course of the next weeks, literally, I think it would be impossible to extend,” he said. “I don’t think we would want to extend at that point. Either you make the decisions to prove your program is a peaceful one, or if you’re unable to do that, it may tell a story that none of us want to hear.”

The nuclear talks, which began a decade ago with Iran and were revived after Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, was elected president in 2013, have been the subject of much concern. Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, who has reached out to the foreign ministers of the five other countries that are negotiating partners of the United States to lobby against a deal, is expected to be highly critical of any potential agreement in an address to Congress planned for March 3.

Israel and the Persian Gulf countries are worried that Iran is on the threshold of developing nuclear weapons. If that were to happen, it could set off a nuclear arms race in the region.

Kerry has met several times in recent weeks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, including twice this weekend in Munich. State Department officials have released almost no details of the complex talks, beyond saying that they are making progress but that large gaps remain.

In Washington, lawmakers in Congress are considering imposing new sanctions on Tehran as leverage to force Iranian concessions, particularly on the number of uranium-enriching centrifuges that Iran says it maintains for peaceful purposes such as energy production and medical testing. The White House has urged patience, saying that more sanctions could lead the Iranians to abandon talks and a temporary accord that has limited Iran’s enrichment program while negotiations for a permanent deal continue.

Hard-liners in Iran who oppose any deal involving the United States also are working to undermine the negotiations.

For now, domestic opposition in Tehran and Washington serves as pressure to reach a final deal.

“We need to seize this opportunity,” Zarif said Sunday in a forum at the Munich conference. “It may not be repeated.”

President Obama and Kerry have said repeatedly that they will not agree to any deal with Iran that would allow Tehran to quickly convert its peaceful nuclear stockpiles to a bomb-making operation.

Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com...aid=3000698&cloc=joongangdaily|home|newslist1

Washington, Korea look to conclude nuclear pact
Feb 09,2015

Korea and the United States are looking to conclude a bilateral nuclear cooperation accord as early as next month after four years of negotiations, according to the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The revision of the current civilian nuclear cooperation agreement is not expected to include “gold standard” clauses, according to government officials here, which explicitly prohibit uranium enrichment and reprocessing spent fuel. This has been a key point of contention between the two countries in the negotiation process.

Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held bilateral talks for the first time this year on Saturday along the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, where the nuclear accord’s finalization was discussed.

The Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Sunday that Kerry and Yun “agreed to hold a final negotiation on the revision of the Korea-U.S. nuclear accord within the next several weeks and agreed to try our utmost to reach a conclusion.”

The bilateral nuclear energy pact, last amended in 1974, prohibits Korea from enriching uranium because the process can produce plutonium, which can not only power nuclear reactors but can also be used to make atomic weapons. It also bans the country from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods from nuclear reactors.

The pact is sometimes referred to as the 123 Agreement, after pertinent sections in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and was initially set to expire in March 2014 before a two-year extension was negotiated. It is now set to expire in March 2016.

Over four years of negotiations, Seoul has been seeking to lift the ban on enriching uranium and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in its civilian nuclear pact with Washington, claiming the terms of the agreement are no longer applicable 40 years on.

Washington, however, has been reluctant to allow reprocessing and enrichment because it fears it could send the wrong signal in regard to global nonproliferation.

The United States has held onto the gold standard for its nuclear cooperation agreements, legally binding its partners to forswear enrichment and reprocessing, exemplified in is bilateral nuclear energy pact with the United Arab Emirates which took effect in December 2009.

However, the successor to the 123 agreement, looking to soon be concluded, is expected to enable Korea to reprocess spent nuclear fuel for research and development purposes - albeit in a limited way - that would still uphold its nonproliferation principles, according to Seoul sources.

“The U.S. is trying to come up with an agreement that will use a creative method unlike its agreements with any other country,” a Korean foreign affairs official said on uranium enrichment and reprocessing. “The clause on enrichment will not involve a dichotomous method or a simply unilaterally prohibition.”

This signifies that the new pact will not include the gold standard, and is also expected to introduce new terminology.

With the technology, Korea seeks to alleviate its spent fuel storage problem, supply enriched uranium to fuel its nuclear reactors and further contribute to research and development and promote its nuclear industry abroad.

Korea, which derives more than a third of its energy from nuclear reactors, expects to run out of storage space for spent fuel in the next decade.

On Saturday, a U.S. State Department official told reporters that concluding negotiations “in the near term” is ideal.

After the provisional signing of the agreement, official signing typically takes another one to two months. Washington will need congressional approval, a process that can take at least 90 days and could be met with opposition.

BY SARAH KIM, YOO JEE-HYE [sarahkim@joongang.co.kr]

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150208/eu--ukraine-diplomacy-c6c3ffc594.html

Peace in Ukraine is goal of four-nation talks in Minsk

Feb 8, 2:19 PM (ET)
By FRANK JORDANS and MATTHEW LEE

(AP) Ukrainian soldiers unload supplies near Debaltseve, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, Feb. 8,...
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BERLIN (AP) — As Russian-backed separatists gain ground in eastern Ukraine, efforts to broker peace appeared to gain momentum Sunday, with leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine announcing plans for four-way talks this week.

The proposed meeting Wednesday in the Belarusian capital of Minsk emerged from a phone call between German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

The aim is to revive the much-violated peace plan both sides agreed to in Minsk last September, and end a war that has now killed more than 5,300 people according to United Nations estimates.

Although the United States won't be at the negotiating table, a growing clamor in Washington to arm Ukraine will be on the minds of those present in Minsk. U.S. officials have said President Barack Obama is rethinking his previous opposition to sending weapons to Ukraine, despite fears of triggering a proxy war between Washington and Moscow.

(AP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to a speech of German Foreign Minister...
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While senior diplomats from the four countries meet in Berlin to prepare for the summit, Merkel is expected to brief U.S. officials in Washington on Monday during a previously scheduled trip.

"It's a fortuitous coincidence that Merkel is going to Washington and whatever she does, Obama will be informed," said Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The threat of U.S. arms shipments won't harm the talks, he added, although "if the diplomatic efforts fail then the option to ship arms becomes more likely."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was keen Sunday to dispel the notion of a trans-Atlantic rift, saying U.S. and its European allies are "united in our diplomacy" on Ukraine. Speaking at an international security conference in Munich, he said the U.S. supports the efforts by France and Germany.

"There is no division, there is no split," Kerry said. "I keep hearing people trying to create one. We are united, we are working closely together."

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, speaking alongside Kerry, said he considers delivering weapons "not just highly risky but counterproductive."

(AP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, speaks, as French Foreign Minister...
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But Republican Sen. John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, insisted in Munich that "we must provide defensive arms to Ukraine."

"If we help Ukrainians increase the military cost to the Russian forces that have invaded their country, how long can Putin sustain a war that he tells his people is not happening?"

Aside from the military cost, Russia has also been struggling with the economic impact of western sanctions and low global oil prices.

While Ukraine's Poroshenko raised the possibility that Wednesday's summit could provide a breakthrough after months of futile diplomacy, Putin insisted Sunday that the four-way meeting would only happen if they agree on key points beforehand.

"We will be aiming for Wednesday, if by that time we are able to agree on a number of the positions that we recently have been discussing intensely," he told journalists in Sochi during a meeting with the president of Belarus.

(AP) Ukrainian military vehicles drive towards Debaltseve on the outskirts of Artemivsk,...
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Details of the proposals have not been revealed, but the main sticking points have emerged in the leaders' recent comments.

One is enforcing a peace deal. In Munich, Poroshenko expressed opposition to any peacekeeper force, apparently reflecting concern that sending Russian peacekeeping troops into eastern Ukraine could result in a de-facto occupation.

However, key to a real settlement is some mechanism for monitoring the Ukraine-Russia border to ensure that Russia is not sending troops or equipment to the separatists. Ukrainian officials would have the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe conduct such monitoring.

The status of the eastern regions remains contentious. Ukraine passed a law last year proposing what it called significant autonomy for the east, but rebels dismissed it as vague and meaningless. Russia has pushed for "federalization" of Ukraine, which would presumably give the east significant independence, but Ukrainian authorities oppose any federalization.

How to separate the belligerents also remains unclear. The Minsk agreement in September foresaw each side pulling back its heavy weapons 15 kilometers (more than 9 miles) from the lines of engagement. But the rebels have taken control of more territory since then, implying that a new buffer zone would have to be mapped.

Kiev is refusing to allow the separatists a place at the top-level talks. Instead, their representatives would join a parallel meeting, to be held by Wednesday in Minsk, between the signatories to last September's accord.

---__

Lee reported from Munich; Associated Press writers Geir Moulson and David Rising in Munich, Sylvie Corbet in Paris, and Jim Heintz and Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this story.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150208/af--congo-anti-rebel_offensive-b6ff556e42.html

Congo vows offensive to oust Hutu rebels after 20 years

Feb 8, 8:42 AM (ET)
By MELANIE GOUBY

(AP) In this photo taken on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, people carry bags of charcoal on...
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MWESO, Congo (AP) — The wobbly white tarp tents once constructed for people fleeing a violent Rwandan Hutu rebel group have gradually been replaced by more solid huts of branches, banana leaves and mud. After all, it's been nine years now since the residents became refugees in their own country.

"And all this time the rebels are still farming the land in my village," says Witonze Nzambonipa, the camp's elected chief.

But now Nzambonipa and others in the camp have hope their situation might improve, as the Congolese military has vowed to oust the rebels known by their French acronym — FDLR — after they failed to meet a Jan. 2 deadline to disarm.

The military operation is supposed to be gaining additional support from the U.N. peacekeepers in eastern Congo who already helped the beleaguered country defeat another group known as the M23.

(AP) In this photo taken on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, elected chief of a displacement camp,...
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The stakes are high in eastern Congo, a region plagued by a myriad of armed rebels in the two decades since the Rwandan genocide. The FDLR includes Rwandan Hutus who committed the 1994 massacres and who fled into Congo to escape prosecution. The instability created by the FDLR rebels in eastern Congo has allowed other fighters to flourish as well.

"In many ways, the FDLR triggered the cycles of war that DRC (Congo) has experienced for two decades," says Fidel Bafilemba, a researcher with the advocacy group the Enough Project. "If these operations manage to really deal with them, all the other armed groups will disappear easily."

Yet days after the United Nations welcomed the official launch of the offensive, internal disputes have kept the forces from kicking off a coordinated offensive. One official, who insisted on anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to journalists, said the U.N. had objected to the inclusion of some Congolese soldiers in the mission.

Congo wants to use the soldiers most familiar with the FDLR group, but the official said those very same soldiers have been "red-flagged" (banned) because of allegations of past human rights abuses.

The U.N.'s deputy spokesman Farhan Haq made those allegations public this week.

(AP) This photo taken on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, shows a large area of natural forest...
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"The appointment of two Congolese generals to lead this operation, who are known to us as having been heavily involved in massive human right violations, is of grave concern," said Haq on Thursday in New York. "I can confirm discussions are underway at the highest level with the DRC (Congolese) government to address these concerns." He said U.N. support for the anti-rebel offensive could be withheld.

With an estimated 1,400 fighters, the FDLR are a shadow of the force they used to be but defeating them may still prove difficult. Hardened by years living deep in the Congolese forest, they are experienced guerrilla fighters with little to lose, and who can also easily blend into the population.

Many hope the elimination of the FDLR will create stability not only in eastern Congo but in Rwanda, where the government has long been accused of backing rebels who fight the FDLR.

"This support will fizzle out once the FDLR are gone," said Bafilemba of Enough Project. "Then it will be up to the Congolese army to secure the population and dismantle the remaining armed groups."

The FDLR, though, also have become an integral part of the region's economy, running the illegal charcoal trade that provides thousands of households with fuel to cook and heat their homes despite causing deforestation.

Many Hutu civilians also fear they will be caught in crossfire and confused with the rebels. Rumors that the operations will be led by the Congolese army, instead of the U.N., have increased these anxieties, given the army's record of human rights abuses.

Olivier Ndayambaje was only 6 years old when he and his family fled Rwanda in 1994 — too young to have taken part in any genocide. Now he is 26 and like other Hutu civilians, he worries about the upcoming military operation designed to defeat the FDLR but may also push out other Rwandan Hutus living in the region.

"Life is already so hard here," he says. "Where can we go?"

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150208/af--nigeria-elections-7c0743f8d1.html

Nigeria postpones elections to March 28, cites uprising

Feb 7, 7:04 PM (ET)
By BASHIR ADIGUN and MICHELLE FAUL

(AP) Recording devices belonging to journalists are placed on a desk as they wait to be...
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ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria is postponing presidential and legislative elections until March 28 because security forces fighting Boko Haram extremists cannot ensure voters' safety around the country, the electoral commission announced Saturday in a decision likely to infuriate the opposition.

Officials in President Goodluck Jonathan's government have been calling for weeks for the postponement, saying the commission is not ready to hold what promises to be the most tightly contested presidential vote in the history of Africa's biggest democracy.

"Many people will be very angry and annoyed," Independent National Electoral Commission Chairman Attahiru Jega told a news conference Saturday night. "I want to assure all Nigerians, no one is forcing us to make this decision, this is a very weighty decision."

He said the commission had considered holding elections outside of the four northeastern states most affected by the uprising by Boko Haram Islamic militants, but decided that the likelihood of an inconclusive presidential election would be "very, very high."

(AP) People stand with there belongings as they leave there homes traveling by bus after...
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Nigerian elections traditionally are violent and several people already have died in clashes. Some 800 people were killed in protests in the predominantly Muslim north after 2011 elections when Jonathan beat former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan is a Christian from a minority tribe in the mainly Christian south. Buhari is a Muslim northerner.

Both men are facing off again and supporters of both are threatening violence if their candidate does not win this year's contest, one analysts say is too close to call since opposition parties for the first time formed a coalition led by Buhari.

A statement from Jonathan's party commended the postponement but blamed it on the commission, saying it is suffering "numerous logistical problems and numerous internal challenges."

Buhari's coalition said it was holding an emergency meeting to discuss the implications of "this major setback for Nigerian democracy." It appealed to all Nigerians "to remain calm and desist from violence."

Jega told reporters that national security advisers and intelligence officers have said security forces need six weeks to conduct "a major operation" against Boko Haram and cannot also safeguard the elections.

(AP) Protestors hold banners during a protest in Abuja, Nigeria, Saturday, Feb. 7, 2015,...
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He said it would be "highly irresponsible" to ignore that advice and endanger the lives and security of electoral personnel and materials, voters and observers as well as the prospects for free, fair and credible elections.

Millions could be disenfranchised if Boko Haram continues to hold a large swath of the northeast and commit mayhem that has left 1.5 million people homeless.

The postponement comes amid a major offensive against the exremists joined by Chad and Nigerian warplanes and ground troops that has driven the insurgents out of a dozen towns and villages in the past 10 days. Even stronger military strikes involving more neighboring countries are planned.

African Union officials ended a three-day meeting Saturday in Yaounde, Cameroon's capital, finalizing details to deploy by next month an 8,750-strong force from Nigeria and its four neighbors to combat the growing regional threat posed by Boko Haram.

Nigeria's home-grown extremist group has responded with attacks on one town in Cameroon and two in Niger this week. Officials said more than 100 civilians were killed and 500 wounded in Cameroon. Niger said about 100 insurgents and one civilian died in attacks Friday. Several security forces from both countries were killed.

(AP) Protestors hold banners during a protest in Abuja, Nigeria, Saturday, Feb. 7, 2015,...
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The insurgents also have launched three attacks within a week on Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast, which thousands of people were fleeing Saturday, overcrowding buses, trucks and cars with bodies and belongings.

"We fear the violence that could erupt during the elections more than the threats of Boko Haram," said Mojo Okechukwu, a 45-year-old vehicle spare parts dealer and Christian from the south who has lived in Maiduguri for 20 years.

International concern has increased along with the death toll: Some 10,000 killed in the uprising in the past year compared to 2,000 in the four previous years, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.

The United States had been urging Nigeria to press ahead with the voting. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Nigeria two weeks ago and said that "one of the best ways to fight back against Boko Haram" was by holding credible and peaceful elections, on time.

"It's imperative that these elections happen on time as scheduled," Kerry said.

The elections had been called early. Elections in 2011 were postponed until April. May 29 is the deadline for a new government to be installed.

The postponement also will give the commission a chance to deliver more voter cards: Jega said that by Friday, only 45.8 million of the 68.8 million cards needed to vote had been collected. Nigeria does not have a working postal service, though it has Africa's biggest economy.

Jonathan's party has won every election since decades of military rule ended in 1999. But the failure of the military to curb the 5-year Islamic uprising, mounting corruption and an economy hit by slumping oil prices have hurt the president of Africa's biggest oil producer and most populous nation of about 170 million.

---

Faul reported from Dakar, Senegal. Associated Press writer Haruna Umar contributed to this report from Maiduguri, Nigeria.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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___

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http://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...eaders-clash-over-ukraine-in-munich-1.2095944

Cold war chill as leaders clash over Ukraine in Munich
While Merkel has faith in sanctions, others see arms as more persuasive

Mon, Feb 9, 2015, 01:00

It was -3 degrees in Munich over the weekend and, inside the 51st Security Conference, there was an unmistakable cold war chill.

For three days the Bayerischer Hof hotel was a security and diplomatic lockdown as western leaders clashed with Russian counterparts over the way into – and out of – the Ukraine crisis. Delegates arrived in glum agreement over the risks posed by the conflict, and departed after heated disagreements over whether military might or diplomatic skill could save the day.

Angela Merkel looked shattered when she arrived on Saturday morning from Moscow after late-night talks with President Vladimir Putin. The chancellor is known for her caution, never leaping unless she has looked at where she is likely to land. That she still flew to Moscow for a diplomatic push, outcome unknown, was an indication of her key stature in the Ukraine stand-off – and the deteriorating situation.

Merkel told Munich delegates her talks with Putin had only confirmed her conviction that delivering weapons to Ukraine would not help an already fraught situation. While one half of the hall applauded her, the other half went on the attack. After Senator John McCain attacked Merkel’s Moscow mission as “appeasement politics” – an accusation with grave historical overtones in Munich – Senator Lindsey Graham accused her of “abandoning a struggling democracy”.

Former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind chastised Merkel with Frederick the Great’s remark that “diplomacy without weapons is like music without notes”.

Though the tone varied, the question remained the same: what is Berlin’s back-up plan with Moscow if diplomacy doesn’t work? Merkel said her reticence on supplying arms to Kiev was not just informed by elusive engagement with Putin, but by her own background. As someone who grew up in East Germany, she said she understood in hindsight the West’s decision not to intervene militarily in 1961 when East Germany erected the Berlin Wall. “I don’t blame anyone for their realistic assessment at the time that it would not be successful,” she said. “Today I cannot imagine a situation in which improved arming of the Ukrainian army impresses Putin so much that he thinks he will lose.”

Merkel vs US
With that, the German leader staked her political reputation – and legacy – on economic sanctions and diligent diplomacy. Her daring challenge to US interventionist logic may be carefully considered, and placate public opinion at home, but could ramp up tensions with the US and unsettle Berlin’s eastern neighbours.

After talks in Munich with Merkel, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko made no effort to hide his disagreement. To bolster his case for defence assistance, and counter Russian delegates’ denial of Moscow involvement in eastern Ukraine, Poroschenko produced passports and ID cards he said were confiscated from Russian soldiers who claimed to have “lost their way, 100km from the border”. Ukraine had a right to defend itself, he said, and would not use “weapons to kill people but to make our defence more efficient”.

Next to him, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite urged western leaders to use “all means necessary” to support Kiev. Speaking in unison, the Lithuanian and Ukrainian leaders underlined their trust in the German chancellor but said they drew a very different lesson from their formative ostblock years. With an eye on Baltic history and geography, Grybauskaite said betraying Ukraine would be a betrayal of the Baltic region’s self-interest. “After Ukraine,” she said, “we will be next.”

Diplomatic tightrope
The stand-off among western delegates in Munich over Ukraine left US vice-president Joe Biden walking a diplomatic tightrope. Seven years after offering Russia a “reset” of relations in Munich, he called for the West to “reassert” itself with Moscow: accepting no compromise on sovereign borders or the right to self-determination.

“We all invested in a type of Russia we hoped and still hope will emerge one day. Unfortunately Mr Putin has chosen a different path,” he said. Washington would judge the Russian leader by his actions rather than his words, he said, because “too often Mr Putin has promised peace and delivered tanks”.

While praising Merkel’s diplomatic lead in the Ukrainian crisis, Biden echoed Poroshenko, saying: “We believe the Ukrainian people have a right to defend themselves.”

By the end of the conference, Munich descended into a disheartening kaleidoscope of claim and counter-claim.

Biden’s accusation that Moscow had violated international agreements on human rights and self-determination – in particular the 1975 Helsinki agreement – were countered by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. He accused the US and EU of violating the very same agreements. Nato’s push eastward “following the US dream of being the winner of the cold war” had destabilised central Europe, he said, just as western interference, from the Maidan protests on, had violated Ukrainian sovereignty.

“Our western partners issued indulgences and pardoned Kiev forces who started revolutionary efforts,” he said, “dubbing terrorists all citizens who were not in agreement with the anti-constitutional coup d’état”.

The reality gap between Russia and the west was painfully clear when Lavrov claimed Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation was in line with the UN charter, prompting hollow laughter in the hall. Security conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger intervened quickly, saying: “This is no laughing matter.”

Some seven decades after the Yalta conference redrew Europe’s post-war borders, and 25 years after the cold war ended, next Wednesday’s Minsk conference may be the last chance to define what price – or line on the map – can contain the conflict with Russia over Ukraine.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150209/eu--france-gunshots-f6903d2949.html

Gunmen open fire in tense Marseille same day as PM visits

Feb 9, 7:27 AM (ET)
By JAMEY KEATEN

PARIS (AP) — Gunmen exchanged fire in a Marseille housing project known as an open-air drug market on Monday, prompting police to close off the area in a search for the shooters the same day France's prime minister planned to visit the city.

No injuries were immediately reported in the shooting in the Castellane housing project, an area north of the city's old port that is rife with drug violence and gangs.

There were conflicting reports about whether officers had also been targeted by automatic gunfire. David Olivier Reverdy, a police union official, told RTL radio no officers were specifically targeted and no one was wounded.

But Samia Ghali, a senator from the region, told iTele that she spoke with the police director and was told that the gunmen were targeting police and also firing at random.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was due in Marseille, France's second-largest city, to talk about security and education. Reverdy said it was not clear whether there was a link between the shooting on what he described as a "drug corner" and Valls' visit.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

Hummm.....

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http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/the-real-danger-in-nuclear-modernization/

The Real Danger in Nuclear Modernization

The true risks in modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal are misunderstood.

By Adam Mount
February 09, 2015

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Russia and China are modernizing their nuclear arsenals and the U.S. is not. The line is so dramatic and so alarming that commentators have found it useful in justifying all sorts of expansions of U.S. nuclear policy, including more extensive modernization plans, new nuclear weapons, and assertive revisions of nuclear strategy. If these steps are not taken, the most powerful country in the world could find itself subject to coercion, its allies bullied, falling behind its adversaries.

This thinking is mistaken on three counts. First, the United States is modernizing its nuclear forces. Second, the U.S. nuclear triad is markedly superior to the Chinese and Russian arsenals. Most importantly, the real danger to strategic stability may not be the U.S. falling behind the modernization of other countries but in racing aggressively ahead.

The United States has not taken an “acquisition holiday” in its nuclear arsenal, as Maj. Gen. Garret Harencak recently asserted. This thought relies on a misreading of the natural nuclear modernization cycles of the major nuclear powers: While many of Russia’s ageing systems are reaching the ends of their service lives in this decade, many of the systems that make up the U.S. arsenal are not due to retire until the 2020s.

Rather than “sit back and simply maintain our existing aging nuclear forces,” as Congressman Michael Turner charged, the United States is gearing up a comprehensive modernization program that in many ways exceeds the requirements of time and deterrence. In some areas (including the nation’s strategic bombers and its tactical bombs) the plans would replace existing systems before the older ones need to be retired. In others (like intercontinental ballistic missiles) the services are considering significant upgrades to existing systems. Moreover, the U.S. arsenal has been undergoing continual modernization as necessary, including major upgrades to strategic bombers and recent life extensions of the warheads atop ballistic missiles launched from both land and sea.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is a robust, redundant triad. It consists of highly capable platforms at each leg of the triad and relatively few nonstrategic systems. The upcoming modernization plans will build on extensive experience in designing, constructing, and operating sophisticated stealth platforms.

In contrast to the United States, Russian strategic forces are now in the middle of their modernization cycle. Though the Kremlin is modernizing aging systems in each leg of their triad, the Russian arsenal will remain markedly less capable than its American counterpart for the foreseeable future.

Even given extensive modernization, a number of question marks remain. One is the trend toward placing more warheads on each launcher. Intended to counteract the U.S. national missile defense system, the result is a level of vulnerability the United States would never accept in its arsenal because each launcher now presents a more inviting target. Furthermore, Russia is retaining many tactical systems that are strategically useless, including torpedoes, depth charges, and short-range ground-launched missiles that could never reach the United States. Lastly, Russia’s ability to fund its modernization program is dubious, given that oil now stands at half the price required to balance the Russian budget. In this environment, and with other military priorities pressing, it will be a major sacrifice for Putin to push ahead with building the nation’s first stealth bomber.

At sea, Russia is building eight new Borei submarines to make up for weaknesses in the current fleet. For example, Hans Kristensen has found that in 2012 the U.S. submarine fleet conducted 28 lengthy deterrent patrols to points near to its adversaries’ coasts, while Russia sailed on only five patrols in areas near its own coastal regions, barely enough to keep one submarine at sea at any given time. Yet by the time Russia has rolled out its fleet of eight Boreis, the United States expects to be launching the first of its 12 next-generation submarines. While Russia has flirted with abandoning continuous-at-sea deterrence, the United States plans to replicate a very strict requirement for its own larger fleet of submarines.

China

Since becoming a nuclear power, China has consistently demonstrated restraint in its nuclear force structure and American intelligence estimates have consistently overestimated Chinese capabilities. It is only in the last ten years that China has gained a plausible second-strike capability against the continental United States and only in the last two years that it has developed a triad of nuclear delivery systems by commissioning its first functional missile submarines. Far from a threat to U.S. nuclear supremacy, China’s gradual modernization is only now approaching a modern nuclear arsenal.

Overall, the capabilities of Chinese nuclear forces are hardly alarming: the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence says the new Jin-class ballistic missile submarines are easier to detect than 1970s-era Soviet submarines; the newest DF-31A ICBMs may not have the range to strike Washington; and China’s new air-launched cruise missile is to be carried by Xian H-6 bombers, which were derived from 1950s-era Soviet Badgers that Russia retired from service in 1993.

There is little evidence that Russia and China are looking to exceed the American advantage in these areas, or that they could if they wanted to. Instead, many of the modernization programs in these countries are the predictable result of previous American decisions. The new Russian Sarmat heavy ICBM, the shift toward multiple warheads, and the Chinese submarine programs are expected reactions to U.S. deployment of ballistic missile defense systems. Meanwhile, the trend in both countries toward mobile missiles is a response to American conventional superiority and military doctrines that seek to defeat sophisticated defenses and gain access to defended targets. U.S. strategists put these policies in place with full knowledge that they would provoke reactions of this sort. It would be foolish to now attribute sinister motives to expected responses.

Given the stability and sophistication of the U.S. arsenal and the vulnerabilities in Russian and Chinese systems, current plans for aggressive nuclear modernization may cause more problems than they solve.

It is vitally in the American interest that nuclear weapons are never again used in war. The likeliest path to nuclear use in the coming decades is not that an enemy suddenly launches a surprise attack on the continental United States with superior delivery systems. The greater concern is that a crisis could lead Russia or China to feel that they had been backed into a corner by U.S. conventional superiority and that utilizing a nuclear weapon could, in Moscow’s words, “de-escalate” the crisis. Nuclear forces that could provoke this scenario are destabilizing and could inadvertently lead to nuclear use. The most important steps the United States can take to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again are those that support a condition of mutual nuclear deterrence and not those that seek to overcome it.

The United States is in the enviable position of moving second in this round of modernization. The U.S. should use its position of technological and diplomatic strength to ensure strategic stability at the nuclear level, rather than destabilizing the world in a vain search for a useless supremacy.

There has always been an element in American strategic circles that is unwilling to accept the mutual vulnerability that underwrites nuclear deterrence. There will be calls to refuse mutual deterrence with China and to attempt to transcend the condition with Russia as punishment for bad behavior. The United States should resist this urge and instead build nuclear forces that are modest, affordable, and stabilizing. The real danger in U.S. nuclear modernization may not be too little, but too much.

Adam Mount is Postdoctoral Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Housecarl · Feb 9, 2015

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http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/nigeria/articles/20150209.aspx

Nigeria: Boko Haram And The Other Revolution

February 9, 2015: In the last three months Boko Haram has attacked and looted over 200 towns and villages in the northeast. Over half of these places were occupied by the Islamic terrorists for at least a month before they left or were driven out by troops. A new AU (African Union) of 7,500 troops (and 1,200 civilian support staff) from five countries (Benin, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad) is being assembled to chase Boko Haram out of the northeast and find and destroy their camps. Nigeria has already agreed to allow foreign troops (first from Chad and Cameroon) to operate inside Nigeria and this has already made it possible to drive Boko Haram out of dozens of villages they had been occupying in the northeast.

American intelligence agencies believe Boko Haram now has over 4,000 veteran members who supervise several thousand more new recruits and slaves. Captured teenage boys are offered an opportunity to fight, or be executed immediately (or whenever they disobey). The girls are used for sex and work around the camps. The terror, looting and slavery is all justified and encouraged by the Boko Haram interpretation of Islamic scripture. Boko Haram uses the Taliban and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) as models. Current Boko Haram tactics are right out of the ISIL playbook. Thus Boko Haram was responsible for over 10,000 deaths in Nigeria and adjacent countries in 2014. Boko Haram did so much damage because the Nigerian security forces were unable to cope.

The corruption in Nigeria, epic even by African standards, was revealed in 2014 to have wrecked the armed forces. This is not unusual but it alarmed neighboring countries, who have smaller but more effective security forces. This accounts for the better performance of troops from Cameroon, Niger and Chad against Boko Haram. The corruption in Nigeria is so bad that political and military leaders are reluctant to admit it, much less do something about it. This has led to strained relations with the United States, which refused to sell weapons to Nigeria unless some real efforts were carried out to deal with the military corruption and incompetence. The Nigerian generals and senior politicians are still holding out, mainly because many politicians believe the loyalty of corrupt senior officers is essential to keeping politicians safe from increasingly angry Nigerians (who suffer the most from the corruption).

Nothing like some stress to expose fundamental problems in a society. Delaying the elections was seen by many Nigerians as a cynical ploy by corrupt politicians to give them time to figure out how to prevent too many reform-minded candidates from getting elected (despite all the corrupt practices used to rig elections). In short, Boko Haram is not the only revolutionary movement Nigeria’s corrupt leaders have to worry about.

Many Nigerian military commanders are surprised at their inability to cope with Boko Haram. After all the Nigerian military put down a tribal rebellion in the south a decade ago and has carried out successful peacekeeping operations for decades. The difference was the southern rebels were basically gangs of oil thieves and not out to conquer and rule the Niger River Delta (and all the oil fields there) using mass murder and slavery as primary tactics. The peacekeeping operations were generally taking place in countries where the fighting had ended and the peacekeepers were carefully chosen for this duty and rarely stressed as they are now by Boko Haram. This stress extends to the Nigerian Air Force which is, for the first time, facing effective ground fire. Boko Haram doesn’t just get its ideology from other Islamic terrorist groups but also practical advise on how to deal with armed helicopters and low flying bombers (machine-guns, especially larger caliber ones, can be very effective). This has led to several helicopters and jets being lost and forced warplanes to fly higher (and less effectively if bombing) or to not use armed helicopters at all if Boko Haram has organized effective ground fire. Not all Boko Haram groups are doing this, but more are and the air force is scrambling to come up with new tactics to deal with it. Already this has included the use of Chinese UAVs, hastily purchased and armed with Chinese versions of the American Hellfire missile. The air force has to better train the operators of these UAVs if they are to be of any use and at least one if these UAVs has already been lost. The generals are still under pressure to heed the American advice and that may yet happen. But so far it has not.

February 8, 2015: In the north across the border in the Niger town of Diffa, a Boko Haram suicide bomber attacked killing five people. Witnesses said the suicide bomber was a young teenage male. Boko Haram gunmen were still operating outside the town as the Islamic terrorists kept trying to get into the town but were thwarted by soldiers.

February 7, 2015: The Electoral Commission delayed the February 14 presidential election until March 28th (and the state elections to April 11) because of the security crises in the northeast. This was not a popular move to most Nigerians who want to vote the current corrupt and incompetent officials out. .......

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/china-confirms-pakistan-nuclear-projects/

China Confirms Pakistan Nuclear Projects

Top official confirms extent of the growing Sino-Pakistan nuclear link.

By Prashanth Parameswaran
February 10, 2015

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A Chinese official publicly confirmed Monday that Beijing is involved in at least six nuclear power projects in Pakistan and is likely to export more to the country, media reports said.

In a press conference in Beijing, Wang Xiaotao, the vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said China “has assisted in building six nuclear reactors in Pakistan with a total installed capacity of 3.4 million kilowatts.”

Wang, who was unveiling plans for new guidelines for Chinese exports in the nuclear sector, also said that Beijing was keen to provide further exports to countries, which would presumably include Pakistan given previous reports and trends.

The Sino-Pakistan nuclear link has been well-known even though some specifics are often shrouded in secrecy. This is reportedly the first time that a top official has publicly admitted to such a scale of China’s cooperation with Pakistan.

Revelations about the growing Sino-Pakistan nuclear axis comes amid continuing concerns expressed by some that ongoing cooperation is occurring without the sanction of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) which helps supervise the export of global civilian nuclear technology. China is a member of the NSG and existing regulations prohibit members from exporting such technology nations like Pakistan which do not adopt full-scale safeguards.

China declared the first two reactors it already agreed to construct for Pakistan – the Chashma-1 and Chashma 2 – at the time it joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 2004, with the expectation that no new deals would follow. But in 2010, the China National Nuclear Cooperation announced it would export technology for two new reactors, Chashma-3 and Chashma-4 because it argued – rather controversially – that these projects were already grandfathered in under previous agreements rather than being fresh proposals.

News of other deals has since followed, including a November 2013 announcement that China would help build two reactors in Karachi and a January 2014 report about talks on three other reactors, which The Diplomat reported on here. Pakistani officials say this is part of broader plans to produce around 8,800 megawatts of electricity from nuclear power by 2030 and overcome crippling power shortages that plague the nation.

Pakistan has also previously sought to secure an exception within the NSG which would allow it to conduct nuclear commerce freely with suppliers. India had received one with U.S. support in 2008 and New Delhi is now seeking membership in the NSG. Both India and Pakistan are not members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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http://www.voanews.com/content/boko-haram-ruling-by-whim/2636029.html

Boko Haram - Ruling by Whim?

Katarina Hoije
February 10, 2015 12:51 AM
LAGOS—In October, Boko Haram militants seized Mubi, the commercial hub in Nigeria’s northern Adamawa state -- making it the biggest town under the insurgents' control before the Nigerian military re-captured it November. In those few weeks, the militants ruled by whim, conscripted by gunpoint, and imposed harsh punishments.

The head bodyguard for the Emir of Mubi, Abdullahi Umaru, could do nothing but watch as Boko Haram fighters stomped across his boss’ polished floors and manhandled expensive furniture before they settled in the ruler’s private quarters.

They then proceeded to the emir’s private fleet of cars to take their pick.

“They only chose the best cars,” Umaru said.

That was in late October, when Boko Haram seized Mubi, raised their black flag and promptly renamed the town Madinatul Islam -- City of Islam. Taking control of the second largest town in Adamawa state was part of the terrorist group’s quest to establish a caliphate in northern Nigeria.

Soon after, the group banned drinking and smoking and carried out lashings and amputations on people accused of stealing, said Isa Barade, the Emir’s head servant.

“The militants themselves, however, were not very good Muslims,” he said, noting the Boko Haram fighters looted shops and occupied private homes.

Barade said the militants did make a limited effort to win the hearts of the townspeople, occasionally handing out some stolen food and goods.

“They used to tell us to not be afraid. That they were fighting the military, not the population,” he said.

Boko Haram effectively cut the town off from the world. In the market, basic goods like pasta, rice and flour became scarce.

They cut mobile phone service and used satellite phones to run operations.

Some of the residents noticed the fighters observed a clear command structure but lacked discipline.

“It was clear they were local recruits who just joined because the militants paid them,” Umaru said.

The fighters also took children to a nearby field for military and weapons training. For the women of Mubi, life under Boko Haram was especially difficult.

“As a woman you could still move in the streets but you had to make sure to not look at the fighters,” said Sarawu Adamu.

The penalty for looking at a Boko Haram militant was 70 lashes.

“To constantly worry for your husband and children made many women go crazy,” she said.

And then there were the forced marriages.

If the insurgents saw a girl they liked, they would approach the parents offering them between $50 to $100. Girls 15 years and older were considered eligible.

She said the parents had been told by the emir not to resist or fight back, so they would agree to the fighters’ offers and then try to send their daughters away before the marriage could take place.

When the insurgents understood the Nigerian army was coming, they left Mubi in a hurry.

While Mubi has since been liberated, Boko Haram still controls a large territory in the northeast.

The threat they pose has forced a six-week delay in national elections to let a new regional force carry out a military operation to give towns and villages here enough security to vote.

But after years of fighting, thousands killed and about 1 million displaced, many Nigerians are asking: “What difference will a few more weeks make?”

Lilbitsnana · Feb 10, 2015

posted for fair use

9 February 2015 Last updated at 09:12 ET

Cyprus denies 'Russia deal on military bases'

Cyprus has denied Russian media reports that it is ready to lease two military bases to Russia.

"There is no question of Russian air or naval military bases on the soil of Cyprus," said Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides.

Earlier, Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades would make the offer on an official visit to Moscow on 25 February.

Cyprus is in the EU but not in Nato.

The leasing deal would concern an air base near Paphos and a naval base at Limassol, according to Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Russia can already use the bases temporarily.

But Mr Kasoulides dismissed the leasing claim, saying "there has never been any request from Russia about this", the Cyprus News Agency CNA reported.

He said President Anastasiades was referring to "the renewal of a military co-operation agreement with Russia consisting of maintenance of military equipment sold to Cyprus years ago, as well as the purchase of spare parts according to existing contracts".

He added that "as regards the offering of facilities, these are of a purely non-military humanitarian nature, such as the evacuation of Russian civilians from the Middle East if the need arises".

Russian warships can already use the Limassol base for refuelling and the Andreas Papandreou air base for humanitarian missions.
Financial help?

In the eastern Mediterranean the Russian navy can only repair ships currently at a small naval dockyard in Tartus, on Syria's coast, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reports.

In exchange for a deal on bases Cyprus could receive Russian financial help for its still ailing banking sector, which suffered a meltdown in 2013, the paper says.

However, Russia - a major oil and gas exporter - faces financial difficulties itself this year, because of EU sanctions and the slump in oil prices.

Russian businesses began moving billions of dollars to Cyprus in the early 1990s, taking advantage of low tax rates and treating it as a "safe haven". But the 2013 Cyprus bailout imposed losses on Russian investors, as well as others.
Tensions with Turkey

As part of a deal Russia could also help Cyprus by putting pressure on Turkey, Rossiiskaya Gazeta says, as Turkey is opposed to Cypriot offshore oil and gas exploration.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkey invaded the north in response to a military coup on the island which was backed by the Athens government. The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is not internationally recognised.

The idea of leasing bases to Russia would be highly controversial, as Cyprus has to comply with EU sanctions imposed on Russia over Moscow's intervention in eastern Ukraine. Those sanctions include Russian military industries.

Such a move could also raise tensions with the UK, which has two big sovereign military bases in Cyprus - RAF Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

Nato has complained about a surge in the number of Russian military flights in European airspace, seen as an echo of the Cold War.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31293330

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150210/ml-islamic-state-5b575e2b0c.html

Assad: We get messages from US-led coalition battling IS

Feb 10, 2:13 AM (ET)

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's President Bashar Assad says his government has been receiving general messages from the American military about airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group inside Syria but that there is no direct coordination.

In an interview with the BBC aired Tuesday, Assad says the messages are conveyed through third parties, such as Iraq.

"Sometimes they convey message, general message, but there's nothing tactical," he said.

A U.S.-led coalition is conducting airstrikes in Syria as part of an international campaign against Islamic State extremists. They share the skies with Assad's air force, which also targets the militants.

In the interview, Assad denies his forces have used barrel bombs. The government's use of the crude explosive devices, usually dropped by helicopters, has been widely documented by international human rights organizations.

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0215/arabarmies.htm

The Arab armies

By Alan Caruba
web posted February 9, 2015

The ongoing Syrian conflict, the fall of the Yemeni government, the burning of the Jordanian pilot, and other events make one wonder why even those Arab nations with significant military capabilities tend not to use them against a common enemy.

The attacks on ISIS by the Jordanian air force have been a dramatic example of what could be done to eliminate this threat to the entire region if the other military forces would join in a united effort.

This raises the question of why the armies of various Middle Eastern nations do not seem to be engaged in destroying the Islamic State (ISIS). The answer may be found in a casual look at recent history; these armies have not been successful on the field of battle. Most recently what passed for the Iraqi army fled when ISIS took over much of northern Iraq.

Since 1948 the Arab nations that attacked Israel were repeatedly defeated. The Iraq-Iran war conducted by Saddam Hussein finally stalemated after eight years. Later it took the leadership of the U.S. to drive Saddam's Iraq out of Kuwait.

In October 2014, the Business Insider published a useful ranking of Middle Eastern militaries put together by Armin Rosen, Jeremy Bender, and Amanda Macias. Ranked number one should surprise no one. It was Israel which has a $15 billion defense budget, 176,000 active frontline personnel, 680 aircraft, and 3,870 tanks.

Unlike previous administrations dating back to Truman, while the U.S. is technically still an ally of Israel, in reality the Obama administration has demonstrated animosity toward the only democratic nation in the region. Indeed, the U.S. has been engaged in lengthy negotiations with Iran that would ultimately permit it to become a nuclear power. There isn't a single Middle Eastern nation that wants this to occur and it has greatly harmed U.S. relations with them.

Ranked second militarily is the Turkish Armed Forces with an $18.1 billion defense budget, 410,000 active frontline personnel, 3,675 tanks and 989 aircraft. This nation has shifted heavily toward being an Islamist state as opposed to the secular one it had been since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the last century. Its military hasn't been involved in a conflict since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. It is a NATO-allied military but that doesn't mean it will support NATO in a future conflict. It was used against the Kurdish separatist movement in the 1980s, but these days the Kurdish Peshmerga, between 80,000 and 100,000 strong is now ranked as "one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Middle East" and it is likely the Kurds will carve their own nation out of an Iraq which barely exists these days.

Number three among the Middle East militaries is Saudi Arabia with a $56.7 billion defense budget, 233,500 active frontline personnel, 1,095 tanks, and 652 aircraft. It has been closely allied with the U.S. for decades, but the Obama Iranian nuclear negotiations have negatively affected that relationship. One can assume the same from its other allies, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has also provided "substantial assistance" to post-coup Egypt.

The rankings put the United Arab Emirates a #4, Iran at #5, Egypt at #6, Syria at #7, Jordan at #8, Oman at #9, Kuwait at #10, Qatar at #11, Bahrain at #12, Iraq at #13, Lebanon at #14, and Yemen at #15. The Business Insider article noted that "The balance of power in the Middle East is in disarray" and that's putting it mildly.

Debka File, an Israeli news agency, reported on February 5 that "The group of nations U.S. President Barack Obama assembled last September for an air offence against ISIS inroads in Iraq and Syria is fraying."

It deemed the participation of the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Bahrain as "more symbolic than active" noting that Iraq has no air force to speak of and an army in name only while the Saudis "allotted a trifling number of planes to the effort" and Bahrain has no air force at all. The UAE has the biggest and most modern air force and it has reportedly joined with Jordan to attack ISIS strongholds.

Debka reported that the coalition is "adamantly opposed to Obama's policy…and loath to lend their air strength for its support" and that is very good news for ISIS, but not for the rest of the Middle East.

In October, Commentary magazine published an analysis by Ofir Haivry, vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, about the"Shifting Alliances in the Middle East." It began with the observation that "The old Middle Eastern order has collapsed" as "the ongoing Arab uprisings that begin in late 2010 have unseated or threaten to unseat every Muslim government in the region."

Postulating ‘five broad, cross-regional, and loosely ideological confederations", Haivry concluded that "Perhaps our biggest challenge is not a new Middle East, but a new United States in paralysis. Under the Obama administration, America's historic aspiration to shape events in the region has given way to confusion and drift."

It should not come as that much of a surprise that Israel has been developing intelligence and security relations with several Arab nations, including what the Middle East Monitor described as "growing secret cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia." That sounds like very bad news for Iran and very good news for the rest of us. ESR

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center. © Alan Caruba, 2015

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/the-battle-for-libyas-oil/385285/

The Battle for Libya's Oil
On the frontlines of a forgotten war

Frederic Wehrey
Feb 9 2015, 9:08 AM ET
Comments 26

BIN JAWAD/AL-SIDR, Libya—The first artillery rounds landed just as the setting sun threw shadows on this barren stretch of coast. Atop an earthen observation berm, a young fighter in an oversize flak vest peered through a makeshift periscope. Six miles away was the prize: white storage tanks filled with oil.

Over the walkie-talkie came a hurried voice: “Saadun, Saadun, the bird is here, the bird is here!” Saadun was the codename for a portly commander in the Libya Dawn militia and my escort on the frontline when I visited Libya in January. His men—boys, actually—had teased him earlier for struggling to haul his hefty frame up the berm.

The bird was a MiG-21 or MiG-23 fighter-bomber belonging to the rival Dignity forces. An overhead roar gave way to crackling flashes across a cloudless sky—flak from anti-aircraft guns. The MiG dropped its bomb about a mile away. It was the second and final airstrike of the day. Like the other, it did no damage.

* * *

This is the battle for Libya’s two largest oil ports at the towns of al-Sidr and Ras Lanuf. It is but one front of a complex and largely forgotten civil war that, since May of last year, has devastated the country. The fighting has opened deep fissures that regional powers and transnational jihadists like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are exploiting. Over 2,500 people have been killed since last summer. In the grim accounting of the wars in Syria and Iraq, this may seem a paltry figure by comparison. But Libya’s population is three and a half times smaller than Syria’s, and more than five times smaller than Iraq’s. And the war’s persistence is affecting not just Libyans but the security of surrounding African and, increasingly, European nations. “We should have no illusion on the fact that we can stay away from Libya. Libya will not stay away from us,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, said recently.

On one side of the fight are the forces of Operation Dignity gathered around General Khalifa Hifter. Hifter is a former Qaddafi-era officer who defected in the 1980s and returned to the country in 2011. In May, he launched Dignity as a military campaign to root out Islamist militias in the eastern city of Benghazi and exclude Islamists from political power. His allies include disaffected military units, security men from the old regime, prominent eastern tribes, federalists demanding greater autonomy for the east, and militias from Zintan and other western towns.

On the opposing side is the Libya Dawn coalition, born in July as a countermovement to Dignity. It includes ex-jihadists from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, militias from the powerful port of Misrata, and fighters drawn from certain Tripoli neighborhoods, the ethnic Berber population, and some communities in the western mountains and coast. Dawn has forged a tactical alliance with a coalition of Benghazi-based Islamist militias that are battling Hifter’s forces, one of which is the U.S.-designated terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia.

Each side claims its own parliament, prime minister, and army. But the United Nations, the United States, and other world powers only recognize the Dignity-allied government, with its parliament in the eastern city of Tobruk and its cabinet in nearby Bayda. Nearly three and a half years after Libyan rebels and a NATO air campaign overthrew Muammar al-Qaddafi, the cohesive political entity known as Libya doesn’t exist. There is no central government, but rather two competing claims on legitimacy and sovereignty.

The rival factions have all but obliterated Libya’s conduits to the outside world. The nation’s major airports lie in smoking ruins. Merchant ships shun its ports. Most embassies (including America’s) and foreign businesses have ceased their operations in the country. In recent months, the fighting has centered on the nation’s central-bank reserves and oil facilities.

The federalist militias allied with Hifter’s forces currently control the oil-pipeline terminals at al-Sidr and Ras Lanuf. Their commander, Ibrahim Jathran, rose to notoriety in 2013 for seizing the ports to compel the Tripoli-based government to grant easterners more control over oil revenues. Jathran, who was ironically part of the guard force meant to protect those facilities, tried unsuccessfully last year to sell the oil on the black market. After the Dignity-Dawn split, Jathran aligned himself with Hifter and the Tobruk-based parliament.

On December 13, Libya Dawn forces, drawn mostly from Misratan militias, launched “Operation Sunrise” to wrest the terminals from Jathran and his Dignity backers. The fighting shut down the terminals’ operations, cutting Libya’s overall oil production to one-fifth of pre-2011 levels (output was at 325,000 barrels per day in January; last October it was at 900,000). On December 25, a rocket struck a storage tank, igniting an inferno that blotted the sky with thick black smoke and caused the loss of about 1.8 million barrels of oil. The blaze was subdued only after nine days of Herculean firefighting.

As a result of OPEC’s decision not to cut oil supplies, the world market’s reaction to the drop in production has been largely muted—oil prices recently rose 4 percent, in part because of the fighting. But the consequences for Libya’s recovery are serious given the mounting infrastructural damage. These oil facilities are, in effect, Libya’s patrimony, and that patrimony is being squandered by both sides.

Today, the fighting has slowed to a grinding, static form of war whose rhythm is set by howitzer rounds and Grad rockets. Hifter’s forces use aging Russian fighter-bombers during the day and Hind helicopters at night—remnants of Qaddafi's air force. Sometimes they send ships to shell the Misratans’ logistical base in the now-deserted town of Bin Jawad. Occasionally they hit the airport and seaport in Misrata itself. Most of their artillery strikes come in the early morning; the Misratans wait to respond until late afternoon, when the sun is at their back.

In Bin Jawad, the Misratans showed me where Hifter’s planes had bombed a bank, a school, and a mechanical repair shop. At the bank, I saw what appeared to be unexploded cluster munitions, a weapon banned by many countries but not Libya. (Mark Hiznay of Human Rights Watch identified the munition as a Russian-origin PTAB-2.5M air-dropped bomblet, used by Qaddafi’s air force during the 2011 conflict but not observed since.) In the sloping hills outside the town, we visited the ruins of a cemetery where a bomb had churned up eight or nine corpses. The desecration offended my guides deeply; they mentioned it to me more frequently than attacks on the living. “Hifter can’t even let the dead lie in peace,” said one fighter.

During lulls in the fighting, young gunners at anti-aircraft sites rest by their trucks in the shade. They play cards and smoke tobacco from water pipes. At night they gather in makeshift barracks in Bin Jawad, watch Braveheart on Tunisian television, and sometimes drink the Libyan moonshine known as bokha. They sleep four or five to a room and wake to a breakfast of mashed dates and olive oil.

When I arrived at the front, a ceasefire had just been declared to coincide with UN-brokered peace talks. But it collapsed within hours, with both sides blaming the other. The Misratans told me that an artillery strike had killed one of their fighters, a 19-year-old. Saadun radioed to his commander for permission to retaliate, and received it immediately. At a staging area near Bin Jawad, fighters hoisted long Grad rockets into a pipe-organ launcher mounted on a truck, amid long, low-pitched chants of “God is Great.” About two hours later the barrage began, with pounding in the distance and lightning flashes across a darkening skyline.

* * *

The commander of Operation Sunrise is a trim, gray-bearded man name Salah Bayu. Trained as a hydraulic engineer, he speaks fluent English with the measured precision of his trade. Under Qaddafi, he was jailed twice—“for expressing my opinions.” He worked in Misrata’s steel plant and overseas in Italy, Thailand, and China. “I never imagined myself as a military guy,” he told me.

Now he leads a roughly 3,000-strong, mostly-Misratan contingent of the “Third Force” that is garrisoned at Bin Jawad. Many Third Force soldiers wear patches that say Jaysh Libi (Libyan Army) on their camouflage fatigues, but their fighting vehicles—Toyota trucks with heavy-caliber guns in the back—bear the insignias of individual katibas or militia “battalions,” over 90 percent of which hail from Misrata. The notion of a Libyan army—on either side of the conflict—is largely a fiction. What exists instead is a loose constellation of armed groups. Many of the Misratan forces fighting for Libya’s oil are the same units that defended Misrata during its epic siege in 2011—a pivotal battle often described as Libya’s “Stalingrad,” which paved the way for the liberation of Tripoli and the fall of Qaddafi. Bayu himself said he led the city’s eastern defenses.

Today, these battalions have spread out across the western half of this vast country. Third Force militias are fighting against Hifter’s tribal allies from Zintan and Warshafana for control of a strategic airbase. In the southern desert, they’ve deployed to the provincial capital of Sabha, which until recently was racked by ethnic fighting between Tabu, Tuareg, and Arabs. The Misratans maintain that they are keeping the peace. Their base at the foot of the city’s Ottoman fortress and their roving checkpoints, they say, have finally allowed shops to open and hospitals to function. But some locals criticize them as just another occupying force that plays favorites among the tribes, much as Qaddafi did.

In attacking al-Sidr, Bayu said the Third Force is acting under orders from an elected parliament, the Tripoli-based General National Congress, to liberate the country’s oil facilities from eastern separatists. Of course, his rivals don’t recognize this parliament or its order, and the United Nations has repeatedly condemned attacks on oil facilities, including one in early February that left 10 dead. The threat of economic sanctions on Sunrise’s commanders is real: U.S. officials told me they were “considering” such measures, and Bayu hinted that he had already received warnings from the United Nations.

But for Bayu and the Misratans, the stakes are much higher than oil. They are seeking to prevent the return of what they call “the deep state,” led by Hifter and backed by counterrevolutionary regimes in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

For their part, Dignity leaders see the fight as a struggle to safeguard Libya’s oil wealth from a rogue government dominated by radical Islamists and terrorists. Dignity officials have claimed that forces from Ansar al-Sharia, the terrorist group, are fighting beside the Misratans on the frontlines east of Bin Jawad. Sunrise commanders have repeatedly denied the charge, and I found no evidence of the group on my visit to the front.

“We haven’t even started yet,” Saadun, the young frontline commander, told me. In the shadows of an arms depot near Bin Jawad, he showed off the Paladin, a massive, self-propelled howitzer with a range of nearly 20 miles, captured from Qaddafi’s stockpiles during the war. He accused Jathran’s forces of placing artillery in front of storage tanks as a shield, and said the Paladin hadn’t been used yet for fear of striking the tanks and starting another fire. Even worse, Saadun added, was Jathran’s use of Chadian Toubou mercenaries. It was a litany of bluster, half-truths, and recriminations that is typical on both sides.

Meanwhile, Misrata is buckling under the war’s economic damage. During my week in the merchant city last month, business magnates told me of declining profits. Freight trucks, long a source of income for many Misratans, sat idle at the city’s gates; with the entire eastern half of Libya now off-limits, they don’t have many places to go.

If there is any hope out of the impasse, it is in UN-backed dialogue. The key question now is whether those representing Misrata—and indeed the rest of Libya’s factions—have enough clout to make a peace deal stick, given the highly atomized nature of militia authority. Bayu told me that he does not approve of the talks but would “follow orders” whatever their outcome. A hardline faction within Misrata remains committed to fighting. Increasingly, though, the rising threat from the Islamic State may be tipping the scales toward the moderates.

* * *

On a nighttime helicopter flight that I took across the desert from Sabha to Misrata, a hooded young man sat with his head down, sobbing faintly. He was a Third Force fighter en route to the funeral of his brother, also a Third Force member, who had been killed a day earlier by assailants claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic State.

The details were murky. A northbound convoy of Third Force soldiers had apparently been stopped a month prior at a false checkpoint north of Sabha. Seven of the soldiers were kidnapped, and three were later found dead by the road. Those released said the kidnappers had declared that they were from the Islamic State. Some Misratans disputed this claim, instead blaming brigands and ex-regime loyalists from the al-Qaddafa tribe who oppose the Misratans’ presence in the south; others accused Dignity forces.

If the story is confirmed, it would not be the Misratans’ first run-in with the jihadist group. In the past weeks, Misratan fighters have clashed with alleged Islamic State militants in an area known as Jufrah and at the Mabrouk oil field south of Sirte.

“Our next fight will be with Ansar al-Sharia and the Islamic State,” Bayu, the Libya Dawn commander, told me, a week before the Islamic State’s Tripoli branch staged an attack on the Corinthia Hotel in the capital that left nine dead, including one American security contractor.

Such admissions are important because the Misratans in Libya Dawn have long been accused of a dangerous ambivalence or duplicity on the jihadist threat in Libya. Several key figures I spoke with in the city admitted to providing arms and funding to the Benghazi-based Revolutionaries’ Shura Council, which includes Ansar al-Sharia. But they were adamant that they only supported legitimate “revolutionary” militias in the Council like the Libya Shield One and the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies, and not Ansar, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group. Many argued that jihadist militancy ran counter to the city’s business ethos and moderate brand of Islamic piety. They argued that the rising Islamic State threat should be addressed through the rule of law and a unified Libyan government. It is an argument that many U.S. officials are emphasizing in their interactions with both Dignity and Dawn forces.

Back in Bin Jawad, a fighter named Ali sat smoking outside the barracks in a deserted plaza on the morning of my departure. Two days before, I had hitched a ride to the frontline with his convoy, which was ferrying howitzer shells. Now he seemed tired. He had two kids back in Misrata and a father in Jordan undergoing heart surgery. “It’s been four years since the Revolution and we are still fighting,” he observed. “I want to go home.”

Housecarl · Feb 10, 2015

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The ‘Islamic State’ Crisis And US Policy – Analysis
February 10, 2015 CRS Leave a comment

By CRS

By Kenneth Katzman, Christopher M. Blanchard, Carla E. Humud, Rhoda Margesson and Matthew C. Weed*

The Islamic State (IS, aka the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL/ISIS) is a transnational Sunni Islamist insurgent and terrorist group that has expanded its control over areas of northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria since 2013, threatening the security of both countries and drawing increased attention from the international community. The Islamic State has thrived in the disaffected Sunni Muslim-inhabited areas of Iraq and in the remote provinces of Syria torn by the civil war. The Islamic State’s tactics have drawn the ire of the international community, increasing U.S. attention on Iraq’s political problems and on the civil war in Syria.

Although the Islamic State is considered a direct threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East, it is unclear if it currently poses a significant direct threat to U.S. homeland security. In September 2014, then-National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen stated that the group poses “a direct and significant threat to us—and to Iraqi and Syrian civilians—in the region and potentially to us here at home.”1 Olsen said that the group’s “strategic goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate through armed conflict with governments it considers apostate—including Iraq, Syria, and the United States.” Olsen further said that “we have no credible information that ISIL is planning to attack the U.S.,” and highlighted potential threats posed by foreign fighters with Western passports. U.S. officials report that as many as 16,000 foreign fighters from 90 countries have travelled to Syria, including more than 1,000 Europeans, and more than 100 U.S. citizens, with approximately 12 Americans believed to be fighting there as of September 2014.

According to Olsen, U.S. counterterrorism officials “remain mindful of the possibility that an ISIL-sympathizer—perhaps motivated by online propaganda—could conduct a limited, self- directed attack here at home with no warning.” However, Olsen noted that, “In our view, any threat to the U.S. homeland from these types of extremists is likely to be limited in scope and scale.” A CIA spokesperson provided an updated estimate of the IS organization’s size in September 2014, saying the group could muster 20,000 to 31,500 individuals. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 16 that two-thirds of the Islamic State organization’s personnel then remained in Syria.

Statements and media materials released by the Islamic State reflect an uncompromising, exclusionary worldview and a relentless ambition. Statements by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al Adnani feature sectarian calls for violence and identify Shiites, non-Muslims, and unsupportive Sunnis as enemies in the group’s struggle to establish “the Islamic State” and to revive their vision of “the caliphate.”2 The group describes Iraqi Shiites derogatorily as “rejectionists” and “polytheists” and paints the Iraqi government as a puppet of Iran. Similar ire is aimed at Syrian Alawites and the Asad government, although some sources allege that operatives for the Islamic State and its antecedents have benefitted from evolving financial and security arrangements with Damascus that started during the 2003-2011 U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Man claiming to be ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in this screenshot from video.

Al-Baghdadi speaking during Friday prayers at Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul on July 4, 2014.

In July 2012, Al Baghdadi warned U.S. leaders that “the mujahidin have set out to chase the affiliates of your armies that have fled…. You will see them in your own country, God willing. The war with you has just begun.”3 In January 2014, Al Baghdadi threatened the United States directly, saying, “Know, O defender of the Cross, that a proxy war will not help you in the Levant, just as it will not help you in Iraq. Soon, you will be in direct conflict—God permitting— against your will.”4 English language propaganda and recruiting material released by the group in connection with its executions of U.S. citizens James Foley and Stephen Sotloff suggest the group is attempting to portray itself as responding to U.S. aggression, a posture adopted by its predecessors and now rivals in Al Qaeda.
Background

The Islamic State’s ideological and organizational roots lie in the forces built and led by the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq from 2002 through 2006—Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Jihad) and Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers (aka Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I). Following Zarqawi’s death at the hands of U.S. forces in June 2006, AQ-I leaders repackaged the group as a coalition known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). ISI lost its two top leaders in 2010 and was weakened, but not eliminated, by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 2011. Under the leadership of Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al Badri al Samarra’i (aka Abu Bakr al Baghdadi),5 ISI rebuilt its capabilities. By early 2013, the group was conducting dozens of deadly attacks a month inside Iraq. The precise nature of ISI’s relationship to Al Qaeda leaders from 2006 onward is unclear. In 2014, Islamic State leaders stated their view that their group “is not and has never been an offshoot of Al Qaeda,”6 and that, given that they view themselves as a state and a sovereign political entity, they have given leaders of the Al Qaeda organization deference rather than pledges of obedience.

In April 2013, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced his intent to merge his forces in Iraq and Syria with those of the Syria-based Jabhat al Nusra, under the name the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS). Jabhat al Nusra and Al Qaeda leaders rejected the merger, underscoring growing tensions among Sunni extremists in the region.
The Situation in Iraq

Many observers assessed that the Iraqi government was able to contain an IS-led insurrection in Iraq’s Anbar Province that captured the city of Fallujah and parts of the provincial capital of Ramadi in January 2014. Such forecasts were upended on June 10, 2014, when the Islamic State captured the northern city of Mosul amid mass desertions by ISF officers and personnel. According to one expert, about 60 out of 243 Iraqi army combat battalions could not be accounted for.7 The Islamic State offensive was reportedly joined by Sunni tribal fighters, former members of the late Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and military, and other Sunni residents.8 The Sunni support for the offensive, despite reservations among many Sunnis about the Islamic State’s brutal tactics against opponents and its intention to impose its version of Islamic law, appeared to reflect broad Sunni dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki that was then in power.9
Mosul, Iraq. Photo by Sgt. Michael Bracken, Wikipedia Commons.

Mosul, Iraq. Photo by Sgt. Michael Bracken, Wikipedia Commons.

After taking Mosul, the IS-led fighters advanced to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit and other cities, and into Diyala Province, which has roughly equal numbers of Sunnis and Shiites. In the course of the offensive, IS and allied fighters looted banks, freed prisoners, and reportedly captured a substantial amount of U.S.-supplied military equipment, such as HMMWVs (“Humvees”) and artillery equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) targeting systems.10 Islamic State–led fighters captured the city of Tal Afar west of Mosul on June 16 and reached the outskirts of Baqubah, capital of Diyala, about 38 miles northeast of Baghdad, by June 17. In mid-July, IS members in Mosul expelled remaining Christians there from the city.11

Shiite militias mobilized to try to help the government prevent IS forces from reaching Baghdad. The Iraqi capital is reportedly about 80% Shiite-inhabited, and many Shiites there and from elsewhere volunteered for militia service—in part answering a call by Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani—to help the ISF. With support from these militias, the government forces regrouped to some extent and stalled the Islamic State advance on the capital.
Iraq Kurdistan

Iraq Kurdistan

The ISF collapse in the north enabled the peshmerga (Kurdish militia) to capture Kirkuk and large nearby oil fields abandoned by the ISF. The Kurds have long sought to control that oil-rich region, which they claim is historic Kurdish territory, and to affiliate the province with their autonomous region run by a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). On July 11, peshmerga reportedly seized control of two key oil fields near Kirkuk from a state-controlled company. Many experts assert that the Kurds are unlikely to willingly return control of Kirkuk and related areas to the central government.12 The peshmerga gains prompted renewed discussion among KRG leaders about seeking outright independence from Iraq. In early July, KRG President Masoud Barzani asked the KRG parliament to plan a referendum on independence.13 However, Kurdish leaders subsequently stated that the crisis the KRG faces from the Islamic State organization has caused KRG leaders to shelve the independence effort, at least temporarily. KRG leaders probably view the independence issue primarily as leverage in disputes with Baghdad, such as those over KRG oil exports and revenue-sharing.

The indirect benefits to the Kurds of the Islamic State offensive proved illusory when Islamic State–led forces advanced into territory controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and its peshmerga militia fighters in early August. In the face of superior Islamic State firepower, the relatively lightly armed Kurdish forces retreated from several towns inhabited mostly by Christians and other Iraqi minorities, particularly the Yazidis. The Yazidis are mostly Kurdish speaking and practice a mix of ancient religions, including Zoroastrianism, which held sway in Iran before the advent of Islam.14 Fearing Islamic State threats to execute them if they did not convert to Islam, an estimated 35,000–50,000 Yazidis fled to Sinjar Mountain.15 By August 8, Islamic State–led fighters had also advanced to within about 40 miles of the KRG capital of Irbil, causing some flight from the city, and heightening U.S. concern about the security of U.S. diplomatic and military personnel there.

Reports of human rights violations by the Islamic State emerged, including murder, kidnappings, forced conversions, and physical and sexual assault.16 Islamic State–led forces captured Iraq’s largest dam, the Mosul Dam, as well, which Kurdish leaders assert could have been damaged or used by the Islamic State to flood wide areas of northern and central Iraq. Subsequently, U.S. and allied efforts have helped the peshmerga reverse some Islamic State gains, and have helped the ISF limit any major IS advances.

Recent U.S. assessments of the 60-country coalition’s campaign against the Islamic State organization suggest that U.S. officials believe that air strikes and Iraqi and Kurdish ground operations have halted the IS fighters’ momentum and have placed them in a largely defensive posture. According to the Department of Defense, several hundred IS personnel have been killed, and “hundreds and hundreds” of vehicles, artillery positions, and checkpoints have been destroyed.17 Most recently, intense U.S. and coalition airstrikes have facilitated Kurdish peshmerga efforts to retake areas in the northwestern Sinjar region in December and January.
Iraq Government Alterations
Iraq's PM Nouri al-Maliki

Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki

The Islamic State advance also led to changes in Iraq’s leadership. Elections for the Iraqi Council of Representatives (COR) were held on April 30, 2014, beginning the process of forming a new government. By informal agreement, the COR speakership is held by a Sunni Arab; the largely ceremonial presidency is held by a Kurd; and the powerful executive post of Prime Minister is held by a Shiite Arab. Even before the Islamic State’s capture of Mosul, several Iraqi factions and some within Prime Minister Maliki’s core coalition opposed a third Maliki term as Prime Minister, despite the strong electoral performance of his “State of Law” bloc. After the Islamic State capture of Mosul, senior Obama Administration officials publicly blamed Maliki for pursuing sectarian politics that generated Sunni support for the Islamic State, and indicated he needed to be replaced.18
Iraq's Dr. Haider al-Abadi. Picture of politician he posted himself on his Facebook page in order to identify himself, Wikipedia Commons.

Iraq’s Dr. Haider al-Abadi. Picture of politician he posted himself on his Facebook page in order to identify himself, Wikipedia Commons.

In July, the COR selected as COR Speaker Salim al Jabburi (a Sunni), and two deputies, and veteran Kurdish figure Fouad Masoum as Iraq’s President. On August 11, in line with the constitutional responsibilities of the president, Masoum formally asked Haydar al Abbadi, a 62- year old member of Maliki’s Da’wa Party, to become Prime Minister-designate. Al Abbadi’s selection attracted public support from U.S. officials as well as from senior figures in Iran, causing support for Maliki’s initial challenge of the Abbadi designation to collapse. The designation gave him 30 days (until September 10) to form and achieve parliamentary confirmation for a new cabinet. His work program and all but two of his ministerial nominations were approved by the COR on September 8, enabling Abbadi to assume the prime ministership. The two powerful security posts of Interior and Defense Minister were not immediately filled, but Abbadi achieved COR confirmation on October 18 of Mohammad Ghabban, who is linked to a Shiite militia organization (Badr Organization), as Interior Minister. That selection could potentially give many Iraqi Sunnis pause as to whether the Abbadi government will prove less sectarian than that of Maliki. The same day, the COR confirmed Khalid al Ubaydi, a Sunni ex- military officer during Saddam’s rule, as Defense Minister, perhaps partly mitigating the Ghabban nomination.

As part of his outreach to Sunnis, on September 10, 2014, in conjunction with a visit by Secretary of State John Kerry, Abbadi proposed to recruit Sunnis to a new “national guard” force that would protect Sunni-inhabited areas that might be taken back from Islamic State control. In early November, Abbadi visited tribal leaders and other notables in overwhelmingly Sunni-inhabited Anbar Province, much of which has been captured by Islamic State forces.
The Situation in Syria19

Since 2013, Islamic State fighters have used Syria both as a staging ground for attacks in Iraq and as a parallel theater of operations.20 In early 2014, IS fighters reestablished control in most areas of the northern Syrian province of Raqqah and reasserted themselves to the east in Dayr az Zawr, a province rich in oil and gas resources bordering the Anbar region of Iraq. Since late 2013, the Islamic State has controlled several oilfields in Dayr az Zawr and reportedly has drawn revenue from oil sales to the Syrian government. With the proceeds, the group was able to maintain operational independence from Al Qaeda’s leadership and pay competitive salaries to its fighters. The Islamic State derived additional revenue in Syria by imposing taxes on local populations and demanding a percentage of the funds involved in humanitarian and commercial operations in areas under its control.21 Anecdotal reporting suggests that the group relies on brutality and intimidation to manage communities under its control, and in some areas partnerships with local armed groups appear to facilitate IS control.

The Islamic State also has operated north of Dayr az Zawr in Hasakah province, establishing a connection to Iraq’s Nineveh province that it was apparently able to exploit in its eventual advance towards Mosul. At some point, the Islamic State’s wide theater of conflict could subject it to overextension. IS gains may also motivate the Iraqi and Syrian governments to cooperate more closely in seeking to counter the group, potentially altering the dynamics in both conflicts. Strikes on IS forces in the vicinity of the Syria-Turkey border town of Kobane continue, as do coalition strikes against IS personnel, vehicles, and facilities in other areas of northern and eastern Syria. However, as in Iraq, the IS forces largely retain their key strongholds.

With regard to Syria’s broader civil conflict, neither pro-Asad forces nor their opponents appear capable of defeating their adversaries in the short term. However, international intervention to degrade the capabilities of the Islamic State appears to be driving speculation among many parties to the conflict that dramatic changes could soon be possible in the dynamics of what has remained a grinding war of attrition. Some opposition forces seek to cast themselves as potential allies to outsiders who are opposed to both the Islamic State and the Syrian government, while others reject the idea of foreign intervention outright or demand that foreigners focus solely on toppling President Asad. Syrian officials have stated their conditional willingness to serve as partners with the international community in counterterrorism operations in Syria, a position that reflects their presumed desire to create an image and role for the Asad government as a bulwark against Sunni Islamist extremism.
Syria's Bashar al-Assad

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

As discussed in more detail below, current relations among opposition groups in Syria and their varying views on cooperation with the United States create a challenging context for pursuing U.S. objectives. Syrian opposition forces are drawn from a broad ideological spectrum. They migrate in and out of cooperative and antagonistic relationships and pursue a range of goals— short and long term, local, personal, and national. By taking limited military action in Syria for narrowly defined purposes, the Obama Administration appears to be seeking to avoid amplifying internal disputes and rivalries among Syrian groups or creating perceptions that the United States seeks to bolster one group or trend over another. A number of variables shape whether U.S.-led military operations can meet U.S. objectives, and some observers voice strong views for or against the potential expansion of these operations.

One potential practical effect of U.S. operations (particularly strikes on terrorist targets associated with popular, capable Islamist forces) may be that some Syrians grow more polarized in their views about Syria’s future and the role of outside forces in building it. Perceived U.S. allies in Syria may be drawn further into conflict with anti-U.S. groups or feel more pressure to collaborate with them. This may amplify violence in some areas and could weaken the opposition’s overall ability to place coordinated pressure on the Asad government.

Key developments since September 2014 include:

Jabhat al Nusra Targets Rebels. Since late October, the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Jabhat al Nusra has been conducting offensive operations in northwestern Idlib Province against the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) and Harakat Hazm (Steadfastness Movement), two armed opposition groups considered to be elements of the broader Free Syrian Army movement. Both the SRF and Harakat Hazm reportedly have received weaponry from U.S. allies, and Hazm fighters have released video footage showing their use of U.S.-origin anti-tank missile systems since early 2014. The Nusra offensive reportedly has led to the eviction of these groups from their strongholds in central Idlib Province and the defection of some of their fighters.
New Revolutionary Command Council. In late November, more than 70 rebel groups announced the formation of a new Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) to coordinate anti-Asad military operations among its secular and Islamist signatories. The council initiative obtained support from several groups reported to have received U.S. military assistance, as well as from groups like Ahrar al Sham, which the U.S. government has characterized as an extremist group. Members of Ahrar al Sham and other select groups would be prohibited from receiving U.S. assistance authorized under the extended “train and equip” authority in H.R. 3979.
U.S. Strikes on Khorasan Group Targets. On November 5, U.S. military aircraft launched airstrikes against targets belonging to Jabhat al Nusra and the Ahrar al Sham Islamic Movement near the Bab al Hawa border crossing with Turkey. The crossing is reportedly a key conduit for external military assistance to the SRF, Hazm, and other “FSA” groups, in addition to a humanitarian access point. A U.S. CENTCOM press release denied the strikes were related to Nusra attacks on moderate rebels and stressed that the targets were associated with active terrorist plotting by the Khorasan Group, an element of Jabhat al Nusra believed to be dedicated to transnational terrorism.22 Many observers argued that the U.S. strikes would inevitably be seen in the context of Nusra- SRF/FSA infighting, and some predict negative effects on the image of the United States and its supporters in northwestern Syria who see U.S. strikes as targeting powerful anti- Asad forces.
Kobane. The United States and its partners have used extensive airstrikes to defend the Kurdish-populated town of Kobane, Syria (also known as Ayn al Arab). The town has been besieged by IS forces since mid-September. The United States on October 19 ordered the air drop of KRG-supplied weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to Syrian Kurds defending the town, and intense airstrikes since have facilitated Kurdish and allied Syrian Arab operations to retake portions of the town, resulting in the deaths of IS fighters and leaders.23
Rebel Offensive Gains in South. Armed opposition groups have consolidated control in parts of southwestern Quneitra and Daraa Provinces in areas adjacent to the borders with Israel and Jordan. Coordinated opposition operations have seen forces from Jabhat al Nusra, the Islamic Front, and various FSA groups including the SRF capture a number of villages and strategic points. This has placed new pressure on the regime’s control of the Nasib border crossing with Jordan and the M5 highway running from the Jordanian border north to Damascus. Social media footage suggests that U.S.-origin anti-tank missiles have been used in some related battles in the area.
Chemical Weapons. Sigrid Kaag, who has led the OPCW-U.N. joint mission for the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, briefed the U.N. Security Council in a closed door session on November 5.

According to U.N. Security Council head Gary Quinlan, Kaag reported that an OPCW team traveled to Damascus in early November to begin plans for the destruction of 12 chemical weapons facilities, including seven hangers and five underground tunnels.24 The OPCW team in Damascus also intends to draw up plans for the destruction of four CW facilities that were not previously disclosed by the Syrian government, including a ricin production facility, according to Quinlan. The OPCW briefed the Security Council on these sites in October. In addition, allegations remain regarding the use of chlorine gas by government forces. Chlorine is not required to be declared or destroyed under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), although its use in warfare is still prohibited under the Convention.

Some ongoing IS operations in Syria are focused in Dayr az Zawr, as the group fights to consolidate its supply lines to the city of Abu Kamal, a key node along the Syria-Iraq border. Press and social media reports suggest that IS, by mid-July, had seized large sectors of the provincial capital of Dayr az Zawr, although some neighborhoods remain contested by the regime and other rebel groups.25 Following the IS declaration of a caliphate, many local and tribal rebel forces surrendered to the group and withdrew from their positions, further expanding the IS presence in the Dayr az-Zawr countryside.26 Others resisted the Islamic State’s advance, and were crushed. In December, Islamic State forces sought to capture the Syrian military air field at Dayr az Zawr, which many analysts argued could isolate remaining pro-Asad forces in the area and lead to the fall of the province to the group. U.S. efforts to disrupt IS operations near Abu Kamal or Dayr az Zawr could benefit Syrian military forces also operating in the area. Islamic State fighters also remain engaged in operations against Syrian Armed Forces southwest of Raqqah and against a range of armed Syrian opposition groups to the northeast of Aleppo.
Location of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani, in northern Syria near border with Turkey.

Location of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani, in northern Syria near border with Turkey.

Syrian Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units (known as the YPG) continue to clash with IS fighters along the border with Iraq and Turkey.27 In August, YPG forces established security corridors along the Iraqi border, enabling some refugees fleeing IS violence in Iraq to cross into Kurdish-held areas of Syria, according to a Syrian Kurdish aid worker.28 The Islamic State’s siege of the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobane/Ayn al Arab has drawn increasing regional and international attention. More than 150,000 residents of the area have been driven into Turkey by the fighting, and fears that Islamic State forces would massacre the predominantly Kurdish defenders and remaining residents of the town have grown over time. U.S. and coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria since September 23 have largely focused on “degrading the capacity of (the Islamic State) at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself.”

Subsequent U.S. and coalition strikes against IS forces near and inside Kobane have destroyed some IS vehicles and personnel, but have not fully reversed the group’s gains or broken the siege of the town.
U.S. Responses and Options: U.S. Strategy to Combat the Islamic State Organization

At President Obama’s direction, elements of the U.S. government are leading a multilateral coalition that seeks to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State organization by progressively reducing the geographic and political space, manpower, and financial resources available to it.29 The United States and other members of the coalition are undertaking various measures, including direct military action, support for Iraqi and Syrian partner ground forces, intelligence gathering and sharing, and efforts to restrict flows of foreign fighters and disrupt the Islamic State’s finances.30 President Obama and Administration officials have stated their view that the Islamic State’s capabilities, intentions, and potential to support transnational terrorist activities require the United States to act.
Retired General John Allen serves as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, and Brett McGurk, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (Iraq and Iran), serves as General Allen’s deputy senior envoy with the rank of Ambassador. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander General Lloyd Austin is the lead U.S. officer with respect to military operations against the Islamic State and other extremists in Iraq and Syria.

Administration officials have identified areas where they believe progress has been made in implementing U.S. strategy to date,31 but have stated clearly that it may take months, and in some cases years to achieve the full range of U.S. objectives. In October, President Obama said, “We’re still at the early stages. As with any military effort, there will be days of progress and there are going to be periods of setback.”32
Strikes Against IS Targets and U.S. Military Advisory Efforts

U.S. military operations as part of the anti-IS strategy have been termed “Operation Inherent Resolve.” U.S. forces have used combat aircraft, armed unmanned aerial vehicles, and sea- launched cruise missiles to conduct several hundred strikes in Iraq since August 8 and in Syria since September 22 with the support of coalition partners. The stated objectives of U.S. strikes have evolved: The initial focus was on stopping the advance of Islamic State forces and reducing threats to American personnel and religious minorities in northern Iraq; now it is supporting defensive and offensive military operations by Iraqi military and Kurdish forces and weakening the Islamic State organization’s ability to support its operations in Iraq from its bases inside Syria.

Other U.S. strikes have targeted individuals and locations associated with what U.S. officials describe as “the Khorasan Group,” that has reportedly engaged in preparations for transnational terrorist attacks. President Obama has stated that he does not believe the introduction of large- scale U.S. ground forces for combat operations is necessary in order to achieve U.S. objectives. Rather, he has stated that U.S. efforts to reverse Islamic State gains on the ground will pair continued airstrikes with expanded efforts to advise and strengthen local Iraqi and Syrian partner forces. Some U.S. military officials have indicated that they are prepared to recommend the introduction of some ground forces if they believe such forces are required to achieve U.S. objectives.33

Late 2013 and early 2014 were marked by growing Iraqi and U.S. concern about the strength and intentions of the Islamic State in northern and western Iraq. U.S. officials, with the support of Congress, responded to some Iraqi requests for enhanced support and expedited expanded weapons transfers. However, U.S. efforts and involvement did not change fundamentally until the Islamic State captured Mosul from Iraqi forces in June 2014. .......

For rest of report please go to the link. Housecarl

WAR 02-07-2015-to-02-13-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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WAR 02-07-2015-to-02-13-2015_____THEWINDSofWAR