Tag: war

We can see that the Democrats and the media are in full panic mode with the desperation of their toothless attacks on the God-Emperor. What we don’t know is why. It may be due to the way in which the Obama administration is being shown to have colluded with various foreign governments while it engaged in illegal spying on the Trump campaign.

As Democrats ramp up their impeachment efforts against President Trump, Fox News contributor Dan Bongino said the party is starting to panic at the possibility of being linked to illegal spying, as the Department of Justice inspector general prepares to release his report on the matter.

“It’s never going to stop. I mean, the republic is dying a slow death,” he said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “We’re on life support here… They’re panicking because the IG report’s about to come out, which is about to expose a massive government spying operation against Donald Trump.

“Here’s the key takeaway — in collusion with foreign governments,” Bongino continued. “That’s why they’re panicking. And they’re panicking because… what the Obama administration did is 1,000 times worse than what they’re alleging Donald Trump did.”

The fact that a senior Twitter executive has been exposed as British military intelligence isn’t going to make it harder for the American public to believe that these various agents of the Deep State committed treason. Gordon McMillan, Twitter’s Head of Editorial for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, is a reserve captain in the 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psyops unit.

The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.

Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences…. The 77th Brigade’s headquarters is located west of London. It brought together a number of existing military units such as the Media Operations Group and the 15 Psychological Operations Group.

The British army’s website describes the 77th Brigade as “an agent of change” which aims to “challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries”.

We learn more and more about the corruption of the USA every day. This is why President Trump’s popularity is steadily growing.

Don’t even think about reacting, let alone overreacting, to Trump helping out a political ally in an election fight. Not for at least two days.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a possible mutual defense treaty between the two nations, a move that could bolster Netanyahu’s re-election bid just days before Israelis go to the polls.

“I had a call today with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the possibility of moving forward with a Mutual Defense Treaty, between the United States and Israel, that would further anchor the tremendous alliance between our two countries,” Trump said on Twitter.

He added that he looked forward to continuing those discussions later this month on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.

Netanyahu thanked Trump, saying in a tweet that Israel “has never had a greater friend in the White House,” and adding that he looked forward to meeting at the U.N. “to advance a historic Defense Treaty between the United States and Israel.”

Then again, perhaps things are a little more complicated than they look on the surface….

In a televised interview with Israel’s Channel 12 later on Saturday, Netanyahu made a direct appeal to voters based on the treaty. “I’m going to get us a defence pact that will provide us with security for centuries but for that I need your votes,” he said.

What is Netanyahu working toward, a defense pact with China? He has to know that the USA won’t even be around for decades, let alone centuries.

Flawless meme. 10/10.

The US military simply doesn’t have the ability to fight low-intensity wars in the Middle East anymore, let alone engage in a three-front war against Russia, China, and Iran.

The US fleet has not been in a war since 1945, the air forces since 1975. nor the Army in a hard fight since Vietnam. Bombing defenseless peasants, the chief function of the American military, is not war.

In extended periods of peace, which includes the bombing of peasants, a military tends to assume that no major war will come during the careers of those now in uniform. Commanders consequently do what makes their lives easy, what they must do to get through the day and have reasonable fitness reports. This does not include pointing out inadequacies of training or equipment. Nor does it include recommending large expenditures to remedy deficiencies. Nor does it include recommending very expensive mobilization exercises that would divert money from new weapons.

Thus an armored command has enough replacement tracks for training, but not enough for tanks in hard use in extended combat. When the crunch comes, it turns out that getting more track requires a new contract with the manufacturer, who has shut down the production line. The same is true for air filters, there not being much sand at Fort Campbell but a lot in Iraq. Things as mundane as MRATs and boots are not there.in real-war quantities.

GAU-8 ammo is in short supply because theory says the F-35 will do tank busting. The Navy runs out of TLAMs early on and discovers that manufacturing cruise missiles takes time. Lots of it.

And of course some things simply don’t work as expected. Military history buffs will remember the Mark XIV torpedo, the Mark VI exploder of WWII, and the travails of the Tinosa.

This may explain why Netanyahu backed down rather than invade Lebanon after Hezbollah sent clear signals that it would fight rather than retreat. And why the Mad Mustache’s services are no longer required by the White House.

The God-Emperor axes Mustache John Bolton:

President Donald Trump has fired National Security Adviser John Bolton after a string of disagreements between the two over how the U.S. should handle North Korea and Iran.

Trump announced on Twitter that he had asked for Bolton’s resignation, which he received this morning, after the president had “disagreed with many of his suggestions.”

“I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning,” Trump said on Twitter.

You can probably imagine how the conversation that preceded his departure went:

Trump: How should we deal with Afghanistan?

Bolton: Send more troops! We need more troops!

Trump: Easy, ‘stache. All right, moving on. What about Iran?

Bolton: Bomb them! Bomb bomb bomb them! Then send in the troops!

Trump: How many troops do you think we will need?

Bolton: All of them! Bring back the draft. Draft the girls! And the Canadians!

Trump: I don’t think we can actually draft Canadians.

Bolton: WHY DO YOU HATE ISRAEL?

Trump:  I almost dread to ask this, but do you have any thoughts concerning the trade war with China?

Bolton: All the bombs! All the troops! All the nukes! Rain fire upon the land! Blood for the Blood God!

Trump: (picks up phone) Yeah, Mike, we seem to have a little problem here…

Prof. Stephen Walt observes, contra Fukuyama, that history didn’t end in 1989:

As a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt has a front row seat to the discussions, debates, and human types that dominate U.S. foreign policy. His assessment is bleak. With the leading lights of both parties wedded to the consensus that he calls “liberal hegemony,” the world’s predicted embrace of democratic capitalism and peaceful relations has not materialized. Instead, liberal hegemony has yielded long and inconclusive wars in the Middle East, regime change operations that have led to failed states in Libya and Yemen, U.S. military spending that dwarfs that of the rest of the world, resentment and passive resistance from our ostensible allies, along with increasing hostility from Russia and China.

In short, Walt makes a persuasive case that liberal hegemony is not succeeding, even on its own terms….

Walt details the practice of liberal hegemony since the end of the cold war, when the United States found itself in the position of being the “sole superpower.” He explains that “the pursuit of liberal hegemony involved (1) preserving U.S. primacy, especially in the military sphere; (2) expanding the U.S. sphere of influence; and (3) promoting liberal norms of democracy and human rights.” This approach continued through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, in spite of their superficial differences. Indeed, the bipartisan hostility to Trump shows how much consensus on foreign policy prevailed before his election, in spite of the heated debate over the Iraq War in the mid-2000s.

The early fruits of liberal hegemony include the ill-fated Somalia mission and the later intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. But most infamously, liberal hegemony provided justification for the Iraq War and contributed to the never-ending Afghanistan campaign. In both cases, liberal hegemony did not counsel limited punitive expeditions, nor would it conceive of classifying certain areas of the world as ungovernable “shitholes” that needed to be cordoned off and avoided. Instead, we would stay until these countries were stable democracies—100 years if need be. As George W. Bush ambitiously put the matter in his second inaugural address, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

One legitimate criticism of this strategy, for which we have real time confirmation, is that in addition to not achieving results in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, these expansive aims have left little reserve for dealing with a genuine emerging competitor: China. Indeed, far from being prepared and equipped to counter a rising China, the NATO expansion counseled by liberal hegemony has driven the otherwise-declining power of Russia into China’s arms, while, at the same time, short-sighted free trade policies have expanded China’s economy while deindustrializing our own.

Liberal hegemony has become simply another name for rule by neoclown. And since the neoclown objectives have remained essentially unchanged since Trotsky advocated world revolution, liberal hegemony will never accomplish its stated goals because it’s not even working towards them. So, the important conclusion is not that liberal hegemony HAS NOT worked as advertised, it is that it CANNOT POSSIBLY do so.

I’ll have to think through this before reaching any firm conclusions, but I’m dubious that what has been called the Chinese “nuclear option” of selling its T-bills is likely to be a very effective tactic.

If there is any further pushback from the US on any of these Chinese projects in Iran, then Beijing will invoke in full force the ‘nuclear option’ of selling all or a significant part of its US$1.4 trillion holding of US Treasury Bills, with a major chunk of the paper due to be sold in September on this basis. This massive holding of these bonds – through which the US finances its economy and is an important factor both in the value of the dollar and therefore in the health of US international companies especially – has been used as a bargaining chip before by China, especially when it feels threatened. Back in 2007, just before the great financial crisis, a number of senior Chinese figures at various state-run think tanks – through which China often signals its big geopolitical threats – stated that the large-scale selling of this massive Treasury Bill holding would trigger a dollar crash, a huge spike in bond yields, the collapse of the housing market and stock market chaos.

Such a tactic would neatly fit into China’s overall strategy to have the renminbi challenge the US dollar’s status as the key global reserve currency and the prime currency for global energy transactions. “The long-planned sequencing for this was inclusion in the SDR {Special Drawing Rights] mix, which happened in 2016, increasing use as a trading currency, which followed that, use as the key currency of an international energy trading exchange, which has occurred with the creation of the renminbi-denominated Shanghai International Energy Exchange in last year, and the calls from big oil producers and other major trading nations to use the renminbi, which has been happening over the past few years,” the head of a New York-based commodities hedge fund told OilPrice.com. Only recently, Leonid Mikhelson, chief executive officer of Russian oil major, Novatek, said that future sales to China denominated in renminbi is under consideration and that US sanctions accelerate the process of Russia trying to switch away from US dollar-centric oil and gas trading and the damage from potential sanctions that go with it. “This has been discussed for a while with Russia’s largest trading partners such as India and China, and even Arab countries are starting to think about it… If they do create difficulties for our Russian banks then all we have to do is replace dollars,” he said. “The trade war between the US and China will only accelerate the process,” he added.

At first glance, it looks to me the potential US response of simply repudiating its debt and declaring those T-bills to be of no value will be considerably more harmful to China than selling the debt will be to the USA.

Those who are focused on posturing and threats never seem to keep in mind that the enemy always gets a vote.

Both the USA and China are seeking to take advantage of unrest within the enemy’s borders, as a lengthy article by Strategy Page elucidates.

While 2018 was a bad year for the economy, 2019 is not much of an improvement. China hoped to maintain GDP growth of at least six percent while at the same time continuing to safely reduce (“deleverage) the huge number of bad loans local governments and corrupt banks have taken on over the last decade. The economic decline in 2018 could be measured in many aspects of economic activity (production, orders for raw materials, finished goods or construction and so on) and sentiments (of people running the economy and consumers). Chinese stock markets were down over 30 percent by the end of 2018 and for the first time in three years, profits of industrial firms took a dive. At the same time there were similar shocks to the American economy, but much more limited. Chinese and American leaders have not been able to agree on how to resolve trade and intellectual property disputes. China so far resists making any trade concessions. There is also supposed to be a halt in Chinese theft of American IP (Intellectual property) and commercial espionage in general. Until now the Chinese would often flagrantly cheat and then deny that they had done any such thing. This has been going on for decades and the recent American trade war is meant to deal with this long festering issue.

China is apparently hoping to be patient and take advantage of the current political turmoil in the United States. This has made most of the American media and many American politicians reluctant to criticize China mainly because American mass media is obsessed with overthrowing the current U.S. government. China sees an opportunity here and is taking it.

Damn him, deify him, or be disappointed in him, the observable fact of the matter is that God-Emperor Trump is about the only force standing in between the USA and its headlong plunge into economic contraction, violent civil conflict, and eventual collapse.

The schools are converged. The churches are converged. The corporations are soulless, corrupt vampires. The politicians are owned, leashed, and broken to heel. The military is converged.

Après Trump le déluge.

Indian Prime Minister Modi is attempting a bold political stroke intended to extinguish the spirit of Kashmir’s independence and is utilizing some strategies that might strike the American observer as being more than a little familiar:

Internally, Modi’s bold re-designation of Kashmir as a union territory with a legislature is a dream fulfilled for Indian nationalistic sentiment which never accepted the compromise provisions in the Indian Constitution under Articles 370 and 35A, wherein Muslim-majority Kashmir had been allowed a parallel Constitution with a flag of its own. State governments in Kashmir had powers over law enforcement, residence and property rights. Central laws had no validity in Kashmir unless the local legislature approved them.

In effect, the autonomous status turned Kashmir into a ghetto with a mentality of uniqueness and distinctness from the rest of India. It strengthened the nearly seven million Kashmiri Muslims’ feeling that they are not Indians but a different nationality who deserve to keep Indians out of their paradisiacal enclave except as visiting tourists….

Over time, the halfway house existence of Kashmir as a state within India and yet a nation that does not emotionally belong to India failed to meet both India’s objectives and Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations. Waves of anti-India uprisings and insurgencies, supported from across the border by Pakistan, kept Kashmir burning. Autonomy had become a slippery slope for separatism, jihadist extremism and alienation of Kashmiri Muslims from the rest of India.

Modi’s bet is that by corralling Kashmir under tighter central government control, he will marginalise the secessionist politicians there, open Kashmir up for the return of Hindu Kashmiri minorities who had been ethnically cleansed by jihadists in the late 1980s, and alter the demographic mix in Kashmir through settlement of Indians of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Since autonomy backfired, Modi is saying ‘enough with appeasement’ and aiming for assimilation and complete integration of Kashmir. Demographically, the idea is to dissolve Kashmiri separatism in a sea of Indian nationalism through the intermixing of populations, blunting the sharp edge of separatism that comes from lack of ethnic heterogeneity in the Kashmir Valley, where 97 percent of the population is Muslim…. Modi’s determined push for total absorption of Indian Kashmir into India proper presents an existential challenge to the long-entrenched Pakistani strategy of fanning alienation of Kashmiri Muslims against India. If Kashmiri Muslims are reorganised and no longer grouped together as an exclusive ethnic entity, Pakistan will find it a lot harder to foment the flame of self-determination.

Modi is redefining the very meaning and identity of ‘self’ in Kashmir, a process that will take years and decades, but whose endpoint will be dilution of pro-independence and pro-Pakistan affiliations in the reshuffled Kashmiri society of the future. Kashmiri Muslims may become further alienated from India as a result of this makeover, but Modi is calculating that, in years to come, they will no longer be numerically so dominant as to stymie Indian sovereignty.

Demographically dissolving a nation through the intermixing of populations and ethnic heterogeniety just sounds so very… 1965?

Anyhow, this strategy will almost certainly lead to war in Kashmir. And elsewhere.

It looks increasingly as if the world wants war, despite the social mood metric of the stock market being at an all-time high.

New Delhi has declared it is revoking a decades-old constitutional provision that granted special powers to the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. The move comes amid ongoing flare-ups between India and Pakistan over the region.

The majority-Muslim region that became part of India in the times of decolonization, and has been a point of dispute between India and Pakistan ever since, has enjoyed broad autonomy under the Indian constitution. It is the only Indian state that was allowed to have its own constitution.

All laws passed by the Indian parliament, except for those regarding defense, communications, and foreign policy, had to first be ratified by the local legislature before coming into force in Kashmir. Apart from that, only local residents could purchase land or property in the state or hold office there.

This will no longer be the case starting Monday, New Delhi has announced. A resolution to revoke Kashmir’s special status was introduced on Monday by Home Minister Amit Shah and enshrined in a decree signed by President Ram Nath Kovind, the ceremonial head of India.

Translation: The Hindu nationalists are intending to crack down hard on India’s Muslims. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were large-scale population transfers in the cards. Remember, we’re living at the end of one of the greatest global peacetime expansions in human history. The correction will therefore likely be of similar scale and scope.