WAR 04-04-2015-to-04-10-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150405/af--mali-attack-220c71163f.html

Mali officials: 1 killed, 3 injured in attack in north

Apr 5, 9:25 AM (ET)
By BABA AHMED

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — One person was killed and three injured on Sunday as unidentified assailants shelled the city of Gao in northern Mali, the country's U.N. peacekeeping mission and a hospital official said.

At least three rockets were fired at around 6 a.m., according to a U.N. statement.

"Preliminary reports indicate that one of them hit a house, killing a woman and injuring two civilians currently being treated at Gao hospital," the statement said.

The superintendent of the city's hospital, Ibrahim Maiga, said a total of three people were injured and "in serious condition."

Residents said they counted about six shells.

The U.N. mission "strongly condemns this terrorist attack on innocent civilians," its statement said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

A U.N. team was dispatched to assist Malian authorities in their investigation and U.N. police stepped up their patrols in the city, the U.N. statement said.

Northern Mali came under control of separatist rebels and then Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaida following a military coup in 2012. A French-led intervention in early 2013 scattered the extremists but did not drive them out entirely. The separatists are still present in Mali's north which remains insecure despite the efforts of U.N. peacekeepers.

An attack last month on a restaurant and bar in the southern capital, Bamako, raised fears that the militants could be extending their reach. The March 7 attack on La Terrasse killed five people including a French citizen and a Belgian national. Al Mourabitoun, or The Sentinels, a northern Mali jihadist group allied with al-Qaida, quickly claimed responsibility.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/opinion/nuclear-fears-in-south-asia.html

The Opinion Pages | Editorial
Nuclear Fears in South Asia

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 6, 2015

The world’s attention has rightly been riveted on negotiations aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program. If and when that deal is made final, America and the other major powers that worked on it — China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — should turn their attention to South Asia, a troubled region with growing nuclear risks of its own.

Pakistan, with the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, is unquestionably the biggest concern, one reinforced by several recent developments. Last week, Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced that he had approved a new deal to purchase eight diesel-electric submarines from China, which could be equipped with nuclear missiles, for an estimated $5 billion. Last month, Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that appears capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to any part of India. And a senior adviser, Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, reaffirmed Pakistan’s determination to continue developing short-range tactical nuclear weapons whose only purpose is use on the battlefield in a war against India.

These investments reflect the Pakistani Army’s continuing obsession with India as the enemy, a rationale that allows the generals to maintain maximum power over the government and demand maximum national resources. Pakistan now has an arsenal of as many as 120 nuclear weapons and is expected to triple that in a decade. An increase of that size makes no sense, especially since India’s nuclear arsenal, estimated at about 110 weapons, is growing more slowly.

The two countries have a troubled history, having fought four wars since independence in 1947, and deep animosities persist. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has made it clear that Pakistan can expect retaliation if Islamic militants carry out a terrorist attack in India, as happened with the 2008 bombing in Mumbai. But the latest major conflict was in 1999, and since then India, a vibrant democracy, has focused on becoming a regional economic and political power.

At the same time, Pakistan has sunk deeper into chaos, threatened by economic collapse, the weakening of political institutions and, most of all, a Taliban insurgency that aims to bring down the state. Advanced military equipment — new submarines, the medium-range Shaheen-III missile with a reported range of up to 1,700 miles, short-range tactical nuclear weapons — are of little use in defending against such threats. The billions of dollars wasted on these systems would be better spent investing in health, education and jobs for Pakistan’s people.

Even more troubling, the Pakistani Army has become increasingly dependent on the nuclear arsenal because Pakistan cannot match the size and sophistication of India’s conventional forces. Pakistan has left open the possibility that it could be the first to use nuclear weapons in a confrontation, even one that began with conventional arms. Adding short-range tactical nuclear weapons that can hit their targets quickly compounds the danger.

Pakistan is hardly alone in its potential to cause regional instability. China, which considers Pakistan a close ally and India a potential threat, is continuing to build up its nuclear arsenal, now estimated at 250 weapons, while all three countries are moving ahead with plans to deploy nuclear weapons at sea in the Indian Ocean.

This is not a situation that can be ignored by the major powers, however preoccupied they may be by the long negotiations with Iran.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-katzman-the-hyundaization-of-the-global-arms-industry-1428271215

Opinion
The ‘Hyundaization’ of the Global Arms Industry
The rapid spread of cheaper but good-enough weaponry poses a serious threat to U.S. military dominance.
By Joe Katzman
April 5, 2015 6:00 p.m. ET
48 COMMENTS

Precision weapons and networked targeting have helped maintain America’s military superiority for decades. But technology marches on. New defense exporters are joining the global game with advanced and well-priced offerings, creating potential threats to the U.S. and its allies, and weakening Western influence. The Pentagon has a plan to cope with these evolving threats, but is it enough?

To understand what’s happening, consider the global automotive industry. South Korea’s Hyundai Motors became a serious global competitor by leveraging the rapid diffusion of technology, an initial edge in cheap labor, and a “good enough” product for value buyers. Their success wasn’t obvious in 2001, but by 2015 the proof was in our parking lots. A similar “Hyundaization” process is under way in the global defense industry.

A few examples: NATO allies Turkey and Poland didn’t buy their latest self-propelled howitzers from the U.S. or even Germany. Instead they turned to Samsung. South Korea’s Daewoo is building Britain’s next naval supply ships, and Korea Aerospace Industries is exporting TA-50 and FA-50 fighter jets to Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines. The F-16 is America’s cheapest fighter; the new Korean, Pakistani and Indian fighters cost about 33%-50% less. If you’d rather pocket a 67% savings, Brazil’s A-29 Super Tucano has become the global standard for counterinsurgency. An urgent order from the United Arab Emirates is likely to see combat in Yemen soon.

The long-term threat involves the spread of precision-strike weapons that can hit what modern surveillance “sees.” In addition to Russian and Chinese exports, Turkey has begun to export new guided weapons, including a stealthy cruise missile. India’s Mach 3 Brahmos antiship missile is available, as are GPS-guided equivalents to Boeing’s JDAM, including the UAE-South-African Al-Tariq or Brazil’s Acauan. Pakistan has already bought Brazil’s MAR-1 radar-killer missiles for its JF-17 fighters. There are other examples.

A model of the Korea Aerospace Industries FA-50 fighter jet at the Baghdad International Fair for Defense and Security, March 7. ENLARGE
A model of the Korea Aerospace Industries FA-50 fighter jet at the Baghdad International Fair for Defense and Security, March 7. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

America’s surveillance-strike capabilities helped defeat Iraq’s military in two wars. Now Western militaries must plan to face evolving versions of the same thing. Western navies and their marine forces, which routinely place themselves within harm’s reach during deployments, expect that these surveillance-strike capabilities will be more common a decade from now.

In addition to challenging the U.S. defense industry, this proliferation of value-priced and “good enough” weapons will challenge Western diplomatic and military relationships in two ways.

First, it’s hard to overstate the value of personal relationships with foreign militaries, which often begin through equipment training and support programs. As we’ve seen in Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere, today’s colonel may be tomorrow’s president.

Second, the flood of choices in the global marketplace will make it harder to withhold advanced weapons from specific regimes, reducing Western leverage throughout the world. In the 1990s it was widely understood that Western opprobrium would have a meaningful impact on one’s military. By the 2020s, that idea will seem quaint.

How is the U.S. responding? With technology. Last November then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled the Pentagon’s “third offset” strategy, designed to develop new technologies as a follow-on to the first two “offsets”—nuclear weapons and precision-guided munitions. The Pentagon plans to shore up its eroding edge by investing in fields like cyberwarfare; advanced computing and big data; robotics and autonomous weapons; advanced manufacturing techniques like 3-D printing; and electromagnetic weapons like railguns and lasers, to boost naval firepower and replace some land-based defensive weapons.

At present, the third offset is merely a statement of intent. The question is whether it would be adequate even if fully executed. Countries whose civilian companies must master big data, for example, can transfer that expertise to their military. Ditto for cyberwarfare, as Iran and North Korea have demonstrated. Passive radars using superfast computing and big data might even compromise today’s stealth technology. Meanwhile, Islamic State is already using lightweight commercial drones, and Peter W. Singer’s recent book “Wired for War” cites 87 countries with military robotics programs.

The West can’t stop Hyundaization, but market barriers like limited investment capital, technological chokepoints, the role of politics in purchasing, and the difficulty of setting up global service networks will slow it down. Nevertheless, Hyundaization is happening, powered by a global tsunami of techno-industrial momentum.

Western governments have a number of policy options to address the numerous military and diplomatic threats Hyundaization presents. But this much is certain: A serious response will have to think beyond technology.

Mr. Katzman is editor emeritus of Defense Industry Daily and the principal at KAT Consulting.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/india-is-developing-a-10000-kilometer-range-icbm/

India Is Capable of Developing a 10,000-Kilometer Range ICBM

India’s 10,000 km range Agni VI ICBM is expected sometime later this decade.

By Ankit Panda
April 06, 2015

0 Shares
13 Comments

When it comes to long-range missiles, India is setting its sights far beyond its recently tested Agni V intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

On Sunday, S.K. Salwan, the chairman of the Armament Research Board at India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), confirmed a subject of long-term speculation — that India is capable of developing an ICBM capable of striking targets beyond the 10,000 km range.

The Agni V, India’s has a range of 5,000 km which allows it cover the entirety of Asia, parts of North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia.

It is currently India’s longest range ICBM that has been successfully tested and is capable of delivering a 1,000 kg payload.

“India has successfully test fired nuclear capable Agni V missile recently which has a range of 5,000 kms. But we are capable of developing ICBM that can hit targets beyond the range of 10,000 kilometers,” Salwan told a conference in Vadodara, Gujarat.

Salwan was referring to the Agni V’s successor, the Agni VI, code-named Surya. According to GlobalSecurity.org, the Indian government has been hesitant to discuss its plans for a long-range ICBM — the first time plans for an ICBM over the 5,000 km range were acknowledged was in a May 2011 DRDO newsletter.

Although much about the Agni VI remains unconfirmed and in the realm of speculation, it is widely expected to be a four-stage ICBM with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) and a maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV) capability.

Many of specifics of the Agni VI, including its range, remain classified. Back in 2013, one DRDO official explicitly told the Business Standard‘s Ajai Shukla that the “extended range” of the Agni VI was a “secret.”

A range of 10,000 km would mean that the Agni VI would be capable of striking the entirety of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Additionally, Alaska and Northern Canada would fall under the missile’s range, but the continental United States and all of South America would remain outside the missile’s range.

The Agni VI will likely undergo flight testing by 2017.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/arms-control-in-asia-back-to-the-future/

Arms Control in Asia: Back to the Future?

Even with nuclear and conventional arms agreements, the tasks of strategy do not go away.

By Christine M. Leah
April 06, 2015
1 Shares
3 Comments

Nuclear reductions and disarmament are not necessarily smart ideas. Even with the successful elimination of nuclear weapons, the tasks of strategy – deterrence, extended deterrence, and arms control – do not go away. Instead, they become even more difficult to manage. This is especially true for conventional arms control which, throughout history, has received very little attention in Asia. That is disturbing, given that Asia is now the center of global strategic gravity. Whilst nuclear disarmament will not happen any time soon (especially given escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia and China), U.S. President Barack Obama’s initial goals of further reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile should force us to think very carefully about the desirability of relying on conventional military balances for deterrence, because a world with significantly fewer nuclear weapons would graphically expose conventional imbalances between states, which in many instances have remained partially hidden in the current nuclear age. It is upon these imbalances that any remaining system of deterrence would increasingly rely.

This is where arms control might be able to contribute: to reduce the probability of war, and to minimize death and destruction if war comes. Article VI of the NPT, for instance, contains a conventional disarmament “obligation.” This raises an important question: To what extent should the nuclear weapon states focus on reducing their nuclear arsenals as a precondition for conventional disarmament? In other words, which comes first? We have tended to think that it would first be a good idea to reduce nuclear weapons before reducing conventional forces. However, the discourse by all the nuclear weapons states except the United States indicates that nuclear weapons are seen as but one component of the overall military balance between states. So we should ask: What are the prospects for conventional arms control agreements in the Asia-Pacific?

Historically, the East Asian region, let alone the wider Asia-Pacific, has been much less interested in arms control than Europe. Indeed, most arms control and disarmament policies (both conventional and nuclear) have been conceived and adopted by non-Asian countries. Both of these factors have been true during the Cold War, and throughout Asia’s military history more generally. We might ask, then, to what extent can we draw lessons from Europe’s history for the region today? (Un)fortunately, Europe’s experience since the late 17th century suggests that whilst arms control may be desirable, and could help alleviate regional tensions, achieving agreement on limitations is fraught with difficulties linked to geography, defense spending, cross-cutting geopolitical interests, alliance dynamics, re-armament capabilities (latency was an issue well before the nuclear age), and the dual nature of evolving military technology.

There are several other issues that plagued negotiations between European states. What kinds of metrics might be used? What categories of weapons should be limited or eliminated? How many of which types? What about their geographic deployment? Should the focus be on the range or destructiveness of a weapons system? Should more attention be given to naval or air power? Or land power? Or the amount of overall defense spending? What should the yardstick of power be? How does each country perceive to be “enough” for strictly national defense? What about the fact that some states face greater internal security problems than others? Some countries may not be as advanced as their neighbors – should they be allowed a “catch-up” period? Could a distinction be made between capabilities intended for sea-denial and sea-control? For instance, submarines were a major point of contention in the 1920s. The British did not like submarines, pointing to the indiscriminate destruction they had wrought in previous naval battles. The French, on the other hand, argued that these were an efficient instrument of defense; Paris and other European capitals argued that they were an effective check on battleship strength. The other French argument was that it was the only weapon that permitted a nation scantily supplied with capital ships to defend itself at sea. The relationship between air and sea power was also hotly debated, particularly after around 1910. With the advent of the airplane, it would now be possible for states to extend the attack range of their warships without first having to be geographically proximate to their target(s) – an extension of firing power that went well beyond torpedoes.

Complementarity

These historical issues highlight the importance of thinking of weapons systems in terms of complementarity – how they fall contribute to an overall military balance. The French emphasized this point at the 1926 Preparatory Commission for the Plenary Conference on Disarmament; whilst the British were focusing on limiting naval capabilities of other states, the French argued that disarmament measures must be fashioned around the concept of security – it was not enough to limit naval capabilities. They affirmed the interdependence of land, naval and aerial capabilities and the need to factor this into the war potential of each country. Even though they might be qualitatively different in terms of destructive capability, nuclear weapons are still part of a broader military equation. We see this time and time again with the proliferation of conventionally-armed cruise and ballistic missiles, which are also a significant enabler of strategic reach and destructive capacity. For instance, before its disintegration, Syria repeatedly stated that it would not agree to a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ) unless Israel renounced its air superiority. For Iran to agree, the U.S. would need to significantly reduce its presence in the region, and Israel would need to limit its offensive capabilities and its aggressive rhetoric. Indeed, Syria’s build-up of Scud-B and Scud-C missiles since 1974 was a direct response to Israel’s conventional superiority and Syria’s growing regional isolation. It was believed that, mated to chemical and biological warheads, some of these could provide a deterrent also to Israel’s use of nuclear weapons against Syrian territory.

Even the Cold War saw significant attempts at non-nuclear arms control, the most important of which was the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. These initiatives were influenced by the nuclear forces of both the U.S. and USSR. Russia recently withdrew from the Treaty and threatened nuclear weapons against Denmark if it decided to host U.S. missile defenses. For Russia, NATO expansion was a means of bypassing the provisions of the Treaty. “In these circumstances, Russia considers it senseless to continue its participation in the meetings of the JCG [Joint Consultative Group]…for political and practical reasons and unreasonably costly from the financial-economic point of view,” the ministry said, citing the head of the Russian Delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control. These developments highlight a crucial issue: the fundamental question of how alliances help or impede arms control efforts.

Alliances were a major factor in the ultimate failure of the League of Nations. The theory was that if one of the great powers pursued an aggressive course of action, the remaining seven could form a united front and oppose it. The British government also expressed concern about this, worrying that the forces available to repel aggression under the Mutual Assistance Treaty would always be subject to agreements, domestic issues, economic considerations, and other constraints. Also, it might take too long for two or more states to agree that they must defend the interests of a third. Indeed, in 1939, Russia signed the Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, and the four totalitarian states became (temporarily) aligned against the three democracies and China, shifting the balance of power and enabling Germany to go to war.

Nuclear and Conventional Power

These issues, in turn, raise additional questions about the relationship between nuclear and conventional military power for arms control. What would the U.S. arsenal look like were it not for Washington’s global alliance commitments? Or if it were a less globally committed military actor and its nuclear policies looked more like those of France and the U.K.? There are, of course, nuances to this question: Could the United States still continue to “extend” deterrence with conventional forces only? Would it want to? In all its history up until the Second World War, the United States was a more or less isolationist power. It is also easy to take for granted just how impressive a feat it was for the United States to establish alliances with countries in Asia, for instance, half a world away. U.S. nuclear capabilities, and their long-range delivery systems, played an important part in that enterprise. Without the bomb, Washington might have had neither the appetite nor the audacity to undertake such vast and significant security commitments.

It’s true that the size and shape of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has always been inherently tied to the defense of its Western European allies, with the Asia-Pacific as a secondary consideration. Relatively recent literature on the subject suggests that it is indeed allies that have always been a major hindrance in U.S.-Russian nuclear arms-control negotiations. Which raises what should be an obvious point: In order to get to lower numbers and eventually zero nuclear weapons, the United States needs to wean its allies off the so-called nuclear umbrella. But would removing the nuclear component of U.S. extended deterrence entail an inverse buildup of conventional forces? Could we see a non-nuclear arms race try to fill a nuclear-shaped gap in the Asia-Pacific? Any buildup of U.S. conventional forces in the region would surely be provocative for challengers (think China) to the current regional order. Already the original “Air-Sea Battle” concept – an attempt at reassuring allies that Washington is serious about their defense – has generated considerable debate in Tokyo, Seoul, and even Canberra.

On the way to formal arms control, then, would great powers be willing to drastically reduce their conventional forces? Previously, U.S. naval forces were not so contentious (at least not the subs) since they had little to do with U.S.-Soviet rivalry (Pacific forces). And there were substantial differences in naval mission priorities. Compared to China’s expansionist tendencies today, the role of the Soviet Navy was primarily to defend coastline, and Moscow did not rely on the seas so much for trade as the United States did. But the focus has shifted, with nuclear strategy and conventional deterrence becoming much more important in the Asia-Pacific. What would happen to Washington’s global alliances, with limited American power projection capabilities? What level of forces would China be satisfied with? What compromises would both sides be willing to make? Would the condition for the Chinese giving up their nuclear weapons be the complete withdrawal of U.S. power projection capabilities from the region? Importantly, all these issues illustrate the fact that proponents of arms control agreements (especially the NPT, the INF, and CFE Treaties) commit the mistake of assuming that the world can remain static, both geopolitically and militarily.

Relative Balance of Power

So the issues of non-nuclear arms control might, in fact, make it even more difficult to assess and navigate the relative balance of power in international politics. Indeed, one of the biggest issues in the realm of conventional arms control is finding any agreed concept of equilibrium. As such, the implications of alliance formations and breakdowns become much more significant. Certainly there was constant debate about what constituted “stability” between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but there were a number of factors that could be applied to evaluating the degree of instability, leading to a nuclear exchange. These included arsenal size, readiness and alertness, MIRV numbers, survivability of forces, and megatonnage. These factors, in turn, would help analysts assess the strength of concepts such as deterrence, pre-emption, second-strike capability, escalation control, and escalation dominance which, in turn, would be used to assess “stability” between NATO and the Soviet Union. With conventional forces, all these concepts are much harder to assess, in large part because the destructive power (and the speed at which it is delivered) of nuclear weapons is lacking. “Strategic stability” might thus be much more difficult to assess in a second conventional age. And so, if anything, arms control may actually worsen the conditions for peace. Besides, as Richard Betts wrote, “there is no evidence that reduction of worldwide totals of arms sales services any of the axiomatic goals of arms control: to save money, reduce the probability of war, or reduce destruction in the event of war… high arms levels are not destabilizing, especially if they are in balance.”

The challenges of strategy, both on the road to nuclear “zero” and in a “disarmed” world, are significant. If one advocates for nuclear disarmament, then the responsible corollary task is to advocate for formal arms control agreements that benefit the greatest possible number of states in the international system; to create an alternative system of strategic stability. However, as my research on the historical record shows, international politics has thus far been incapable of yielding any enduring limitation on conventional military forces. Limitations aside, even the prospect of general and complete disarmament was never taken seriously. Universal disarmament was as unacceptable at the 1907 Hague Peace Conference as it was at the 1899 Conference. Indeed, the issues raised by Global Zero advocates were already being debated in the 1930s, just before Adolf Hitler overran most of Europe. The difference lies in nuclear weapons – weapons which, unique above and beyond all others, have provided a sobering effect in international politics. In a stimulating but hopeful book, Sidney D. Drell and James Goodby use the term “end state” to describe a world with zero nuclear weapons. This is a misleading term: there is no real “end state” – one does not simply extract the bomb from international security issues and hope for the best. Issues of conventional military power will re-emerge with new prominence and increase in danger, especially in the Asia-Pacific where the Asian tigers have not yet figured out how to share a mountain.

Christine M. Leah is a Postdoctoral Associate in Grand Strategy at Yale University. Previously a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow in Nuclear Security at MIT.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...97676c-cc32-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html

Middle East

The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.

CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’| This is part of an occasional series about the militant group Islamic State and its violent collision with the United States and others intent on halting the group’s rapid rise.

By Liz Sly April 4
Comments 1669

SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.


Abu Hamza, a former Islamic State fighter is pictured in Sanliurfa, Turkey, in September 2014. He said that in Syria, local “emirs” are shadowed by an Iraqi deputy who makes the real decisions. (Alice Martins)

In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.

“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”

[The Islamic State is failing at being a state]

The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.

The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shiite-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”

“A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L.* Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.

The U.S. military failed in the early years to recognize the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, “Iraq After America.”

The U.S. military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn’t anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group.

[Islamic State appears to be fraying from within]

“We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqization process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.”

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the U.S. military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before.


Most Islamic State leaders were officers in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq View Graphic 

Shared traits

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.

But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.

Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.

By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking, started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the U.S. invasion.

In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.

The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.

Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalized at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists.

Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor.

It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.

Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups.

Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When U.S. troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation.


U.S. Army Maj. Kathleen Perry watches as Maj. Gen. Tensin Hamid, the police chief for Iraq’s Salahuddin province, signs a document denouncing the Baath Party at the police headquarters in Tikrit in May 2003. (Saurabh Das/AP)

Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military.

Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar.

Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans.

“The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”

He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said.

“I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn’t have joined the Islamic State.

“There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”

The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after U.S. troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces.

But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq.

[The Islamic State’s war against history]

Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern.

Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving foreigners, said Hassan.

Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.

“They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said.

The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled.

“They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.


Scores of hostages, including Westerners, have been killed by the Islamic State since 2014. Here are some of the major incidents where the Islamic State killed the hostages. View Graphic 

Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group.

The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders.

“They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam.

“They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.”

‘They want to run Iraq’

Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not.

“One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.”

Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realize the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.

“You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”

The Islamic State was dumped by al-Qaeda a year ago. Now look at it.

Former Baathist officers who served alongside some of those now fighting with the Islamic State believe it is the other way around. Rather than the Baathists using the jihadists to return to power, it is the jihadists who have exploited the desperation of the disbanded officers, according to a former general who commanded Iraqi troops during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety in Irbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where he now resides.

The ex-Baathists could be lured away, if they were offered alternatives and hope for the future, he said.

“The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” he asked. “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.”

When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, “they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs,” he said.

There are former Baathists with other insurgent groups who might be persuaded to switch sides, said Hassan, citing the example of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, usually referred to by its Arabic acronym JRTN. They welcomed the Islamic State during its sweep through northern Iraq last summer, but the groups have since fallen out.

But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalized, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said.

“Even if you didn’t walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.”

Read more on the Islamic State:

Map: How the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria has surged

The Islamic State was dumped by al-Qaeda a year ago. Now look at it.

Why did victims in Islamic State beheading videos look so calm?

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150406/as--china-labor_movement-900f9764a7.html

Strikes proliferate in China as working class awakens

Apr 6, 2:46 AM (ET)
By DIDI TANG

(AP) In this image taken from APTN video shot on March 26, 2015, Shi Jieying talks from...
Full Image

NANLANG TOWNSHIP, China (AP) — Timid by nature, Shi Jieying took a risk last month and joined fellow workers in a strike at her handbag factory, one of a surging number of such labor protests across China.

Riot police flooded into the factory compound, broke up the strike and hauled away dozens of workers. Terrified by the violence, Shi was hospitalized with heart trouble, but with a feeble voice from her sickbed expressed a newfound boldness.

"We deserve fair compensation," said Shi, 41, who makes $4,700 a year at Cuiheng Handbag Factory in Nanlang, in southern China. Only recently, she had learned she had the right to social security funding and a housing allowance — two of the issues at stake in the strike.

"I didn't think of it as protesting, just defending our rights," she said.

(AP) In this image taken from APTN video shot on March 26, 2015, Shi Jieying talks from...
Full Image

More than three decades after Beijing began allowing market reforms, China's 168 million migrant workers are discovering their labor rights through the spread of social media. They are on the forefront of a labor protest movement that is posing a growing and awkward problem for the ruling Communist Party, wary of any grassroots activism that can threaten its grip on power.

"The party has to think twice before it suppresses the labor movement because it still claims to be a party for the working class," said Wang Jiangsong, a Beijing-based labor scholar.

Feeling exploited by businesses and abandoned by the government, workers are organizing strikes and labor protests at a rate that has doubled each of the past four years to more than 1,300 last year, up from just 185 in 2011, said Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, which gathers information from China's social media.

"What we are seeing is the forming of China's labor movement in a real sense," said Duan Yi, the country's leading labor rights lawyer.

That's prompted crackdowns by authorities, and factory bosses have fired strike organizers. Although authorities have long ignored labor law violations by companies, activists say authorities now dispatch police — and dogs, in at least one case — to factories to restore order or even restart production. They have also detained leading activists and harassed organizations that help workers.

(AP) In this March 26, 2015 photo, one of workers shows bruises which she says were...
Full Image

China's labor law, which went into effect in 1995, stipulates the right to a decent wage, rest periods, no excessive overtime and the right of group negotiation.

Workers are allowed to strike, but only under the government-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions — which critics say is essentially an arm of the government that has failed to stand up for workers.

Workers who organize on their own can be arrested, not for striking but on charges such as disrupting traffic, business or social order. In Shenzhen, worker representative Wu Guijun was charged with gathering crowds to disrupt traffic, but was released with no conviction after a year in detention.

Migrant factory workers are perhaps the vanguard of this movement, but labor activism is slowly spreading among a working class that, all told, forms more than half of China's 1.4 billion.

"The working class has not yet fully woken up," said Qi Jianguang, 27, who was sacked from his job at a golfing equipment company in Shenzhen for leading a strike last summer. Lack of effective organization is another challenge. But he said that a common appeal for equitable and dignified treatment is serving to unite the laboring classes.

(AP) In this March 26, 2015 photo, workers walk past idle machinery as they strike at the...
Full Image

Deep suspicion of labor activism among authorities is rising. In February, the ACFTU's party chief, Li Yufu, warned that hostile foreign forces were using illegal rights groups and activists to compete for the hearts of the workers, sabotaging the unity of the working class and of the state-sanctioned union.

Zhang Zhiru, who runs a small labor group helping workers defend their rights, has been repeatedly harassed by police. He said the government will continue thwarting efforts at labor organizations because it considers them "making trouble."

But he remained optimistic.

"The social development and the increasing awareness of workers about their need to protect their rights will push the society forward," he said.

In March, workers returning from the Chinese New Year break to the thousands of factories in the Pearl River delta region near Hong Kong staged three dozen strikes at companies such as Stella Footwear, Meidi Electronics and Hisense Electronics.

Some fight for mandated severance pay, some for back social security payments and some for equal pay for out-of-town workers who typically earn less than local city residents. All of these actions have been on factory grounds because workers have grown impatient with government mediation rooms or courts.

"In many cases, lawsuits cannot ensure that workers' rights are protected, so the workers now are turning to collective negotiations or even organizing into a group to gain more, and to save time," Duan said.

While many labor activists have been harassed and detained, few have been convicted. In the only known case of workers involved in organized actions being criminally punished in recent years, Meng Han and 11 other security guards at a state hospital in Guangzhou were convicted in April 2014 of gathering crowds to disrupt social order after they staged a strike to demand equal pay and equal social security for local and out-of-town workers.

In the Pearl River Delta town of Nanlang, the handbag factory where Shi worked is one of many lining the main drag that leads to a group of parks honoring the town's most famous son, Sun Yat-sen, and the 1911 revolution he led to build a republic in China.

Earlier this year, the 280 or so workers, mostly women, went on strike to demand a still-unpaid but promised bonus of about $150 for last year. They ended the strike when factory management shelled out the money.

But in early March, the bosses announced fewer overtime hours and fewer workdays due to the global economic slump, and yanked a $5 bonus given to every female worker on March 8, International Women's Day.

The workers went on strike again, demanding back payments into social security funds, housing allowances and — believing the factory was on its last legs — the right to a severance package if they quit.

This time, the management did not budge.

Inside the town's government building, a Japanese man who identified himself as the factory's former general manager but declined to give his name said through an interpreter that the company had no choice but to cut hours when it failed to receive enough orders. He said workers kept making new demands, and that the factory had to call in police after surveillance cameras showed workers engaged in sabotage.

A Nanlang government statement said it dispatched a team March 24 to persuade the workers to return to work, but that some of them were flattening tires, destroying a surveillance camera, displaying banners and preventing other workers from returning to the workplace. Four workers were detained.

Workers said they were holding a peaceful rally when police attacked them.

"They were pulling our hair, smashing cell phones so we could not take photos," said a worker who gave only her family name, Cao. She was later taken to a police station, where she said she was handcuffed, deprived of sleep and food, and was lectured on her wrong behavior before being freed the next morning.

"I told them we are defending our own rights," Cao said. She and 10 other workers were fired.

Shi, who had been hospitalized after the police raid, said the incident eroded her trust in authorities.

"We were hoping the government would be on our side," she said, "but how could we have ever imagined that we would see the police pour in instead."

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-07/french-special-forces-rescue-dutch-hostage-in-mali/6373964

Dutch hostage rescued: French special forces find Sjaak Rijke during raid against Al Qaeda-linked militants in Mali
By Europe correspondent Barbara Miller, wires

Updated about 6 hours ago
Dutch hostage Sjaak Rijke after his release in Mali
Photo: Sjaak Rijke was kidnapped by Al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists in Timbuktu in November 2011. (AFP: ECPAD)
Related Story: More than 700,000 rally across France after deadly terror attacks
Related Story: French workers kidnapped in Mali desert
Map: Mali

French special forces have freed a Dutch hostage who had been held by an Al Qaeda-linked group in Mali for more than three years.

France's defence ministry said soldiers found Sjaak Rijke, 54, as they carried out a raid on suspected Islamist militants near Tessalit in north-east Mali.

The Dutch train driver was kidnapped from a hotel while on holiday with his wife in Timbuktu in November 2011.

Mr Rijke appeared in a video last year marking 1,000 days in captivity, saying he was suffering from serious back problems and was not well emotionally.

Following his release, Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders said Mr Rijke was in good condition and receiving medical treatment.

Residents in his home town of Woerden flew the Dutch flag to mark his release.

"The Netherlands has continuously worked in recent years to bring this hostage-taking to an end," a government statement said.

"This is fantastic news for Sjaak and his family."

French president Francois Hollande said soldiers were not aware of the hostage's location before the military operation.

"It was a surprise for us, for our forces, to be able to free this hostage as we did not have any information on the presence of this hostage," Mr Hollande said.

"Our battle against terrorism in Mali is not over."
Jihadists killed, captured in gunbattle

Lieutenant Colonel Michel Sabatier, a spokesman for Operation Barkhane, said French forces killed two militants and captured two others in the raid on the Islamist group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
YouTube: Sjaak Rijke appears in video posted by Al Qaeda

In November, the group issued a video of Mr Rijke along with French national Serge Lazarevic, in which they asked for help from their leaders.

Mr Lazarevic, held captive in the Sahara for three years, was released the following month in exchange for four Islamist militants with ties to Al Qaeda in north Africa.

France intervened against Al Qaeda-linked militants in its former colony of Mali in January 2013.

It has since created Operation Barkhane, a 3,000-strong force to track down Islamist militants across five countries from Chad to Mauritania.

Dutch troops have been deployed in Mali as part of security and peacekeeping missions under the aegis of the United Nations.

ABC/Reuters

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://blogs.economictimes.indiatim...-korea-openly-brandishes-its-nuclear-weapons/

Pakistan does a North Korea, openly brandishes its nuclear weapons
April 7, 2015, 6:29 am IST Seema Sirohi in Letter from Washington | World | ET
Comments 14

At the recent Carnegie Conference on Nuclear Policy, Pakistan openly brandished its nuclear weapons, advertised its bellicose intentions and generally sounded more like North Korea than a maturing nuclear power.

The full-throated cry of frustration had a purpose—to put hurdles in the way of India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) because it would be yet another sign that the international community accepts India’s nuclear programme for special treatment but not Pakistan’s.

Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who has overseen Pakistan’s nuclear programme for more than 15 years and is still involved as an adviser, was in full flow, spinning scenarios and issuing warnings to India from what is arguably the most prestigious international platform on matters nuclear. You have the eyes and the ears of hundreds of western experts, government officials and budding scholars. In short, it is the best place, especially for countries with a highly questionable nuclear past, to muddy the waters and raise straw men. And he did both.

Kidwai faced no push back from the moderator as he built his case on what was essentially fiction. He said “Cold Start” was the reason for a Pakistan gone wild and for piling up an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs). Pakistan has also developed “full-spectrum deterrence” and is working towards a second-strike capability to counter India, he helpfully informed the audience.

Frankly, he should have been stopped in his tracks because “Cold Start” is not Indian policy. The political leadership never embraced it and the last one heard the Indian armed forces were firmly under the command of the elected government. Cold Start was an “idea” of a quick and limited conventional strike against Pakistan with the narrow aim to deny Islamabad the ability to raise things to a nuclear level. Indian generals, frustrated after the army’s mobilisation on the border in response to the ISI-supported Lashkar-e-Taiba’s attack on the Indian Parliament in 2002, had floated the idea but it was never adopted.

A principal recommendation of Cold Start was to move the Indian Army closer to the border. This never happened. The fact is whatever India does or doesn’t do, the Pakistani army will conjure up clouds of paranoia to justify its strategy. It is this imagination that is behind Pakistan’s rush to build TNWs. Tactical nukes are deemed highly destabilising because they are small and to be effective on the battlefield, they must be distributed to lower-level officers. The more diffused the command and control, the more likelihood of mistakes and escalation in the fog of war. The mechanics of deploying TNWs are tricky at best but Kidwai dismissed questions on command and control as “lesser issues.” Then he added Pakistan’s nuclear policy is one of “ambiguity.”

The nuclear gurus must ponder if “ambiguity” gives them confidence or bolsters “transparency” or marks an improvement from the days of AQ Khan when Pakistan was found proliferating nuclear technology from Libya to Iran.

Yet, Kidwai kept up the charade that Pakistan is the victim. In fact, he argued his TNWs had made “war less likely” because they would make India “think twice, ten times” before attacking Pakistan. If India still doesn’t get scared, “MAD (mutually assured destruction) will come into play.” He boastfully told India to keep in mind Pakistan’s “complete inventory.”

If it weren’t the Carnegie nuclear conference, one might be forgiven for thinking Kidwai was doing what today’s teenagers call “drama.” The climax of the drama: You gave India a nuclear deal but now don’t allow India to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group — the anticipated next step stemming from the 2008 Indo-US agreement— or Pakistan will go madder.

Blackmail? It sure sounded like it. Kidwai wants India’s entry into the NSG to be “criteria-based” because that would allow Pakistan to enter at some later date if it meets those criteria. It shouldn’t be a special favour for India. This demand is nothing but a giant ruse.

It is designed to tickle and press into service the same non-proliferation hardliners in the United States and Europe who initially opposed the India-US nuclear deal. They still have grievances against India and putting hurdles in India’s path to NSG membership has their attention.

But let’s go along and see how a “criteria-based” approach might develop. Here are some questions: Keeping in mind Pakistan’s record of proliferating nuclear technology to the likes to North Korea just a decade ago, what should be the period of punishment? Or should bad behaviour be incentivised?

Is outwards proliferation the same as inwards proliferation? Is bravado as displayed by Kidwai the same as transparency? Western observers tend to confuse braggadocio with facts without a shred of verification. Do statements like Kidwai’s help build strategic stability?

How about a criterion that no one with a jihadist mindset should ever get close to nuclear weapons? How can this ever be ascertained? Sorry, but Kidwai’s word is no good after insider attacks on Pakistan’s naval base and army headquarters. US experts are well aware of the penetration of Pakistan’s armed forces.

Another criterion could be determining the “motive” to enter the NSG. Is it prestige and parity as in Pakistan’s case or accessing technology as in India’s case? How about a criterion on the end-game: the country in question must give up revisionist tendencies.

And while the experts are at it, they can also examine the dangers of a country conducting terrorist attacks under a nuclear umbrella. That should certainly mean “No Admission” or shouldn’t it?

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/193702#.VSNjrvB5spo

What Might a Middle East Nuclear Arms Race Look Like?
Nuclear brinkmanship in the Middle East would not necessarily resemble past nuclear rivalries around the world.

By Gedalyah Reback
First Publish: 4/6/2015, 3:29 PM

Saudi Arabia is on the march. Within days of a framework agreement between Iran and the United States, the Saudis launched Operation Decisive Force in Yemen to ostensibly roll back Iranian influence in the region.

It also possible that the Saudis think they have a time limit to make moves against Iran before Iran actually gets the bomb. After that, the Saudis might need to be much more cautious going to war with Iran's allies or with Iran itself. There is another worry as well - that the Saudi alliance with the United States might also be eclipsed by a new relationship between Tehran and Washington.

“I think Saudi Arabia is obviously, tremendously worried about the nuclear deal,” says Emily Landau of the Institute for National Security Studies. “But what worries them about it the most isn’t the nuclear capacity of Iran but the bilateral arrangements between Iran and the United States that might have broader implications on the overall strategic situation that would end up coming at their expense.”

What Landau is referring to is the increasingly discussed idea that the United States is shifting to an alliance with Iran. While it is hard to say how seriously experts are taking the notion that this would happen, what matters is more that the Saudis see some degree of probability in the move. Israel is also likely weighing if this is in the background of the United States’ thinking, but for the time being Israel is not as afraid of such a development as much as Saudi Arabia.

“It is not nuclear capability per se that worries Saudi Arabia but the context the agreement, of a possibly changing Iranian-US relationship that is tremendously disconcerting for Saudi Arabia. It also has serious implications for Saudi hegemony in the Persian Gulf in how it could change regional dynamics.”

Landau emphasizes that despite the literature that has been written about nuclear brinksmanship and strategic responses to developing nuclear power, very little can be predicted with a degree of certainty. The United States and Soviet Union danced around each other for decades, with both sides "prevailing" in a way since neither employed nuclear weapons against the other, nor against each other’s allies, throughout the years of the Cold War. But that dynamic is very different from analyzing how two regional rivals, particularly neighbors, might compete with each other or what might lead the two sides to the brink.

“We don’t know yet. The problem in assessing the strategic relationship (between the Saudis and the Iranians) is that we have relatively few cases to examine and compare it to. For experts, there aren’t too many cases on which to base our projections in terms of future developments.”

Other cases involve the rivalry between India and Pakistan, but Landau dismisses the possibility that that rivalry might hold definitive answers for the Middle East; particularly considering the possibility other regional powers could also develop their own nuclear weapons. In addition to the presumed possibility of Iran and Saudi Arabia racing each other to the bomb, Israel is already assumed to have an arsenal, Egypt is a military power that has begun its own nuclear energy program, and Turkey has the financial means to launch its own program.

Most people assume that Saudi Arabia can move toward a nuclear weapon relatively quickly,” says Landau, whether via its own development program or "buying" a bomb from Pakistan. On the possibility that five Middle Eastern states could either have or be near having their own nuclear weapons all at the same time, she says there are more questions than answers on how that would change regional dynamics.

“Will they have a mutual deterrent relationship? What will it involve? How will it evolve?

“A lot here is not known – a lot of people knowledgeable about nuclear issues are having a hard time predicting what will happen.”

Beyond just the nature of the rivalries, specific countries have their own internal dynamics that could determine different paths to the bomb, then subsequently the sort of strategy they project toward the world once they actually have that bomb.

“It depends on how specific states will formulate the rules of the game under the threat of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. No one can promise it will be stable or necessarily cause additional proliferation.”

That lack of certainty of what smaller states would do with their weapons - states with much more deeply-seeded rivalries based on battles over shared resources or land than the Americans and the Soviets had between each other over global influence or hegemony - is precisely what frightened political leaders in the early 1960s to push for a global arms control agreement to prevent nuclear proliferation, says Landau.

“It was the main reason for the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1960s. There was a tremendous concern about these states being a source of nuclear instability in the world.”

At the time, there might have been more concern over superpower allies like Turkey or Cuba, which were at the center of 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. If such states had their own weapons, would they feel the sense of responsibility that superpowers do, who have interests around the world?

“Again, different states have gone nuclear for different reasons and that has an impact on how relationships (or rivalries) between nuclear states develop. All these things factor into how things will develop. Maybe Iran will be an ambiguous nuclear state like Israel is.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/193701#.VSNkLPB5spo

Nightmare Scenario: How Would Israel Combat a Nuclear Iran?
Israel will look to the US for security guarantees in response to an Iranian nuke, but how would it defend against strengthened proxies?

By Gedalyah Reback
First Publish: 4/6/2015, 12:38 PM

Political science has analyzed the topic of nuclear proliferation since the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949. After decades of watching the apparent chess game of nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, world leaders were met with alarm in the 1970s when both India and Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons.

It is far less acquainted with what even smaller countries would do with those sorts of weapons in a much more tight-knit, yet complex web of regional rivalries. If Iran gets the bomb, the Saudis, Egyptians and Turks might all follow. But what of Israel?

Most experts assume Israel has nuclear weapons under Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, leading rivals on to the idea Israel might have a nuclear arsenal as an insurance policy. It is telling that since most experts believe Israel has had a weapon for about 50 years, efforts to obtain such a weapon by enemy states have been extremely limited, due to an understanding perhaps that Israel's nuclear weapons are purely defensive. Iraq’s efforts went from fission to fizzle in 1981’s Israeli attack against the Osirak nuclear reactor, and there was the 2007 bombing of an alleged Syrian nuclear research site.

When it comes to Israel’s most immediate concern, Iran, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would suddenly have a “nuclear umbrella.” That is to say, fighting those groups increases the chance Iran might employ its nuclear weapons against Israel in a war.

“There’s a question about non-state actors like Hezbollah or Hamas. As soon as Iran has a bomb, you have to treat these groups differently,” says Emily Landau of the Institute for National Security Studies.

“The very fact Iran would be a nuclear state would give those proxies a different status.”

It is one thing to consider the possibility that Israel courts nuclear annihilation by going to war with a proxy force like Hamas or Hezbollah. But it is entirely another to think those groups themselves might acquire nuclear technology from the Iranians. It would go against the tendency in history for nuclear states to maintain full responsibility over their weapons in order not to allow smaller state (or non-state) actors to make independent and possibly irresponsible decisions about employing such weapons. There is another reason that Landau highlights that would keep Iran from handing nuclear capabilities to allies in the Palestinian territories or Lebanon.

“I’m less concerned that Iran would purposely transfer nukes to one of those proxies," says Landau. "There is a very low chance of those things happening because nuclear powers tend not to share their weapons because they don't know if those things might come back to be threats against them themselves down the line.”

When asked by Arutz Sheva if talk of possibly using nuclear weapons might be futile because history has shown they have not been deployed since the original bombings in Japan in World War II, Landau is not confident that the lessons of nuclear rivalries the world has seen so far would necessarily apply to how Israel should weigh its strategic needs or options.

“There is a norm against using nuclear weapons because of the way states have interacted. They’ve become seen as weapons of nonuse. It might take years, but things can develop.”

“The accidental use or the prospect of mis-escalation are things that no one wants to happen.”

When asked if another concern was deployment of smaller weapons that could be more easily managed by paramilitary terrorist organizations, Landau pondered the possibility.

“There are tactical nuclear weapons of different sizes. The real question is if they would be used? Conventional weapons could also be more destructive.”

As former Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University Loren Thomspon wrote in Forbes last year, “Strategic nuclear weapons like intercontinental ballistic missiles are tightly controlled by senior military leaders in Russia and America, making their unauthorized or accidental use nearly impossible. That is less the case with nonstrategic nuclear weapons, which at some point in the course of an escalatory process need to be released to the control of local commanders if they are to have military utility.”

Command breakdown, or lack of discipline in the chain of command, is a real possibility that frightens Middle East observers. Consider the fickle organization of militias in Syria, where allegiance could shift suddenly and competent commanders killed to make way for those with far less experience. If a group that has less depth in man power and officers like Hezbollah were to lose several experienced officers during a conflict while controlling a tactical nuke, someone less familiar with the consequences may make the decision to use it.

Landau believes that Israel’s strategy will likely not be based on matching the alliances anchored by Iran or Saudi Arabia. There are no natural allies for Israel in the region in order to make that happen. Instead, Landau sees Israel falling back on what it has done in the past, “getting certain security guarantees from the United States or rethinking its nuclear policy” regarding disclosure.

In 2003, a group of academics presented then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government with the conclusions of the Daniel Project. That strategic assessment imagined a scenario where another state – specifically Iran – acquired nukes. Instead of continuing nuclear ambiguity, the report suggests that Israel would need to shift its policy:

“Israel should continue with present policy of ambiguity regarding its own nuclear status. This would help to prevent any legitimization of WMD in the Middle East. It is possible, however, that in the future Israel would be well-advised to proceed beyond nuclear ambiguity to certain limited forms of disclosure. This would be the case only if enemy (state and/or non-state) nuclearization had not been prevented.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://news.yahoo.com/boko-haram-disguised-preachers-kill-least-24-nigeria-162212642.html

Boko Haram disguised as preachers kill at least 24 in Nigeria
Reuters
13 hours ago

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria - Islamist Boko Haram militants disguised as preachers killed at least 24 people and wounded several others in an attack near a mosque in northeast Nigeria's Borno state, a military source and witness said on Monday.

The attackers arrived in cars late on Sunday and gathered people at a mosque in the remote village of Kwajafa, pretending to preach Islam. They then opened fire on them, witness Simeon Buba said.

The group's six-year insurgency, and President Goodluck Jonathan's failure to end it or protect civilians, were factors in the victory of opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari in last week's election.

The group fighting for an Islamic state has killed thousands and kidnapped hundreds, although a military operation against them by Nigeria and neighbors Chad, Cameroon and Niger in the past two months has wrested back much of the territory it controlled.

"People didn't know the Boko Haram men came for attack because they lied to our people that they came for preaching," said Buba in a telephone conversation.

"They opened fire on them and killed many people," he said, adding that houses were set on fire.

Some people were being treated for gunshot wounds and burns at a hospital in the Borno state town of Biu on Monday, a source there said.

(Reporting by Lanre Ola; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Tim Cocks and Tom Heneghan)

View Comments (183)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://news.yahoo.com/us-philippines-set-hold-expanded-war-games-182042764.html

US, Philippines set to hold expanded war games
AFP
12 hours ago

The United States and the Philippines will double the size of their annual war games this month, with some exercises to be staged close to a South China Sea flashpoint, the Filipino military said Monday.

The 10-day exercises between the long-time allies will be held as fears grow in the Philippines that China is seeking to take control of the strategically vital and resource-rich sea.

Nearly 12,000 soldiers will be involved in this year's edition in several locations in the Philippines, including a naval station directly facing the disputed waters, military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Harold Cabunoc said.

That number, which includes 6,600 American troops, compares with a total of 5,500 soldiers who participated in last year's Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) exercises, Cabunoc said.

He emphasised the expanded war games highlighted the deepening military alliance between the Philippines and its former colonial ruler.

"The higher strength of Balikatan 2015 for this year only reflects the Philippines' and the United States' growing commitment to enhance our capability to conduct joint military and non-military activities," Cabunoc told AFP.

He said the decision to expand the numbers involved in the games was not directed at China, which claims nearly all of the South China Sea, even waters and reefs close to Southeast Asian nations and far from its nearest major landmass.

However, part of the exercises will be held from Zambales naval base, which is located 220 kilometres (137 miles) east of Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

The shoal is a rich fishing ground within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone but has been controlled by China since 2012.

The Balikatan exercises, which start on April 20, will also be held on the central island of Panay, Palawan in the southwest and a former American airbase north of Manila.

Cabunoc said the exercises involved maritime security and disaster response drills, as well as civic projects.

Spokespeople for the US and Chinese embassies in Manila were unavailable for comment on Monday.

The Philippines has repeatedly protested at China's increasingly assertive actions in the South China Sea and has sought closer military ties with the United States in an effort to counter it.

The US and Philippines signed an agreement last year that will allow a larger American military presence in the Philippines.

However it has not yet been implemented, as the Supreme Court is hearing challenges to it from anti-US groups.

Aside from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have competing claims to parts of the South China Sea.

View Comments (69)

Related Stories

China state media tells US to stop 'kibitzing' AFP
Indonesian president says China's main claim in South China Sea has no legal basis Reuters
Japan to expand SE Asia security ties with Indonesia pact Reuters
[$$] As China Expands Its Navy, the U.S. Grows Wary The Wall Street Journal
No legal basis in China's nine-dotted line South China Sea claim: Indonesia adviser Reuters

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/0...-europeans-take-up-military-training-against/

Eastern European civilians undergo military training amid Russia threat

Published April 06, 2015
Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland – NATO aircraft scream across eastern European skies and American armored vehicles rumble near the border with Russia on a mission to reassure citizens that they're safe from Russian aggression.

But these days, ordinary people aren't taking any chances.

In Poland, doctors, shopkeepers, lawmakers and others are heeding a call to receive military training in case of an invasion. Neighboring Lithuania is restoring the draft and teaching citizens what to do in case of war. Nearby Latvia has plans to give university students military training next year.

The drive to teach ordinary people how to use weapons and take cover under fire reflects soaring anxiety among people in a region where memories of Moscow's domination — which ended only in the 1990s — remain raw. People worry that their security and hard-won independence are threatened as saber-rattling intensifies between the West and Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, where more than 6,000 people have died.

In Poland, the oldest generation remembers the Soviet Army's invasion in 1939, at the start of World War II. Younger people remain traumatized by the repression of the communist regime that lasted more than four decades.

It's a danger felt across the EU newcomer states that border Russia.

"There's a real feeling of threat in our society," Latvian defense ministry spokeswoman Aija Jakubovska told The Associated Press. Military training for students is a "way we can increase our own defense capabilities."

Most people are still looking to NATO's military umbrella as their main guarantor of security. Zygmunt Wos waved goodbye to a detachment of U.S. armored vehicles leaving the eastern Polish city of Bialystok with apprehension: "These troops should be staying with us," he said, "not going back to Germany."

Poland has been at the forefront of warnings about the dangers of the Ukraine conflict. Just 17 hours by car from the battle zone, Poland has stepped up efforts to upgrade its weapons arsenal, including a possible purchase of U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles. It will host a total of some 10,000 NATO and other allied troops for exercises this year. Its professional army is 100,000-strong, and 20,000 reservists are slated for test-range training.

It's the grassroots mobilization, however, that best demonstrates the fears: The government has reached out to some 120 paramilitary groups with tens of thousands of members, who are conducting their own drills, in an effort to streamline them with the army exercises.

In an unprecedented appeal, Parliament Speaker Radek Sikorski urged lawmakers to train at a test range in May, while Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak called on men and women aged between 18 and 50, and with no military experience, to sign up for test-range exercise. So far, over 2,000 people have responded.

"The times are dangerous and we must do all we can to raise Poland's ability to defend its territory," President Bronislaw Komorowski said during a recent visit to a military unit.

The Poles believe they have grounds for feeling particularly vulnerable because they have been invaded by Russia repeatedly since the 18th century. Russian leader Vladimir Putin seems to have singled out Poland, a staunch U.S. ally, as a prime enemy in the struggle over Ukraine, accusing it of training "Ukrainian nationalists" and instigating unrest.

Recently Moscow said it will place state-of-the-art Iskander missiles in its Kaliningrad enclave, bordering Poland and Lithuania, for a major exercise.

Last week, over 550 young Polish reservists were summoned on one hour's notice to a military base for a mobilization drill. In their 20s and 30s, in jeans and sneakers, the men and women arrived at a base in Tarnowskie Gory, in southern Poland for days of shooting practice. One of them, 35-year-old former soldier Krystian Studnia, said the call was "absolutely natural."

"Everyone should be willing and ready to fight to defend his country," he said.

In Warsaw, Mateusz Warszczak, 23, glowed with excitement as he signed up at a recruitment center. "I want to be ready to defend my family, my relatives, from danger," he said.

Even older Poles feel obliged to take responsibility for their own safety.

In September, Wojciech Klukowski, a 58-year-old medical doctor, and his friends organized a civic militia group of about 50 men and women of various ages, and called it the National Guard. They practiced skirmishes and shooting, with the aim of becoming citizen-soldiers in their hometown of Szczecin, on the Baltic Sea coast.

"We do not feel fully safe," Klukowski said. "Many people ... want to be trained to defend their homes, their work places, their families."

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/07/us-northkorea-china-nuclear-idUSKBN0MY06Q20150407

World | Tue Apr 7, 2015 12:02am EDT
Related: World
China urges creation of conditions to resume Korea nuclear talks
BEIJING

(Reuters) - All parties involved in talks about North Korea's nuclear program need to meet each other half way and address each other's concerns to create conditions to resume negotiations, China's foreign minister said.

Numerous efforts to restart the talks since they were last held over six years ago have failed.

Last month, South Korea's representative to the talks said China and Russia, as well as the United States, Japan, and South Korea, have reached "a certain degree of consensus," on how to restart the process.

Interviewed by a Russian television station, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said all sides had a joint responsibility to resolve the problem appropriately to ensure regional peace and stability.

"The nuclear issue has been around for a long time and is intricate and complicated," Wang said, according to a transcript released by the Chinese foreign ministry on Tuesday.

"Only if the symptoms and the causes are addressed ... and there is a full and equal resolution of all sides' concerns can we find a way out," he added.

"In the present situation, (I) hope that all sides can work hard together, meet each other half way and create conditions to resume the six-party talks, to strive to put the nuclear issue at the earliest date possible on a dialogue process that is sustainable, effective and cannot be gone back on."

China is isolated North Korea's only remaining ally of note, but relations have soured due to Beijing's anger at Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.

In 2005, North Korea reached an agreement with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to suspend its nuclear program in return for diplomatic rewards and energy assistance.

Negotiations collapsed after the last round of talks in 2008, with North Korea declaring the deal void after refusing inspections to verify compliance.

North Korea has called for the resumption of the talks, but the United States and South Korea have said Pyongyang must first show it was serious about ending its nuclear program.

Pyongyang has said it was willing to suspend nuclear testing if the United States halted annual joint military drills with South Korea. Washington and Seoul rejected the proposal saying the drills were for defensive purposes.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Michael Perry)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/07/us-malaysia-terrorism-idUSKBN0MY05920150407

World | Tue Apr 7, 2015 1:57am EDT
Related: World
Militants in Malaysia planned raids for guns, attacks in capital: police
KUALA LUMPUR

(Reuters) - Suspected militants loyal to the Islamic State (IS) had planned to raid Malaysian army camps and police stations to seize weapons and to attack "strategic locations" in the capital, Malaysia's police chief said on Tuesday.

Hours after news of the arrest of 17 suspects, lawmakers passed an anti-terrorism bill early on Tuesday following more than 10 hours of debate on legislation that reintroduces detention without trial three years after it was revoked.

Police arrested the 17 on Sunday saying they wanted to establish an Islamist regime in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian country.

"The purpose of this new terrorist group is to establish an Islamic country a la IS in Malaysia," police chief Khalid Abu Baker said in a statement on Tuesday.

Malaysia has not seen any significant militant attacks but has arrested 92 citizens on suspicion of links to the Islamic State. Authorities have identified 39 Malaysians in Syria and Iraq.

Militants have used Facebook and other social media to draw recruits, attracting thousands of followers online.

The 17 were arrested in various locations in the northern state of Kedah and in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

They had also planned kidnappings and to rob a bank. Khalid did not identify any locations he said they planned to attack in Kuala Lumpur and the nearby federal administrative center of Putrajaya.

Prime Minister Najib Razak oversaw the repeal of an Internal Security Act, which allowed for detention without trial, in 2012 under a reform agenda.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch described the legislation reintroducing it as "a giant step backwards for human rights".

"Malaysia has re-opened Pandora's Box for politically motivated, abusive state actions," he said in a statement.

The law permits police to arrest and detain individuals suspected of terrorist activities, with decisions for extension of detention made by a Prevention of Terrorism Board, and ruling out courts from having jurisdiction over board decisions.

Khalid did not identify any suspects but said among them was a 49-year old former member of the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia militant group who was suspected of getting military training in Syria last year, and earlier in Afghanistan and Indonesia.

A 38-year-old suspect was a religious teacher who went to Syria in September 2014 to join Islamic State and returned in December. Two other suspects were in the army, and one was a security guard who had access to weapons.

A former member of the Jemaah Islamiyah militant group from Indonesia who was skilled in handling weapons was also detained, Khalid said.

(Reporting By Trinna Leong and Anuradha Raghu; additional reporting by Yantoultra Ngui; Writing by Praveen Menon; Editing by John Chalmers, Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/russia-nervously-eyes-us-iran-deal

Russia Nervously Eyes the U.S.-Iran Deal
Geopolitical Weekly
April 7, 2015 | 07:55 GMT
By Reva Bhalla

When a group of weary diplomats announced a framework for an Iranian nuclear accord last week in Lausanne, there was one diplomat in the mix whose feigned enthusiasm was hard to miss. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov left the talks at their most critical point March 30, much to the annoyance of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who apparently had to call him personally to persuade him to return. Even as Lavrov spoke positively to journalists about the negotiations throughout the week, he still seemed to have better things to do than pull all-nighters for a deal that effectively gives the United States one less problem to worry about in the Middle East and a greater capacity to focus on the Russian periphery.

Russia has no interest in seeing a nuclear-armed Iran in the neighborhood, but the mere threat of an unshackled Iranian nuclear program and a hostile relationship between Washington and Tehran provided just the level of distraction Moscow needed to keep the United States from committing serious attention to Russia's former Soviet sphere.

Russia tried its best to keep the Americans and Iranians apart. Offers to sell Iran advanced air defense systems were designed to poke holes in U.S. threats to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Teams of Russian nuclear experts whetted Iran's appetite for civilian nuclear power with offers to build additional power reactors. Russian banks did their part to help Iran circumvent financial sanctions. The Russian plan all along was not to help Iran get the bomb, but to use its leverage with a thorny player in the Middle East to get the United States into a negotiation on issues vital to Russia's national security interests. So, if Washington wanted to resolve its Iran problem, it would have to pull back on issues like ballistic missile defense in Central Europe, which Moscow saw early on as the first of several U.S. steps to encircle Russia.

Things obviously did not work according to the Russian plan. As we anticipated, the United States and Iran ultimately came together in a bilateral negotiation to resolve their main differences. Now the United States and Iran are on a path toward normalization at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying simultaneously to defend against a U.S.-led military alliance building along Russia's European frontier and to manage an economic crisis and power struggle at home. And the situation does not look any better for Russia on the energy front.
Russia Stands to Lose Energy Revenue

The likelihood of the United States and Iran reaching a deal this summer means that additional barrels of Iranian oil eventually will make their way to the market, further depressing the price of oil, as well as the Russian ruble. To be clear, Iranian oil is not going to flood the market instantaneously with the signing of a deal. Iran is believed to have as much as 35 million barrels of crude in storage that it could offload quickly once export sanctions are terminated by the Europeans and eased by the United States via presidential waiver. But Iran will face complications in trying to bring its mature fields back online. Enhanced recovery techniques to revive mothballed fields take money and infrastructure, which is difficult to apply when oil prices are hovering around $50 per barrel. Under current conditions, Iran can bring some 400,000-500,000 barrels per day back online over the course of a year, but this will be a gradual process as Iran vies for foreign investment in its dilapidated energy sector.

U.S. investors will likely remain shackled by the core Iran Sanctions Act until at least the end of 2016, when the legislation is set to expire. However, European and Asian investors will be among the first to begin repairing Iran's oil fields, as long as Iran does its part in improving contractual terms and the economics make sense for firms already cutting back their capital expenditures.
Europe's New Options

The rehabilitation of Iran's energy sector, however gradual a process that may be, will complicate Russia's uphill battle in trying to maintain its energy leverage over Europe. Russia is a critical supplier of energy to Europe, currently providing about 29 percent and 37 percent of Europe's natural gas and oil needs, respectively. An additional 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas available for export from the United States within the next five years will not be able to compete with Russia on price due to the low operational and transport costs of Russian natural gas. Even so, the United States will still be creating more supply in the natural gas market overall to give Europe the option of paying more for its energy security should the political considerations outweigh the economic cost. The Baltic states are already working toward this option, with Lithuania taking the lead in creating a mini-liquefied natural gas hub for the region to try to reduce, if not eliminate, Baltic dependence on Russia. This year, Poland is debuting its own LNG facility, and the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana is scheduled to bring the first LNG exports from the Lower 48 to market, with shipments already contracted for Asia.

In Southern Europe, the picture for Russia is more complicated but still distressing. Aside from the significant issue of cost for energy companies already cutting their capital expenditures, Turkey's veto on the transit of LNG tankers through the Bosporus effectively neutralizes any LNG import facility project on the Black Sea. But Europe is proceeding apace with the much more economically palatable option of building pipeline interconnectors across southeastern Europe. This does little to dilute Russia's control over energy supply, but it does strip Moscow of its ability to politicize pricing in Europe. Pipeline politics in Europe have allowed Russia to reward — and punish — its Eastern European neighbors through pricing contracts. However, Brussels is more thoroughly examining contracts signed by EU member states for this very reason and in line with one of the main tenets of the EU's Third Energy Package, which seeks to break monopolies by splitting energy production and transmission and to implement fair pricing. Meanwhile, the construction of interconnectors allows member states to influence pricing downstream from Russia.

This gambit has been on display over the past year in Ukraine. Kiev depended heavily on its neighbors in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary for reverse flows of Russian natural gas at discounted rates to stand up to Russia's energy swaggering. Though Russian natural gas will still be flowing primarily through these pipelines, the expansion of interconnectors will open up options for non-Russian natural gas from the North Sea and from LNG terminals in Northern Europe to make their way southward to embattled frontline states such as Ukraine.

https://www.stratfor.com/sites/defa.../images/ukraine-gas-compass.jpg?itok=ZZL1vK9V

Russia thought it would be able to keep a hook in Southern Europe through the construction of South Stream, a mammoth pipeline project with a $30 billion price tag and 63-bcm capacity that sought to cut Ukraine out of the equation by moving natural gas across the Black Sea and through the Balkans and Central Europe. The combination of plunging energy prices and growing EU resistance to another pipeline that would allow Russia to draw political favors sent this project to the graveyard, but Russia had a backup plan. The Turkish Stream pipeline would make landfall in Turkey after crossing the Black Sea, before using the Trans Adriatic Pipeline and the Trans Anatolian Pipeline to feed Southern Europe through the web of interconnectors and pipelines already in development. On the surface, Moscow's plan appears quite brilliant: Use the very infrastructure that Europe was already counting on to diversify away from Russia and then, when the political skirmishing over Ukraine eventually settles down, reinsert itself into Europe's energy mix via a willing partner like Turkey.

Post-South Stream Options

https://www.stratfor.com/sites/defa...s/europe_russia_pipelines_0.jpg?itok=-nG_3hlG
Click to Enlarge

But the plan remains full of holes. Someone needs to pay for the main pipeline expansion between Russia and Turkey, and both countries will struggle to find private investors in this geopolitical and pricing climate. Moreover, there is no indication that the Europeans will be willing to take additional Russian natural gas from a yet-to-be-built Turkish Stream when a perfectly good pipeline running from Russia to Eastern Europe already exists. Russia does not have the option of refusing natural gas shipments when it is already desperate for those energy revenues. In the end, this is a Russian bluff that the Europeans will not be afraid to call. When Putin agreed to a three-month natural gas deal with Ukraine last week (with a huge discount to boot, at $247.20 per thousand cubic meters), he likely did so realizing that Russia playing hardball with Ukraine on energy would only spur further investment and construction into pipelines and connectors in southeastern Europe that would accelerate the decline of Russia's energy influence in Europe. The best he can hope for is to slow that timeline down.

Not only will Russia's pricing leverage wane in Europe over the long term, but its influence on Europe's energy supply also will decrease over the longer run. Azerbaijan was the first southern corridor supplier to Europe circumventing Russia and is now expanding that role by bringing natural gas from its Shah Deniz II offshore fields online for export. Turkmenistan is still vulnerable to Russian meddling but has been increasingly willing to host Turkish and European investors looking to build a pipeline across the Caspian to feed Europe. Whether these talks translate into action will depend on the Turkmen government's political will to stand up to Moscow, not to mention legal battles over the Caspian Sea. But while the lengthy courting of Ashgabat by the West continues, a rehabilitated Iran is now the latest addition to the list to join the southern corridor.
Russia's Influence Wanes in the Middle East

Just a day after the Iranian nuclear framework deal was announced, Russia's state-owned RIA Novosti published a story quoting Igor Korotchenko, the head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of World Arms Trade, as saying it would be a "perfectly logical development" for Russia to follow through on a sale of S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Iran if the embargo is lifted. Korotchenko noted that specifications to the deal would have to be made as "the United States is watching very closely" to whom Russia sells these weapons. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also made a point to say the U.N. arms embargo against Iran should be lifted as part of the nuclear deal. These well-timed statements likely caught Washington's eye but probably did little to impress. The S-300 threat mattered a lot more when the United States needed to maintain a credible military deterrent against Iran. If the United States and Iran reach an understanding that neutralizes that threat through political means, Russian talk of S-300s is mostly hot air.

This was a small, yet revealing illustration of Russia's declining position in the Middle East. For many years, the Middle East was a rose garden for the Russians, filled with both sweet-smelling opportunities to lure Washington into negotiations and ample thorns to prick their American adversary when the need arose. Russia's support for the Syrian government is still relevant, and Moscow will continue to court countries in the region with arms deals out of both political and economic necessity. Even so, bringing down the Syrian government is not on Washington's to-do list, and countries like Egypt will still end up prioritizing their relationship with the United States in the end.

Russia's influence in the Middle East is fading rapidly at the same time Europe is starting to wriggle out of Russia's energy grip. And as Russia's options are narrowing, U.S. options are multiplying in both the Middle East and Europe. This is an uncomfortable situation for Putin, to be sure. But a narrow set of options for Russia in its near abroad does not make those options any less concerning for the United States as the standoff between Washington and Moscow continues.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://spectator.org/articles/62316/iran-‘agreement’-charade

A Further Perspective
The Iran ‘Agreement’ Charade

Comparing Obama to Chamberlain is unfair — to Chamberlain.

By Thomas Sowell – 4.7.15

By abandoning virtually all its demands for serious restrictions on Iran’s nuclear bomb program, the Obama administration has apparently achieved the semblance of a preliminary introduction to the beginning of a tentative framework for a possible hope of an eventual agreement with Iran.

But even this hazy “achievement” may vanish like a mirage. It takes two to agree — and Iran has already publicly disputed and even mocked what President Obama says is the nature of that framework.

Had Iran wholeheartedly agreed with everything the Obama administration said, that agreement would still have been worthless, since Iran has already blocked international inspectors from its nuclear facilities at unpredictable times. The appearance of international control is more dangerous than a frank admission that we don’t really know what they are doing.

Why then all these negotiations? Because these charades protect Barack Obama politically, no matter how much danger they create for America and the world. The latest public opinion polls show Obama’s approval rating rising. In political terms — the only terms that matter to him — his foreign policy has been a success.

If you look back through history, you will be hard pressed to find a leader of any democratic nation so universally popular — hailed enthusiastically by opposition parties as well as his own — as was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich in 1938, waving an agreement with Hitler’s signature on it, and proclaiming “Peace for our time.”

Who cared that he had thrown a small country to the Nazi wolves, in order to get a worthless agreement with Hitler? It looked great at the time because it had apparently avoided war.

Now Barack Obama seems ready to repeat that political triumph by throwing another small country — Israel this time — to the wolves, for the sake of another worthless agreement.

Back in 1938, Winston Churchill was one of the very few critics who tried to warn Chamberlain and the British public. Churchill said: “The idea that safety can be purchased by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”

After the ruinous agreement was made with Hitler, he said: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Chamberlain’s “Peace for our time” lasted just under a year.

Comparing Obama to Chamberlain is unfair — to Chamberlain. There is no question that the British prime minister loved his country and pursued its best interests as he saw it. He was not a “citizen of the world,” or worse. Chamberlain was building up his country’s military forces, not tearing them down, as Barack Obama has been doing with American military forces.

Secretary of State John Kerry, and other members of the Obama administration, are saying that the alternative to an agreement with Iran is war. But when Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactors, back in 1981, Iraq did not declare war on Israel. It would have been suicidal to do so, since Israel already had nuclear bombs.

There was a time when either Israel or the United States could have destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities, with far less risk of war than there will be after Iran already has its own stockpile of nuclear bombs. Indeed, the choice then will no longer be between a nuclear Iran and war. The choice may be between surrender to Iran and nuclear devastation.

Barack Obama dismissed the thought of America being vulnerable to “a small country” like Iran. Iran is in fact larger than Japan was when it attacked Pearl Harbor, and Iran has a larger population. If Japan had nuclear bombs, World War II could have turned out very differently.

If anyone examines the hard, cold facts about the Obama administration’s actions and inactions in the Middle East from the beginning, it is far more difficult to reconcile those actions and inactions with a belief that Obama was trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons than it is to reconcile those facts with his trying to stop Israel from stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

This latest “agreement” with Iran — with which Iran has publicly and loudly disagreed — is only the latest episode in that political charad

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://atimes.com/2015/04/pakistans-all-weather-friend-counsels-caution/

Pakistan’s all-weather friend counsels caution

Author: M.K. Bhadrakumar April 6, 2015 0 Comments

Asia Times News & Features

Houthis, Iran nuclear issue, Sunni-Shi'ite rivalry, Yemen

The opinion of an “all-weather friend” should always count. Will Pakistan take China’s estimation of the Yemen situation seriously before crossing the Rubicon to meet Saudi Arabia’s expectations from it? Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, who just returned from a visit to Riyadh leading a military delegation, told the parliament in Islamabad on Monday, “Saudi Arabia has asked for combat planes, warships and soldiers.”

Yet, in an extraordinarily frank assessment, Xinhua news agency flagged over the weekend that Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen is motivated by its narrow self-interests and do not rest on any principles. The commentary attributes four motives to the Saudi intervention, which it says, was “by no means an impulse [sic] decision by Saudi leaders, but reflects their strategic consideration in various aspects.”

One, heightened security concerns over a possible spillover of terrorist (read al-Qaeda) activities in Yemen would have worked on the Saudi mind. Two, the intervention in Yemen serves “to divert attention from the increasingly fierce power struggle among the royals, and provides the new leader [King Salman] a chance to establish his authority.” {Emphasis added.]

Three, Riyadh hopes that the tensions would drive up oil prices, “and that could consolidate Saudi Arabia’s market share.” Four, Saudi Arabia hopes to throw a spanner at the wheel of the US-Iran nuclear negotiations and prevent “a détente between Tehran and the West.”

Indeed, this is plain speaking. China doesn’t buy the Saudi thesis of a hidden Iranian agenda to destabilize Saudi Arabia by inciting the Houthis of Yemen, nor does it see the Yemen conflict as a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran or even as a Sunni-Shi’ite question regionally.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity has not come under threat. But it can, if the Saudis persist on the war path. The precipitate Saudi action is bound to produce a backlash at some point. From independent media accounts, the Saudi military operations are having no tangible effect on the ground on the Houthi’s march into Aden city.

Meanwhile, the Houthis have put the Saudis on the defensive by offering talks. So have the UN agencies and Russia by requesting a “humanitarian pause” in the Saudi air strikes. More and more media reports speak of horrific civilian casualties (Al Jazeera). Even the cheerleaders among the neocons in the US or Israel would gurdgingly agree by now that it’s becoming a PR disaster for the Saudis.

Hardly two weeks into the war, Riyadh seems to have bitten more than what it can chew. The Saudi demarche with Islamabad virtually seeks subcontracting the war to the Pakistani generals. But Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will do well to pay heed to the Chinese assessment. Read the Xinhua commentary here.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://atimes.com/2015/04/eurasian-emporium-or-nuclear-war-pepe-escobar/


Eurasian emporium or nuclear war?: Pepe Escobar

Author: Pepe Escobar April 6, 2015 0 Comments

Empire of Chaos, Pepe Escobar

A high-level European diplomatic source has confirmed to Asia Times that German chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has vigorously approached Beijing in an effort to disrupt its multi-front strategic partnership with Russia.

Beijing won’t necessarily listen to this political gesture from Berlin, as China is tuning the strings on its pan-Eurasian New Silk Road project, which implies close trade/commerce/business ties with both Germany and Russia.

The German gambit reveals yet more pressure by hawkish sectors of the U.S. government who are intent on targeting and encircling Russia. For all the talk about Merkel’s outrage over the U.S. National Security Agency’s tapping shenanigans, the chancellor walks Washington’s walk. Real “outrage” means nothing unless she unilaterally ends sanctions on Russia. In the absence of such a response by Merkel, we’re in the realm of good guy-bad guy negotiating tactics.

The bottom line is that Washington cannot possibly tolerate a close Germany-Russia trade/political relationship, as it directly threatens its hegemony in the Empire of Chaos.

Thus, the whole Ukraine tragedy has absolutely nothing to do with human rights or the sanctity of borders. NATO ripped Kosovo away from Yugoslavia-Serbia without even bothering to hold a vote, such as the one that took place in Crimea.

Watch those S-500s

In parallel, another fascinating gambit is developing. Some sectors of U.S. Think Tankland – with their cozy CIA ties – are now hedging their bets about Cold War 2.0, out of fear that they have misjudged what really happens on the geopolitical chessboard.

I’ve just returned from Moscow, and there’s a feeling the Federal Security Bureau and Russian military intelligence are increasingly fed up with the endless stream of Washington/NATO provocations – from the Baltics to Central Asia, from Poland to Romania, from Azerbaijan to Turkey.

This is an extensive but still only partial summary of what’s seen all across Russia as an existential threat: Washington/NATO’s intent to block Russia’s Eurasian trade and development; destroy its defense perimeter; and entice it into a shooting war.

A shooting war is not exactly a brilliant idea. Russia’s S-500 anti-missile missiles and anti-aircraft missiles can intercept any existing ICBM, cruise missile or aircraft. S-500s travel at 15,480 miles an hour; reach an altitude of 115 miles; travel horizontally 2,174 miles; and can intercept up to ten incoming missiles. They simply cannot be stopped by any American anti-missile system.

Some on the U.S. side say the S-500 system is being rolled out in a crash program, as an American intel source told Asia Times. There’s been no Russian confirmation. Officially, Moscow says the system is slated to be rolled out in 2017. End result, now or later: it will seal Russian airspace. It’s easy to draw the necessary conclusions.

That makes the Obama administration’s “policy” of promoting war hysteria, coupled with unleashing a sanction, ruble and oil war against Russia, the work of a bunch of sub-zoology specimens.

Some adults in the EU have already seen the writing on the (nuclear) wall. NATO’s conventional defenses are a joke. Any military buildup – as it’s happening now – is also a joke, as it could be demolished by the 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons Moscow would be able to use.

When in doubt, bully

Of course it takes time to turn the current Cold War 2.0 mindset around, but there are indications the Masters of the Universe are listening – as this essay shows. Call it the first (public) break in the ice.

Let’s assume Russia decided to mobilize five million troops, and switch to military production. The “West” would back down to an entente cordiale in a flash. And let’s assume Moscow decided to confiscate what remains of dodgy oligarch wealth. Vladimir Putin’s approval rate – which is not exactly shabby as it stands – would soar to at least 98%. Putin has been quite restrained so far. And still his childishly hysterical demonization persists.

It’s a non-stop escalation scenario. Color revolutions. The Maidan coup. Sanctions; “evil” Hitler/Putin; Ukraine to enter NATO; NATO bases all over. And yet reality – as in the Crimean counter coup, and the battlefield victories by the armies of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk – has derailed the most elaborate U.S. State Department/NATO plans. On top of it Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande were forced into an entente cordiale with Russia – on Minsk 2 – because they knew that would be the only way to stop Washington from further weaponizing Kiev.

Putin is essentially committed to a very complex preservation/flowering process of Russia’s history and culture, with overtones of pan-Slavism and Eurasianism. Comparing him to Hitler does not even qualify as a kindergarten prank.

Yet don’t expect Washington neo-cons to understand Russian history or culture. Most of them would not even survive a Q&A on their beloved heroes Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Moreover, their anti-intellectualism and exceptionalist arrogance creates only a privileged space for undiluted bullying.

A U.S. academic, one of my sources, sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi copied to a notorious neo-con, the husband of Victoria, the Queen of Nulandistan. Here’s the neo-con’s response, via his Brookings Institution email: “Why don’t you go (expletive deleted) yourself?” Yet another graphic case of husband and wife deserving each other.

At least there seem to be sound IQs in the Beltway driven to combat the neo-con cell inside the State Department, the neo-con infested editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, an array of think tanks, and of course NATO, whose current military leader, Gen. Breedlove/Breedhate, is working hard on his post-mod impersonation of Dr. Strangelove.

Russian “aggression” is a myth. Moscow’s strategy, so far, has been pure self-defense. Moscow in a flash will strongly advance a strategic cooperation with the West if the West understands Russia’s security interests. If those are violated – as in provoking the bear – the bear will respond. A minimum understanding of history reveals that the bear knows one or two things about enduring suffering. It simply won’t collapse – or melt away.

Meanwhile, another myth has also been debunked: That sanctions would badly hurt Russia’s exports and trade surpluses. Of course there was hurt, but bearable. Russia enjoys a wealth of raw materials and massive internal production capability – enough to meet the bulk of internal demand.

So we’re back to the EU, Russia and China, and everyone in between, all joining the greatest trade emporium in history across the whole of Eurasia. That’s what Putin proposed in Germany a few years ago, and that’s what the Chinese are already doing. And what do the neo-cons propose? A nuclear war on European soil.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-06/corker-obama-doctrine-means-abandoning-middle-east

Declassified
Corker: 'Obama Doctrine' Means Abandoning Middle East
29 Apr 6, 2015 2:03 PM EDT
By Josh Rogin
Comments 29

President Barack Obama finally got his framework nuclear deal with Iran, and now has to convince Congress to back off its demand for an up-or-down vote on the final package. Its going to be a tough sell: As of now, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t even agree with Obama on what the deal will mean for the region and the world.

In an interview with me last week, before the Obama administration announced the breakthrough between Iran and six major world powers, Republican Senator Bob Corker said he had figured out the overarching objectives of the president’s various moves in the Middle East, including not just Obama’s drive to get a deal with Iran but also his reluctance to get involved in Syria and his treatment of Arab allies and Israel. Corker said Obama just wants to get out of the region.

“It’s become very evident as to what the administration is doing relative to the Middle East,” Corker said. “The administration’s view is that in order to extract ourselves in the Middle East, we need to move away from our relationship from Israel and we need to more fully align ourselves with Iran, so we create this balance in the Middle East between Iran and its influence and the Arab Sunni influence in the region.” He added: “That seems to be our strategy. And that’s what’s creating all of this turmoil in the region.”

According to Corker, the Iran deal is the lynchpin of Obama’s drive to change the balance of power in Iran’s favor and then remove America’s role from the region. But he said Obama’s plan was fatally flawed because Iran has no intention of reforming. “The P5+1 discussions are central to that,” Corker said. “The problem with that today, the fact is, Iran hasn’t changed its behavior. That’s why you see so much of what’s happening in the Middle East.”

Obama and Corker have been trying to work together as the Iran negotiations enter their final phase. Corker plans to move forward with his legislation that would mandate a 60-day review period before any deal Obama signs with Iran could go into effect. The White House has promised to veto that bill, but Obama said in an interview with the New York Times’s Thomas L. Friedman that he was open to working with Corker on a rewrite that would allow Congress to express its views but that would not impinge on the presidential prerogative to make foreign policy.

In the Times interview, Obama said that the Iran pact, if it materializes, will be a good deal even if Iran doesn’t change its behavior. But he added that he hopes a deal will turn the page both inside Iran and in the U.S.-Iran relationship. “I’ve been very clear that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon on my watch, and I think they should understand that we mean it,” Obama said. “But I say that hoping that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement -- and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations -- and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors.”

Obama defined his own doctrine as: “We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.” American core concerns in the region no longer include oil or territory or strategic interests, the president said. “Our interests in this sense are really just making sure that the region is working,” he said. “And if it’s working well, then we’ll do fine.”

In regard to Israel and the Arab states, Obama denied that he is moving away from them at all. He did say that Sunni Arab countries have to do more to reform politically and respond to the concerns of their people. “When it comes to external aggression, I think we are going to be there for our friends,” said Obama. “But I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.”

Corker has been more moderate on the Iran talks than most of his Republican colleagues. He declined add his name to the letter that 47 of them sent to the Iranian regime promising to scuttle any deal after Obama leaves office. He has been working with Democrats including Robert Menendez and Tim Kaine to craft legislation that will get broad bipartisan support.

But Corker and Obama fundamentally disagree on the impact a nuclear Iran deal will have on the region; Obama thinks it will be helpful, Corker thinks it could be catastrophic. Before Obama will be able to convince Congress to trust him on a deal he says will prevent Iran from getting the nuclear bomb, he will have to convince the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that their views of how the deal will affect the world can mesh.

To contact the author on this story:
Josh Rogin at joshrogin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Nathan J Hunt retweeted
Christian Thiels @ThielsChristian · 57m 57 minutes ago

#India's AAD interceptor missile test fails. http://defence.pk/threads/aad-test-...s-fire-immediately-after-its-take-off.369171/ … RT @defencepk


posted for fair use
http://defence.pk/threads/aad-test-...s-fire-immediately-after-its-take-off.369171/

India AAD interceptor #missile falls down,catches fire immediately after its take off from Wheeler Island off Odisha coast

#India AAD interceptor #missile falls down,catches fire immediately after its take off from Wheeler Island off Odisha coast.@NewIndianXpress
— Hemant Rout (@Hemant_TNIE) April 6, 2015



[​IMG]
A map of Wheeler Island.


There appeared to be a problem in one of the sub-systems, which malfunctioned, DRDO scientists told The Hindu.

The trial of an upgraded interceptor missile conducted by DRDO scientists has failed on Monday. According to DRDO sources, the missile called Advanced Air Defence (AAD), plummeted into the Bay of Bengal a few seconds after the liftoff from Wheeler Island, off the Odisha Coast.

There appeared to be a problem in one of the sub-systems, which malfunctioned, DRDO scientists told The Hindu. The exact cause would be known after analysing the data and it might take 24 hours to come to a preliminary conclusion.

The DRDO planned to conduct the Interceptor missile test against an electronic target missile to validate the missile’s capability to carry a bigger warhead, improved manoeuverability and reduced mis-distance, among other parameters. India plans to deploy a two-tiered Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system to protect important cities and vital installations from external threats.

The first phase envisages to engage and destroy incoming enemy ballistic missile of 2,000-km range, while the second phase seeks to tackle missiles between 2,000-km and 5,000-km range. With Monday’s mission the DRDO has conducted 10 Interceptor missile tests and eight out of them have been successful.

Intercepter missile test off Odisha coast fails - The Hindu

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/chinas-new-carrier-killer-subs/

China's 'New' Carrier Killer Subs

Armed with a new supersonic missile, these upgraded boats could spell trouble for US carriers in Asian waters.

By Franz-Stefan Gady
April 06, 2015

7 Shares
98 Comments

The Chinese Navy in in the process of commissioning three new nuclear-powered attack submarines, according to China Daily. The report, quoted on the website Defense Tech, furthermore notes that the new vessels will be equipped with a new vertical launching system capable of firing supersonic anti-ship missiles.

The “new” SSNs are in fact, upgraded versions of the Type-093 Shang-class second-generation nuclear-powered attack submarines, two of which are currently in service in the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The upgrades are designated Type-093G.

“The Type-093G is reported to be an upgraded version of Type-093… With a teardrop hull, the submarine is longer than its predecessor and has a vertical launching system,” China Daily said.

However, the Chinese PLAN could also choose to re-designate the ships as Type-095 SSGNs, should all public reports on the vessel prove accurate.

Next to improved speed, reduced noise, and an increased operational range, the upgraded Type-093G Shang-class will be able to fire China’s most modern supersonic anti-ship missile, the YJ-18, the report states. There is sparse open source information available on this new missile, which is specifically designed to defeat the Aegis Combat System.

Nevertheless, writing on an older variant of the YJ-18, the YJ-12 ASCM, an analyst notes that it is, “the most dangerous anti-ship missile China has produced thus far, posing an even greater risk to the U.S. Navy’s surface forces in the Western Pacific than the much-discussed DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile.”

The missile, he continues, has “a range of 400 kilometers, making it one of the longest-ranged ASCMs ever fielded (and much longer than the 124 kilometer limit of the U.S. Navy Harpoon).” According to some reports, YJ-12 boasts a speed of up to Mach 3 and can perform evasive maneuvers in air before hitting the target. Writing on an air-attack scenario the analyst points out what potentially could make the YJ-12 a “carrier killer” — its range and speed:

Crucially, at 400 kilometers, Chinese attack aircraft will be able to launch the YJ-12 beyond the engagement range of the Navy’s Aegis Combat System and the SM-2 surface-to-air missiles that protect U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups. (…) The YJ-12s would employ a variety of sensor types to find their targets and execute dramatic cork-screw turns to evade final defenses.

Despite a reduced range, the vertically launched YJ-18 otherwise may share similar characteristics with the YJ-12 and will be a deadly addition in any carrier strike group attack scenario. One public source describes the capabilities of the YJ-18:

After the vertical launch the missile’s turbojet engine is capable of flying at a cruise speed of Mach 0.8 for about 180 kilometers; after that point the warhead section separates and a solid rocket engine ignites allowing at a top speed of Mach 2.5-3 for about 40 kilometers (…) The missile can maneuver at 10G acceleration to avoid enemy interception by air-to-air or surface-air missiles.

Of course, the U.S. Navy is slowly adding new missile defense capabilities (e.g., Cooperative Engagement Capability) to its fleets along with new operational doctrines (see: “The Pentagon Just Dropped the Air Sea Battle Name”). However, multiple launch platforms make it more likely that the percentage of missiles penetrating the multi-layered defense perimeters of carrier strike groups will increase.

The Type-093G Shang-class are technologically on par with 1980s NATO nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines (i.e. roughly three decades behind current Western sub technology), according to some experts. The Taiwanese media reports that the upgrades on two Type-093G Shang-class subs were completed in December 2014 by the Bohai Shipyards in Huludao, while a third vessel is still in a dry dock.

However, Defense Tech reports that earlier this week, China Central Television showed satellite pictures claiming that the three vessels shown on photographs during the broadcast were, in fact, Type-093G attack submarines, anchored at an undisclosed Chinese harbor.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.globalpost.com/article/6...ing-drug-cartel-it-even-builds-its-own-rifles

Meet Mexico’s fastest growing drug cartel. It even builds its own rifles

Intoxication, Conflict, Mexico
Ioan Grillo
on Apr 7, 2015 @ 2:15 AM

Mexico's Jalisco New Generation cartel members holding hostages they accuse of kidnapping in a video uploaded to the internet in March 2014.

( Screen shot / YouTube )

MEXICO CITY — From the outside, the two buildings looked like thousands of other farmhouses in Mexico’s agricultural heartland of Jalisco, where products include potent tequila. But when police raided them in October, they found industrial metal cutters, blowtorches and bullet cartridges.

A drug cartel had used them, Jalisco investigators revealed, to assemble their own AR-15 assault rifles.

“It’s highly sophisticated machinery with very precise software that allows them to make the cuts to finish the guns, which work perfectly,” Jalisco Attorney General Luis Carlos Najera said last year.

The authorities blamed a snappily named gang: the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The same cartel has hit the news again with a series of assaults on police and officials. On Monday, gunmen ambushed a convoy of state police in San Sebastian del Oeste, killing 15 officers in one of the worst attacks on police in recent years.

That followed attacks last month, too. On March 20, in the town of Ocotlan, a dozen trucks of gunmen ambushed federal police, killing five officers. On March 31, cartel thugs attacked the Jalisco security commissioner causing a shootout in an urban area of Guadalajara.

The offensives and gun factories show how the New Generation is defying the government’s crackdown on traffickers. The cartel is also expanding its territory, with tentacles stretching from its base in the midwestern state of Jalisco as far as Cancun in the southeastern tip, and even up to the border with Texas.

“It is spreading like a cancer in Mexico,” says Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It’s the fastest expanding cartel and they could in the near future overtake the Sinaloa cartel as the most significant organized group in Mexico.”

Since taking office in 2012, President Enrique Peña Nieto has waged an offensive against gangster kingpins, taking out leaders of most cartels. His administration’s arrests include Sinaloan Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, Zetas bosses Omar and Miguel Treviño, and most recently, Knights Templar head Servando “La Tuta” Gomez.

More from GlobalPost: Where are Mexico’s top 10 drug lords now?

The Jalisco leader Nemesio Oseguera, alias “El Mencho,” has not only survived this onslaught but also pushed into other weakened gangs’ turf.

The New Generation has expanded particularly in western Mexico’s Michoacan state, where the Knights Templar cartel has been shattered, leaving a trail of bodies with threatening notes.

The Jalisco cartel is also linked to some vigilantes operating there, according to Mexican prosecutors.

The rise of the Jalisco gang at the expense of other cartels illustrates the long-running problem in fighting drug trafficking.


“It is like the proverbial hydra. When you chop off one head, another grows in its place.”

- Mike Vigil, former DEA agent

“It is like the proverbial hydra. When you chop off one head, another grows in its place,” says Vigil, now a consultant who has advised Mexican security forces and author of the book "Deal."

“One issue is that while the Mexican government has done a good job hitting the kingpins, it also needs to go after the corrupt officials, money laundering, and the infrastructure of cartels,” he adds.

Mexican traffickers make billions of dollars shipping cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth to the United States, using the money to bribe officials and run front businesses.

Strategically placed in the heart of Mexico, Jalisco has long been home to drug traffickers, with the Guadalajara cartel operating there back in the 1980s. But in the 1990s and 2000s trafficking power shifted to border cities like Tijuana and Juarez, and the drug producing hills of Sinaloa.

More from GlobalPost: A retired DEA agent dishes on his years spent infiltrating Mexican and Colombian cartels

The Jalisco New Generation cartel was born after the Mexican army shot dead a dominant regional trafficker called Ignacio Coronel in the Guadalajara urban area in 2010.

Coronel's younger followers and their associates formed the new mob, and stepped up the violence to repel the rival Zetas, who were encroaching on the area. Jalisco New Generation is blamed for mass killings: One left 35 corpses of alleged Zetas dumped on a street in Veracruz in 2011; another, 14 hung from meat hooks in the border city of Nuevo Laredo in 2012.

In total, Mexican cartels or the official security forces fighting them have killed more than 83,000 people since 2007, according to a count by Mexico’s federal intelligence agency.

Along with its bloodshed, the Jalisco New Generation has released propaganda videos, where they show off their guns and claim they defend citizens against more predatory cartels.

This video illustrates the level of firepower they have.


However, federal prosecutors say that while the Jalisco mob claims to protect people, it carries out its own shakedowns and kidnappings.

“It is a very dangerous organization. It operates on a local level, hitting business, like other newer cartels. But it also has international trafficking links like the older cartels,” a prosecutor from the Mexican government’s organized crime unit told GlobalPost. He did not want to be named because he’s not authorized to speak to media on the topic.

Masked women on this video also accuse the Jalisco New Generation of extorting businesses and urge people not to pay.


Innocent bystanders also sometimes get hit by stray bullets. Three residents were killed during the gun battle after the recent attack on federal police in Ocotlan. One of the victims was 15-year-old Isaac Solis.

At the end of last month, hundreds of people dressed in white marched through the town holding photos of Solis.

“We want peace, that is all we are asking for today,” a protester said. “This is one march. But that has to be many more.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150407/lt--venezuela-regional_silence-3e7605a8d0.html

Latin America silent on Venezuela as US airs rights concerns

Apr 7, 5:01 PM (ET)
By JOSHUA GOODMAN and PETER ORSI

(AP) In this Feb. 18, 2014 file photo, demonstrators rest from taking part in an...
Full Image

PANAMA CITY (AP) — From Mexico to Brazil, leaders in Latin America have largely kept silent amid charges of human rights abuses in Venezuela and are unlikely to speak out against their neighbor at this week's Summit of the Americas.

Many Latin American heads of state gathering in Panama City are bound to oil-rich Venezuela by business dealings if not ideology, and are put off by recent U.S. sanctions against some of the country's officials. Others do not want to be seen as doing Washington's bidding, particularly as they face protests and plunging approval ratings at home.

"Venezuela has successfully played the history of U.S. imperialism and U.S. heavy-handedness cards, in a way that has made people want to back away from public criticism," said Geoff Thale, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America.

The Obama administration last month froze the U.S. assets and revoked visas for seven senior officials accused of human rights violations related to protests last year against President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government. The unrest is blamed for more than 40 deaths and triggered a crackdown on criticism that led to the jailing of several opposition leaders, including February's surprise arrest of Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma.

(AP) In this Feb. 18, 2014 file photo, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, dressed...
Full Image

Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups issued a statement on Tuesday asking the countries attending the summit to call Maduro's administration to task for its alleged harassment of rights defenders.

But rather than highlight alleged abuses, the U.S. sanctions have drawn widespread condemnation in Latin America, denying Obama a hoped-for diplomatic victory lap at the summit for his decision to restore ties with Cold War nemesis Cuba. A reference to Venezuela as a threat to U.S. national security included in the sanctions declaration is standard bureaucratic language for the United States, but disturbing to a region with a long history of U.S. interference, from support for past military regimes to efforts to topple leftist governments.

Host Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela said that while regional leaders are concerned about the situation in Venezuela, both the government and the opposition, which has been calling for Maduro's resignation, bear responsibility. Safeguarding the results of congressional elections later this year is the best way to resolve the impasse, he said.

"As a democratic country, for sure, we defend human rights, we defend the right of the Venezuelan opposition to participate in democratic elections," he said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. "But we also have to defend the right for President Maduro to finish his term."

Ricardo Zuniga, the U.S. National Security Council's senior director for Latin America, said Tuesday during a press briefing on Obama's upcoming visit that the situation in Venezuela is a concern of all governments around the region. But he played down the language labeling Venezuela a national security threat.

(AP) In this July 22, 2014 file photo, Peru's Nobel Literature Prize laureate...
Full Image

"We don't have any hostile designs on Venezuela," he said. "We are Venezuela's largest trading partner. We have an extensive and deep history between our countries, including a lot of family connections."

The U.S. action has been breathing new life into Maduro's government just as a plunge in oil prices looked set to deepen economic turmoil marked by widespread shortages and soaring 68 percent inflation. He has promised to deliver Obama a petition signed by 10 million Venezuelans calling on the U.S. to repeal the sanctions.

The pushback from the region seems to have caught the U.S. off guard.

"I was a bit, I will confess, disappointed that there weren't more who defended the fact that clearly this was not intended to hurt the Venezuelan people or the Venezuelan government even as a whole," Roberta Jacobson, the top State Department official for Latin America, said last week about the sanctions.

It was no surprise that leftist allies such as the governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua would leap to defend Caracas. All have a history of vocal opposition to Washington. But even more moderate governments and traditional U.S. allies in the region have been reluctant to criticize Maduro.

(AP) In this Aug. 1, 2014 file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro points...
Full Image

Some governments are protective of deep economic ties to Venezuela, including Argentina and more than a dozen nations that have received subsidized oil under the Venezuelan-led Petrocaribe alliance.

Others worry about instability spilling over. In Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos is trying to protect important trade with Venezuela, repair relations that nearly collapsed under his combative conservative predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, and retain Venezuelan support for complicated peace talks with leftist rebels.

Meanwhile the presidents of regional heavyweights, Mexico, Brazil and Chile are dealing with their own domestic crises brought on by slumping economies and government corruption charges, so are reluctant to antagonize left-wing constituents who still revere the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Mexico's Enrique Pena Nieto has been forced to slash spending and partially rein in much-touted energy reforms due to plummeting oil prices. He is also fighting scandals over alleged cronyism and the disappearance of 43 students who authorities say were detained by police, handed over to a drug gang and murdered last September.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's slumping approval ratings rival those of Maduro, with just 12 percent of citizens saying in a recent poll that they viewed her government's performance as "good" or "excellent." Driving voters away are a sputtering economy and a spreading corruption scandal at state oil company Petrobras. While her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was a regional powerbroker, Rousseff has not developed a clear foreign policy or a leadership role beyond Brazil.

(AP) In this Dec. 5, 2014 file photo, UNASUR leaders pose for a group photo at the...
Full Image

Both leaders have been the target of protests calling for their resignation.

Rousseff and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet are former political prisoners who would seem natural candidates to speak out about human rights concerns. But Bachelet's popularity also has dropped over allegations her son used his influence to secure a bank loans — a corruption scandal that threatens her agenda to combat inequality in Chile.

With the exception of comments this week by Uruguay's foreign minister expressing concern over the jailing of opposition leaders and use of force against protesters, Latin America's most public criticism of Venezuela has come from those outside the halls of power.

In a letter released Monday, 19 former leaders from Latin America and Spain called on Maduro's government to release jailed activists and urged respect for "constitutional principles and international standards."

Latin diplomats like to say they can be more effective raising concerns privately with Venezuelan officials rather than airing dirty laundry in public. They point to mediation efforts by the South American regional bloc Unasur, which last year briefly brought the government and opposition to the negotiating table, and say they may exercise this leverage again should things spin out of control around legislative elections later this year.

(AP) In this Dec. 30, 2014 file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro,...
Full Image

Maduro has promised to deliver to Obama a petition signed by 10 million Venezuelans calling for the U.S. sanctions to be revoked, but Panama's president said regional leaders won't allow the tensions to dominate the conference.

"The summit isn't about the bilateral relationship between the United States and Venezuela," Varela said. "But if they (Obama and Maduro) have to meet, Panama is a good place to meet, Panama is a good place to talk, Panama is a good place to solve differences. That's the tradition of our country."

---

Associated Press writer Joshua Goodman reported this story in Panama City and Peter Orsi reported from Mexico City. AP writers Hannah Dreier in Caracas, Venezuela, and Jim Kuhnhenn in Washington contributed to this report.

---

Joshua Goodman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APjoshgoodman

Peter Orsi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/04/08/2015040800596.html

N.Korea Capable of Nuclear Strike at U.S., Military Leader Says

Top U.S. military officials believe North Korea is now capable of launching a nuclear-armed missile at the United States.

"Our assessment is that they have the ability to put a nuclear weapon on a KN-08 and shoot it at the homeland," Admiral William Gortney, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, told reporters Tuesday during a Pentagon briefing. "We assess that it's operational today, and so we practice to go against it."

Gortney cautioned that U.S. officials have yet to see Pyongyang test the KN-08, which so far has been displayed only during military parades. But he called the U.S. assessment a "prudent decision."

The "mobile nature" of the KN-08 has left U.S. officials concerned about losing "our ability to get the indications that something might occur," Gortney said. Still, he said he had "high confidence" that U.S. missile systems would be capable of defending the country from a potential North Korean strike.

This is not the first time U.S. officials have warned of the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

In a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, National Intelligence Director James Clapper warned that Pyongyang had taken "initial steps" toward fielding the KN-08.

As far back as October 2014, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, General Curtis Scaparrotti, was cautious in downplaying North Korean claims that it could deliver a nuclear warhead.

"They've had the right connections, and so I believe [they] have the capability to have miniaturized a device at this point," Scaparrotti said. "They have the technology to potentially actually deliver what they say they have."

A report issued Tuesday by the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said Pyongyang has about 1,000 ballistic missiles capable of reaching South Korea and Japan. But it also said North Korea faces "significant problems" with its longer-range missiles.

The report's authors concluded North Korea would need help from foreign technology to be able to hit the U.S. accurately.

VOA News / Apr. 08, 2015 08:00 KST

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://news.yahoo.com/us-aerospace-command-moving-comms-gear-back-cold-015320113.html

US aerospace command moving comms gear back to Cold War bunker

AFP
5 hours ago

Washington (AFP) - The US military command that scans North America's skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said.

The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command's sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, military officers said.

The Pentagon last week announced a $700 million contract with Raytheon Corporation to oversee the work for North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command.

Admiral William Gortney, head of NORAD and Northern Command, said that "because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain's built, it's EMP-hardened."

"And so, there's a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there," Gortney told reporters.

"My primary concern was... are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody who wants to move in there, and I'm not at liberty to discuss who's moving in there," he said.

The Cheyenne mountain bunker is a half-acre cavern carved into a mountain in the 1960s that was designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. From inside the massive complex, airmen were poised to send warnings that could trigger the launch of nuclear missiles.

But in 2006, officials decided to move the headquarters of NORAD and US Northern Command from Cheyenne to Petersen Air Force base in Colorado Springs. The Cheyenne bunker was designated as an alternative command center if needed.

That move was touted a more efficient use of resources but had followed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of modernization work at Cheyenne carried out after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Now the Pentagon is looking at shifting communications gear to the Cheyenne bunker, officials said.

"A lot of the back office communications is being moved there," said one defense official.

Officials said the military's dependence on computer networks and digital communications makes it much more vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse, which can occur naturally or result from a high-altitude nuclear explosion.

Under the 10-year contract, Raytheon is supposed to deliver "sustainment" services to help the military perform "accurate, timely and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats" at the Cheyenne and Petersen bases.

Raytheon's contract also involves unspecified work at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

View Comments (262)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150407/af--uganda-terror_prosecutor-f0bbd8f941.html

Uganda: 3 arrested over killing of terror prosecutor

Apr 7, 12:35 PM (ET)
By RODNEY MUHUMUZA

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Ugandan police on Tuesday arrested at least three people in connection with the killing last month of a senior prosecutor who was involved in the trial of a dozen men accused of being Islamic extremists who had participated in bombings in 2010 which killed more than 70 people.

The suspects — who once lived in the Kampala neighborhood where prosecutor Joan Kagezi was shot dead — had changed their physical address three times, leading a surveillance team to suspect they played a role in the killing, Ugandan police chief Kale Kayihura told reporters on Tuesday.

Police searched an apartment on the outskirts of Kampala that the suspects, who were not identified, occupied before they were arrested.

"We got information about some suspects who have been moving from place to place ... They were moving, trying to escape from us," Kayihura said as the police searched the flat, which had been cordoned off like a crime scene and a crowd gathered nearby to watch.

Ugandan police believe Islamic extremists killed Kagezi because of her public role as a senior prosecutor who handled international crimes and terror cases.

Kagezi was shot twice by gunmen on March 30 after she left her car — in which she was traveling with two of her children on the way home from work — to buy groceries in a Kampala suburb. After shooting her in the head and neck, the gunmen fled on a motorcycle during heavy vehicular traffic, according to local police.

The U.S. Embassy in Uganda described Kagezi as a "heroine in the forefront of the fight against crime and terrorism."

Kagezi had been a prosecutor in the ongoing trial of 12 suspects accused of being involved in the July 2010 bombings here in which more than 70 people were killed while watching a soccer World Cup final on TV.

Those bombings were carried out by al-Shabab, the Somali Islamic extremist group which opposes Uganda's military involvement in Somalia.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150408/lt-mexico-violence-c8db85539d.html

Ambush that killed 15 police in western Mexico a rarity

Apr 8, 12:02 AM (ET)
By MARK STEVENSON

(AP) Federal police stand next to a bullet riddled and burned car after a criminal gang...
Full Image

MEXICO CITY (AP) — An ambush that killed 15 state police officers in western Mexico appears to be a drug cartel's revenge attack and could herald a military-style offensive against government authorities.

The assault on a Jalisco state police convoy late Monday on a rural road between the Pacific coast resort of Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, the state capital, followed arrests earlier in the day and over the weekend of suspected members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. It also came a week after a failed attempt to kill state Security Commissioner Alejandro Solorio.

The assassination attempt "was the first response by organized crime to the clash in which state security forces killed the criminal Heriberto Acevedo Cardenas, nicknamed 'El Gringo,'" Solorio said at a news conference Tuesday. He said four suspects in that attack were turned over to federal authorities on Saturday and 11 more on Monday.

Monday night's ambush was a response to those arrests, Solorio said. He gave no details on how it was carried out, but local media said a vehicle was hijacked, parked across the two-lane road and set on fire to force the convoy to stop.

(AP) Map locates the state of Jalisco, Mexico.; 1c x 3 inches; 46.5 mm x 76 mm;...
Full Image
"The serious thing about this attack was that it was very well planned and orchestrated, with a military-style strategy," said Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "This was planned. A lot of gunmen were involved. They blocked the highway to surround them (police) and attack with military superiority."

Ambushes of state-level security officials and Mexican army patrols have been relatively rare, and the Jalisco attacks suggest the conflict in the western state is reaching a new level.

The cartel has been violent since it was founded in 2010 following the death of Jalisco-based Sinaloa cartel leader Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel.

But it was the first time a cartel appeared to be mounting a direct, head-on challenge to authorities, Benitez said. Gunmen from other cartels have been known to open fire on police and soldiers, but it is usually because they are being pursued and want to escape capture.

The cartel has been fighting the Knights Templar carter for territory in neighboring Michoacan state, which the Knights Templar once controlled, building an economic empire based on extortion, drug trafficking and illegal mining until police and vigilantes largely dismantled the gang in 2013 and 2014.

"It appears that the Jalisco cartel is getting stronger and wants to take over the role that the Knights Templar had," Benitez said.

In November 2013, Jalisco state authorities linked Jalisco New Generation to dozens of bodies discovered in mass graves in the community of La Barca near Lake Chapala, which is popular with Canadian and U.S. expatriates and tourists.

Officials believe the cartel was behind the dumping of 35 bodies on a busy street in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz in 2011, during a turf battle with the Zetas drug gang.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/russian-submarine-catches-fire/

Russian Submarine Catches Fire

Bad News for Russia’s Naval Ambitions?

By Franz-Stefan Gady
April 08, 2015

2 Shares
4 Comments

Today, RT reported that a fire broke out on a nuclear-powered submarine at the Zvezdochka ship repair center in the Arkhangelsk region in Northern Russia.

The incident occurred aboard the K-266 Oryol, an Oscar II-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSGN), which is part of Russia’s Northern Fleet. According to a spokesperson of the Zvezdochka dockyards, no weapons were on board when the fire broke out.

“The nuclear fuel from the ‘Orel’ was unloaded when the submarine arrived for maintenance to the dry dock. The reactor has been shut down. No workers or members of the crew were harmed during the fire,” Ilya Zhitomirsky, the spokesperson emphasized.

The fire allegedly started in a compartment close to the ship’s tern. Sputnik News notes that according to preliminary information from a law enforcement source, the fire was caused by welding operations. RT reports that welding operations were also the cause of a fire aboard the Delta-IV-class SSBN Yekaterinburg in December 2011.

The Oryol has been serving in Russia’s Northern Fleet for the past 21 years. In 2013, it was transported to the shipyard for a general overhaul, which was scheduled to be completed in 2016. As of now, it remains unclear how much damage the fire caused and in what way it will postpone the Oryol’s return to active duty.

As I reported two weeks ago, the Russian Navy is in the middle of an ambitious naval modernization program (see: “Russia to Upgrade 10 Nuclear Submarines by 2020”). In March, Russian Admiral Vladimir Chirkov, the navy’s commander-in-chief, announced that ten project 971 SSN Akula-class and project 949A SSGN Oscar II-class nuclear-powered submarines will be upgraded in the Zvezdochka shipyard in the northwest and in the Zvezda docks in Russia’s Far East.

The upgrades are supposed to expand the subs’ lifespan for another 15-20 years. Between 40 to 70 percent of Russian submarines are currently estimated to not be operational. The K-141 Kursk, which sank in August 2000 killing all on board, also belonged to the Oscar II-class.

One of the reasons for the modernization of the Soviet-era Oscar II-class submarines are delays in the project 885 Yasen-class SSGN program and the exorbitant costs of the new submarine. This class of Russian attack submarines was supposed to replace older Soviet-era multi-purpose nuclear submarine models by 2020.

The fire could be a further confirmation what many experts have noted in the past: Russia’s shipbuilding industry will not be able to keep up with Vladimir Putin’s aggressive 2020 naval procurement program. Indeed, some analysts estimate that Russian shipyards will only be capable of producing 50 to 70 percent of the weapons and equipment laid out in the plan over the next five years.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Interesting...one more reason not to fly


News_Executive @News_Executive · 31m 31 minutes ago

BREAKING: A Japan Airlines Boeing 777 jet make an emergency landing in Tokyo after mid-air engine shutdown, cause of shutdown still unknown.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 7m 7 minutes ago

AFGHANISTAN: Firefight breaks out between Afghan and #NATO security forces in east #Afghanistan - @LBCI_News_EN




ETA 5:23 AM CDT:

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 6m 6 minutes ago

UPDATE: Afghan soldier killed after fired at US troops in eastern #Afghanistan. No word of casualties among US forces - @WilliamsJon

 

[Lilbitsnana]

I wonder who is getting thrown under the bus now??


posted for fair use

Libya says ‘new elements’ in killing of U.S. ambassador

AFP, Benghazi
Wednesday, 8 April 2015

Libya’s internationally recognized parliament said Tuesday it has uncovered “new elements” behind the 2012 assassination of the U.S. ambassador when the American consulate was stormed in eastern city Benghazi.

“I have been tasked today with leading a team of inquiry,” Tareq Saqar al-Jeruchi, deputy head of the parliament’s security and defense committee, told AFP.

He said the team had “new elements on the real perpetrators of the attack” and would work closely with the FBI and Congressional commissions of inquiry, although he did not elaborate on the identities of the assailants.

A Libyan parliamentary delegation is to travel to the United States for consultations with members of Congress, Jeruchi said.

Christopher Stevens, the ambassador, and three other Americans were killed in the September 11, 2012 attack on the consulate that was said at the time to be the work of jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia, which Washington has branded a “terrorist” organization.

U.S. special forces seized a Libyan national, Ahmed Abu Khattala, as a chief suspect in a 2014 raid near Benghazi and handed him over to American judicial authorities.

Libya has been run by two governments and two parliaments since August, when an Islamist-backed militia alliance overran the capital Tripoli.

The government recognized by the international community fled to the country’s far east and set up in the city of Tobruk.

Last Update: Wednesday, 8 April 2015 KSA 00:12 - GMT 21:12

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...w-elements-in-killing-of-U-S-ambassador-.html

 

[almost ready]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/04/08/2015040800596.html

N.Korea Capable of Nuclear Strike at U.S., Military Leader Says

Top U.S. military officials believe North Korea is now capable of launching a nuclear-armed missile at the United States.

"Our assessment is that they have the ability to put a nuclear weapon on a KN-08 and shoot it at the homeland," Admiral William Gortney, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, told reporters Tuesday during a Pentagon briefing. "We assess that it's operational today, and so we practice to go against it."

Gortney cautioned that U.S. officials have yet to see Pyongyang test the KN-08, which so far has been displayed only during military parades. But he called the U.S. assessment a "prudent decision."

The "mobile nature" of the KN-08 has left U.S. officials concerned about losing "our ability to get the indications that something might occur," Gortney said. Still, he said he had "high confidence" that U.S. missile systems would be capable of defending the country from a potential North Korean strike.

This is not the first time U.S. officials have warned of the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

In a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, National Intelligence Director James Clapper warned that Pyongyang had taken "initial steps" toward fielding the KN-08.

As far back as October 2014, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, General Curtis Scaparrotti, was cautious in downplaying North Korean claims that it could deliver a nuclear warhead.

"They've had the right connections, and so I believe [they] have the capability to have miniaturized a device at this point," Scaparrotti said. "They have the technology to potentially actually deliver what they say they have."

A report issued Tuesday by the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said Pyongyang has about 1,000 ballistic missiles capable of reaching South Korea and Japan. But it also said North Korea faces "significant problems" with its longer-range missiles.

The report's authors concluded North Korea would need help from foreign technology to be able to hit the U.S. accurately.

VOA News / Apr. 08, 2015 08:00 KST

Question - about the "mobile nature" of the KN-08. Is this mobile as in transportable/launchable off a sea vessel, or the sort that is moved around on trucks around a country, rather than kept in a specific silo/hold?

Sounds like sabre-rattling is picking up with the recent missile shootings off NK. Just curious what might be up their sleeves.

Thanks, HC and Lilbitsnana. WOW. When you put it all together it is clear that hot spots aren't cooling and more new areas of open warfare are popping up all the time. The idea that the official government of Libya is now skirted off to Tobruk is quite concerning. As are the grinding away of life and civility in such areas as Mexico and Mali. Tragic for the populations caught up in the mess of it.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

The KN-08 is road mobile, I'm not sure if it can be launched from the sea. (they do have one they can launch from sea, but I don't know the range, etc)

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 10m 10 minutes ago

CONCERNING: #Iran Navy’s 34th fleet sets sail for Gulf of #Aden http://ptv.io/1qY3 #Yemen - @PressTV


I know it's PressTV, but it's the only article I have right now.

posted for fair use
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2015/04/08/405243/Iran-Navy-sends-fleet-to-Gulf-of-Aden

Iran Navy’s 34th fleet sets sail for Gulf of Aden

Wed Apr 8, 2015 9:15AM


The 34th fleet of the Iranian Navy has left for the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab Strait in line with the country’s policy of safeguarding naval routes for vessels in the region.

The flotilla, which comprises the Bushehr logistic vessel and Alborz destroyer, left Iran’s southern port city of Bandar Abbas on Wednesday, Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said on the sidelines of a ceremony to deploy the fleet.

The commander said that the 34th Fleet is sent on a mission “to provide [safety for] Iran’s shipping lines and protect the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests in the high seas.”

Sayyari said that the flotilla also seeks to ensure safety for the vessels against pirates.

The Navy observes international law while conducting its mission in the north of the Indian Sea with full power, the commander stressed.

In recent years, Iran’s Navy has increased its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.

In line with international efforts against piracy, the Iranian Navy has also been conducting patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 in order to safeguard merchant containers and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran or other countries.

Iran’s Navy has managed to foil several attacks on both Iranian and foreign tankers during its missions in international waters.

AR/NN/HRB

 

[Lilbitsnana]

more on above post

News_Executive @News_Executive · 11m 11 minutes ago

Breaking: Iran has deployed Two warships, the Alborz destroyer and Bushehr support vessel in the Gulf of #Aden off #Yemen's coast.


ETA:

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 32m 32 minutes ago

Iranian commander: "We won't allow anyone to drive out our fleet of warships from the international waters" http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940119000554 … - @L0gg0l


posted for fair use

Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:36

Iranian Navy's 34th Flotilla Off to Gulf of Aden

TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iranian Navy's 34th flotilla of warships left Bandar Abbas port, in Southern Hormozgan province, for the Gulf of Aden on Wednesday to protect the country's cargo ships and oil tankers against pirates.

The Navy's 34th Fleet, comprising Alborz destroyer and Bushehr helicopter-carrier warship, will conduct anti-piracy patrols in the high seas and Gulf of Aden.

The mission of the 34th fleet will last about three months in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Earlier today, Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari rejected media reports alleging that the country's warships have been driven out of the Gulf of Aden by Egyptian warships, stressing that regional conflicts do not affect the Iranian Navy's missions.

"The Navy warships powerfully safeguard the Islamic Republic's interests in free waters and will be deployed in any region if necessary," Sayyari told FNA in Bandar Abbas port city, Southern Iran, on the sidelines of a ceremony to welcome the Navy's 33rd fleet of warships dispatched to the high seas after a 77-day mission.

Stressing that regional conflicts don’t have any effect on the mission of the Iranian fleet of warships in the international waters, he said, "We deploy our warships in free waters based on the international laws and combat sea terrorism and safeguard our country's shipping lines very powerfully."

Sayyari underlined that Iran doesn't allow anyone to drive out its fleet of warships from the international waters.

In relevant remarks late in March, Sayyari dismissed allegations that the Iranian flotilla had received warnings by the Egyptian warships, and said, "The Iranian Navy warships are patrolling in the Northern Indian Ocean and fulfilling their missions with full force and observing the international laws … and they do not allow any foreign warship to warn them and shoo them away… ."

Also last month, Commander of Iran's 33rd fleet of warships Commodore Ahmadi Kermanshahi rejected the report, saying the Iranian warships had no contact with Egyptian vessels and when the website was making these allegations, they were in India's Cochin port.

He underlined that the presence of Iran's naval warships in the Gulf of Aden is aimed at establishing security for cargo ships and sending message of peace and friendship to the regional countries.

On Tuesday, the Iranian Navy's 33rd fleet of warships dispatched to the high seas on a 77-day mission returned home and berthed in Bandar Abbas port in Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.

The Iranian Navy's 33rd flotilla of warships, comprised of martyr vice-admiral Naqdi destroyer and Bandar Abbas logistic warship left Bandar Abbas port for the Gulf of Aden late January to protect the country's cargo ships and oil tankers against pirates.

Iran's 33rd fleet of warships berthed in Cochin Port, India, on March 24. Earlier, the flotilla had docked in Tanjung Priok port of Indonesia and Colombo port of Sri Lanka in February.

The flotilla of warships ended its mission in the Gulf of Aden, and returned home today after tracing and identifying 782 cargo ships, 29 navy vessels and 5 fighter jets during its mission. It also had communications with 20 oil tankers which appreciated the Iranian fleet's measures and efforts in protecting security in international waters.

The 33rd flotilla returned to Iran after 77 days of missions in the Sea of Oman, North of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Red Sea.

The Iranian Navy has been conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008, when Somali raiders hijacked the Iranian-chartered cargo ship, MV Delight, off the coast of Yemen.

According to UN Security Council resolutions, different countries can send their warships to the Gulf of Aden and coastal waters of Somalia against the pirates and even with prior notice to Somali government enter the territorial waters of that country in pursuit of Somali sea pirates.

The Gulf of Aden - which links the Indian Ocean with the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea - is an important energy corridor, particularly because Persian Gulf oil is shipped to the West via the Suez Canal.

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940119000554

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 7m 7 minutes ago

AFGHANISTAN: Firefight breaks out between Afghan and #NATO security forces in east #Afghanistan - @LBCI_News_EN




ETA 5:23 AM CDT:

Conflict News @rConflictNews · 6m 6 minutes ago

UPDATE: Afghan soldier killed after fired at US troops in eastern #Afghanistan. No word of casualties among US forces - @WilliamsJon

UPDATE

News_Executive @News_Executive · 2h 2 hours ago

Breaking: An Afghan soldier opened fire on US troops, 3 US soldiers were wounded before the the Afghan soldier was shot dead.

News_Executive @News_Executive · 16m 16 minutes ago

Update: One of the US soldiers who was injured died of his wounds.

 

[fairbanksb]

USAF’s B-52 Stratofortress bombers participate in Exercise Polar Growl
8 April 2015

B-52 bomber

Two pairs of US Air Force's (USAF) B-52 Stratofortress bombers participated in a US Strategic Command (STRATCOM)-directed long-range exercise over the Arctic and North Sea regions.

The training mission was code-named Polar Growl. It saw B-52s complete simultaneous, round-trip sorties from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, to the Arctic and North Sea regions, respectively.

STRATCOM commander admiral Cecil Haney said: "These flights, demonstrating the credible and flexible ability of our strategic bomber force in internationally recognised flight information regions, are the culmination of months of planning and coordination.
"Exercises and operations such as these bomber flights enable and enhance relationships with STRATCOM’s allies and partners."

"They are one of many ways we demonstrate interoperability, compliance with national and international protocols, and due regard for the safety of all aircraft sharing the air space.

"Exercises and operations such as these bomber flights enable and enhance relationships with our allies and partners, and allow others to understand what capabilities US Strategic Command brings to the equation."

Each of the two phases of the exercise provided unique training opportunities for the aircrews, while validating the bomber force's command and control apparatus' ability to support two synchronised flight paths.

The aircrews flying the North Sea route conducted dissimilar air intercept manoeuvres with fighter aircraft belonging to the air forces of Canada, Netherlands, and the UK.

In addition, the crews on the Arctic leg of the mission transited around the North Pole, providing the crews invaluable training in polar navigation.

USAF 343rd Bomb Squadron instructor radar navigator major Nathan Barnhart said: "The long-range nature of the mission, coupled with the opportunity to interact in real-time with allied aircraft was an invaluable experience that simply can't be replicated out of the cockpit.

"Training like this ensures we are ready to respond to any and all mission directives across the globe."

Image: A USAF B-52H Stratofortress receives fuel from a New Hampshire Air National Guard KC-135R Stratotanker near the eastern coast of Canada. Photo: courtesy of Air National Guard photo / Airman Ashlyn J Correia.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...an-readies-test-new-stealth-fighter-jet-12580

Watch Out, China: Japan Readies Test of New Stealth Fighter Jet[1]

A new report says Japan will test a protoype of its ATD-X project this summer.

Zachary Keck [2][3]
April 8, 2015
Comments 156

Japan is preparing to test its first ever domestically built stealth fighter jet, Chinese and Taiwanese media are reporting.

“The highly anticipated F-3, Japan's first domestically-made stealth jet, is aiming to conduct test flights this summer,” the Taiwan-based Want China Times reported [4], citing a story in the PLA Daily, the official publication of the Chinese military.

Japan has been building a prototype stealth fighter as part of its advanced technology demonstrator-experimental (ATD-X) program. Some of the first images [5] of the prototype were first published on the web last year.

The ATD-X program, which is being run by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), has run into myriad different problems. Indeed, Japan had originally intended to conduct the first flight test of the jet in 2014, however, Tokyo was forced to postpone the test due to “engine control” problems. Back in January, Flight Global reported that, because of these problems, the F-3 wouldn’t conduct its first test “until late this year at the earliest.”

As the name suggests, the ATD-X program aims to develop new technologies to enable Japan to build its own fifth and sixth generation fighter jets in the coming decades. The program was started in part because the United States imposed an export ban on its first fifth generation stealth fighter jet, the F-22.

According to Fox Trot Alpha, along with seeking to develop stealth technologies, “the ATD-X will test include a second generation AESA radar [6], advanced ‘fly-by-fiber-optic’ flight control system that can compensate for battle damage and control surface failures, [and] an advanced ESM [7]and ECM [8] suite.” Flight Global further reports that “two IHI-made XF5-1 low-bypass turbofan engines power the ATD-X, each providing a maximum of 5t (11,000lb) of thrust.”

The ATD-X project is expected to cost at least Y39.2 billion ($330 million), and conclude sometime in 2017. Ultimately, Japan hopes the technological innovations gained from the ATD-X project will enable it to produce the F-3, a fifth generation fighter jet. The F-3s are expected to replace Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s Mitsubishi F-2 and F-15J fleets. However, since the F-3s are not expected to enter service until the 2030s, Japan recently upgraded its F-2s— which it stopped producing in 2011— to carry medium range AAM-4B radar-guided air to air missiles.

Japan’s Air Force is also procuring Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth fighter jets. It currently has 42 F-35s on order, but has said it could purchase [9] more of the jets if the price falls. The F-35s will be used to replace some of Japan’s aging fleet of Mitsubishi F-15Js.

Zachary Keck is managing editor of The National Interest. You can find him on Twitter @ZacharyKeck [10].

Hide The Buzz

Publication

Tags
F-3 [11]Japan [12]Japan Air Self-Defense Force [13]ATD-X [14]
Topics
Security [15]
Regions
Asia [16] [3]

Source URL (retrieved on April 8, 2015): http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...an-readies-test-new-stealth-fighter-jet-12580

Links:
[1] http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...an-readies-test-new-stealth-fighter-jet-12580
[2] http://nationalinterest.org/profile/zachary-keck
[3] http://twitter.com/share
[4] http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20150407000126&cid=1101
[5] http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-first-clear-pictures-of-japans-stealth-fighter-emer-1604027972#
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_electronically_scanned_array
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Support_Measures
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure
[9] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...5-jets-price-falls-onodera-says/#.VSU0IpTF-aY
[10] https://twitter.com/zacharykeck
[11] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/f-3
[12] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/japan
[13] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/japan-air-self-defense-force
[14] http://nationalinterest.org/tag/atd-x
[15] http://nationalinterest.org/topic/security
[16] http://nationalinterest.org/region/asia