Tag: war

Syria, because North Korea

It increasingly appears that the Syrian attack was intended to put pressure on China to end the North Korean nuclear threat.

April 11, 2017: A Chinese daily newspaper (Global Times) known for being a state-controlled media outlet used to test new ideas published an item today pointing out that if North Korea does not abandon its nuclear weapons program (which is seen as a threat to China) then China will bomb the nuclear facilities and North Korea will have to live with that or suffer further military and economic consequences they cannot respond to (by attacking China). This article also warned the United States not to contemplate doing this, as North Korea was for neighbor China to deal with, not some distant superpower. Within hours the article was removed from the Global Times website, but many people had seen it and it still existed in Google cache. In other words, China was telling North Korea that stronger measures from China were now a possibility. At the same time the U.S. was making it clear that the kind of attack on Syria the U.S. recently carried out could be tried on North Korea. China agrees that it might come to that but they insist that the bombs or missiles be Chinese.

My current thinking is that the attack on Syria was intended to let Premier Xi know that Trump meant what he was saying about North Korea, and that if China did not swiftly address the situation, the US naval forces being sent to the Sea of Japan would be utilized instead. This also means that the US will have additional assets in place if North Korea were to respond to a Chinese attack by attacking South Korea.

I’ve never thought it was an accident that the attack took place during the meeting between Trump and Xi. It also tends to answer the question that has been plaguing the Trump-doubters, which is why Trump would suddenly appear to do an about-face on Syria. But Trump still doesn’t care about Syria or see it in the national interest, he simply needed something to blow up in order to make it clear to Xi that he would actually follow through on his threats. And I think Trump actually agrees with the Chinese in that he, too, would prefer that any bombs or missiles dropped on North Korea be Chinese rather than American.

If this is the correct interpretation of events, and if the Syria attack causes the Chinese to remove the Kim dynasty from power in North Korea, it will be seen as a brilliant grand strategic move on the God-Emperor’s part. It will also demonstrate that Trump not only is not controlled by the neocons, but that he doesn’t need them at all.

“We’re not going into Syria”

The God-Emperor spells it out:

Amid complaints that his aides are saying different things about Syria and his policy is confusing, President Trump emphatically cleared the air. “We’re not going into Syria,” he told me yesterday in an exclusive interview. “Our policy is the same — it hasn’t changed. We’re not going into Syria.”

He was especially upset that Syria had used chemical weapons after supposedly destroying all its stockpiles under a deal President Obama signed in 2013 and repeatedly boasted about. I asked whether that fact gave him more pause about Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

“I don’t need more pause about Iran,” Trump said. “It was the single worst deal ever. It’s a disgrace that a deal like that was even signed. It made Iran a power from a country that was ready to fall apart.”

He wasn’t finished. “Iran won’t honor its deal. Instead of saying, ‘Thank you very much for saving our country,’ they’ve been emboldened.”

Noting those problems and North Korea’s threatening aggression, Trump said, “I knew I was left a mess, but it’s worse than I thought.”

We’ll see whether he stands by that statement. But regardless, it’s clear that he hasn’t been entirely captured or convinced by the neocons, or he wouldn’t come out publicly and say that.

You don’t say

My proposed scenario of a joint US-Chinese effort against North Korea is looking considerably less out there than it did three days ago:

According to Chosun, a Korean news agency, the People’s Republic of China has moved an estimated 150,000 troops to the border of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) in order to prepare for “unforeseen circumstances.”

Among such unforeseen circumstances?  The possibility of “military action” by the United States.

Over the weekend, U.S. president Donald Trump ordered the U.S.S. Carl Vinson (CVN – 70) – a 1980 Nimitz-class aircraft carrier – and three guided-missile destroyers to break off planned exercises in Australia and head toward the Korean peninsula.

This redirection was ostensibly ordered in response to North Korea’s latest missile test – in which a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile called the Pukguksong-2 was successfully fired for the second time.

Both North Korean missile tests took place as Trump was welcoming key Asian leaders for meetings at his Winter White House in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

The Chinese military posturing comes two months after its government announced the immediate suspension of coal imports from North Korea – cutting off a vital economic lifeline for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

This doesn’t mean I’m correct. It doesn’t mean that the God-Emperor isn’t sending 150,000 troops to Syria in order to attack Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime there.  But it does demonstrate why it’s probably best to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut when the God-Emperor does something you don’t understand.

The next target

First, a roundup of some other people’s thoughts. Zerohedge on the intelligence community’s perspective:

Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.

Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.”

Giraldi said his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an accidental release of the poison gas after an Al Qaeda arms depot was hit by a Russian airstrike.

“The intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have been giving … which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels – now these are rebels that are, of course, connected with Al Qaeda – where the rebels were storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an explosion that resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear.”

Giraldi said the anger within the intelligence community over the distortion of intelligence to justify Trump’s military retaliation was so great that some covert officers were considering going public.

“People in both the agency [the CIA] and in the military who are aware of the intelligence are freaking out about this because essentially Trump completely misrepresented what he already should have known – but maybe he didn’t – and they’re afraid that this is moving toward a situation that could easily turn into an armed conflict,” Giraldi said before Thursday night’s missile strike. “They are astonished by how this is being played by the administration and by the U.S. media.”

I tend to favor the Russian accounts because the Russians have repeatedly proven to be reliable with regards to Syrian events, while the US has repeatedly been caught pushing false narratives and even false flags. Remember the “Russian attack” on the aid convoy that abruptly disappeared from the news once it became apparent that the US drones had blown up the convoy? It was all over the international news one day and utterly gone the next. And as anyone who has read Murakami’s Underground knows, whatever the reported chemical was, it was not sarin.

Mike Cernovich reports that was McMaster serving as a Petraeus stand-in, not Mattis or Kushner, who was primarily responsible for the Syrian attack:

Current National Security Adviser Herbert Raymond “H. R.” McMaster is manipulating intelligence reports given to President Donald Trump, Cernovich Media can now report. McMaster is plotting how to sell a massive ground war in Syria to President Trump with the help of disgraced former CIA director and convicted criminal David Petraeus, who mishandled classified information by sharing documents with his mistress.

As NSA, McMaster’s job is to synthesize intellience reports from all other agencies. President Trump is being given an inaccurate picture of the situation in Syria, as McMaster is seeking to involve the U.S. in a full scale war in Syria. The McMaster-Petraeus plan calls for 150,000 American ground troops in Syria….

McMaster’s friends in the media, as part of a broader strategy to increase McMaster’s power, have claimed Jared Kushner and Bannon had a major falling out. In fact Kushner and Bannon are united in their opposition to McMaster’s plan. If McMaster and Petraeus have their way, America will find itself in another massive war in the Middle East.

It’s certainly interesting to hear that Kushner and Bannon are still de facto allies. And now, since others appear to have noticed the same things that I have and gone public with it, I’ll post what I wrote to a friend several days ago:

Obviously, I don’t know what is happening. But I strongly suspect all this Syria nonsense is a feint to cover an upcoming US-China attack on North Korea.


We’re all hearing deployment news from contacts in the military. But if you look at where the carriers are, the signs point to action in the Pacific, not the Middle East. If you look at the map of the Korean Peninsula, it would make sense for the US to defend the South Korean border, then provide air support and perform amphibious operations from the Sea of Japan while China attacks from the north and from the Yellow Sea.


I think the fact that Trump and Putin are publicly engaged in this very angsty sabre-rattling over virtually nothing in Syria while Xi is in Florida is potentially significant. Trump and Putin play out the little Syrian charade, Trump explains it to Xi, and then the US Navy has the greenlight to go after the lunatics before Tokyo, Moscow, or Beijing get nuked.

This appears to be wrong about the Syrian action a feint; the God-Emperor has come out very noisily against North Korea and expressed satisfaction with an operation that appears to have accomplished precisely nothing. It looks more like a warning to a third party. Therefore, I conclude that the Syrian strike may have achieved two goals for him.

  1. Calling the neocons’ bluff. They were all in favor of this attack and claimed it would accomplish something significant. Obviously, they knew it wouldn’t, but hoped it would provoke a response from either Assad or Putin that would permit further entanglement and a justification for an invasion. That didn’t happen, and now the President can tell them that he already took their advice and it did not work as they predicted.
  2. Putting pressure on Kim. I don’t know what happened beyond what we all know from the news, but something that has come out of North Korea recently appears to have all the world leaders rattled. Japan’s Abe was just at the White House. China’s Xi was actually there during the Syrian strike and took no offense at what the some in the media tried to portray as disrespect. Notice in particular how Trump stressed that the Syrian attack proved that he is a man of his word just prior to launching some very serious threats at Kim.

I further observe that the media is now widely reporting what I was already observing, which is that the US naval elements, which are always the core of any large-scale US military assault, are now stronger in the Pacific than they are in the Gulf.

“a massive joint naval exercise involving Japan, South Korea and the US was being held this week aimed at countering the threat from North Korean submarines”

Where I was clearly wrong was that I was expecting a feint followed quickly by a hard-hitting surprise attack. It appears, however, that the God-Emperor is going to attempt to negotiate first, while carrying a big stick in his hand. Of course, even with a strong US naval presence in the Sea of Japan, an attack from the north by the Chinese would probably come as a big surprise to the North Koreans.

Shouldn’t the God-Emperor put American interests first? Well, that’s just it. There are no American interests in Syria. But it’s simply not possible to say the same with any degree of certainty about the North Korean situation. If – if – China and Russia are both signing on, as appears to be the case, then it behooves us to not rush to any judgment until we know more about the situation.

The constant Right

Both the Alt-Right and the civic nationalists are, not unreasonably, unhappy with the God-Emperor in light of the attack on Syria.

Many former Donald Trump supporters have turned on the President after his decision to retaliate against the Assad regime for its chemical weapons attack.

Nigel Farage, Milo Yiannopoulos Katie Hopkins, right-wing vlogger Paul Joseph Watson, Ukip leader Paul Nuttall and Ukip donor Arron Banks are among the Trump supporters who have been disappointed by their hero.

Mr Farage said: “I am very surprised by this. I think a lot of Trump voters will be waking up this morning and scratching their heads and saying ‘where will it all end?’

American right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who campaigned for Donald Trump, wrote: “Those who wanted us meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates.

“Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Mideast. Said it always helps our enemies & creates more refugees. Then he saw a picture on TV.”

The Zman also took it rather hard:

Yesterday, the alt-right and even many seasoned geezers like me took a body blow when Trump abandoned everything he said over the last two years and embraced the idiocy of yet another war in the Middle East. Not only is he embracing the lunacy of the traitorous neocons, he is risking war with Russia. His “reason” for condemning himself to ruin is that his daughter got the sads over seeing pictures of dead kids in Syria. She takes to twitter over this latest agit-prop and in a day daddy is launching missiles at Assad.

The United States has no interest in Syria. There are no good guys to back. There’s no “solution” to what ails that part of the world, short of another flood. Syria is a mess because it is full of Syrians. The only sane policy is to make sure it remains full of Syrians. Let them kill each other there, not in Paris or Portland. If the Russians want to build their pipeline there and pay the price for it, good for them. If the Saudis want to stop them, best of luck with it. This is not an American problem. It is their problem. Let them own it. 

For the record, I am totally opposed to US involvement in the Middle East. However, as a student of military history, I am also not inclined to leap to criticize strategy on the basis of a single limited tactical strike. War is coming, but not necessarily where everyone assumes it will be or at the behest, and in the interest, of the neocons.

That being said, I will certainly be disappointed if the God-Emperor makes regime change in Syria an objective of his administration, and I will continue to oppose any military involvement in the Middle East, Europe, the Ukraine, and any military activity directed against China or Russia.

But as long as he builds that big beautiful wall and keeps repatriating immigrants, I don’t really care all that much one way or the other. Americans shouldn’t worry overmuch about war abroad, they should be worrying more about the coming war at home.

Blunder or complete debacle?

The God-Emperor pulls a Clinton and lobs 59 missiles at Syria:

The United States on Friday fired dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase from which it said a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched this week, an escalation of the U.S. military role in Syria that immediately raised tension with Russia.

Just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he had ordered the attack, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the strike had seriously damaged ties between Washington and Moscow.

Two U.S. warships fired 59 cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the Syrian airbase controlled by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in response to a poison gas attack in a rebel-held area on Tuesday, U.S. officials said.

Putin, a staunch ally of Assad, regarded the U.S. action as “aggression against a sovereign nation” on a “made-up pretext” and a cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was cited as saying by agencies.

It was the toughest direct U.S. action yet in Syria’s six-year-old civil war and leaves Trump facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since his Jan. 20 inauguration, raising the risk of confrontation with Russia and Iran, Assad’s two main military backers.

Without question, this looks both stupid and disappointing. Following the lead of the neocons inevitably leads to disaster, sooner or later, for both the US President and the American people. And why now, when Assad and the various allied forces have ISIS on the run?

Perhaps it is because ISIS is an American creation? Perhaps because Israel prefers Daesh to Assad? Who knows?

Regardless, it’s important to keep in mind that the God-Emperor always makes mistakes. He always bumbles around like a bull in a china shop in any new or complicated situation. But usually, he learns from them. Usually, when one horn of his A/B testing fails, he abandons that strategy.

The problem, of course, is that “send American troops to fight and die in the Middle East” is an obvious failure that shouldn’t require any testing. And with tensions on the rise in North Korea, it seems a spectacularly stupid thing to attempt to heat up a second front, particularly at the price of losing Russian cooperation.

Furious Vladimir Putin has called the US airstrikes on Syria an ‘illegal act of aggression’ and suspended a deal to avoid mid-air clashes with American fighter jets over the war-torn country. The Russian President warned of grave damage to relations between Washington and Moscow which are already ‘in tatters’… Syrian Army officials described the attack as an act of ‘blatant aggression’, saying it had made the US ‘a partner’ of ISIS, the ex-Nusra Front and other ‘terrorist organisations’. 

So, we’ll see. But we can still hope, not unreasonably, that Trump is merely giving Mattis or one of his military advisors his head, and that he will step in and make replacements once it becomes obvious that the “let’s pick a fight with Iran and Russia over Syria while rattling sabres at North Korea and China” is not a viable grand strategy. Never forget, Trump is a delegator, and this would appear to have been Mattis’s call.

The Pentagon’s plan, delivered by Defense Secretary (and former Central Command commander) James Mattis, at Wednesday’s NSC meeting: a hellfire of Tomahawk missiles on the airfield where Assad’s regime had launched the attack. If there was dissent among any on Trump’s national security team, nobody spoke up. “Everybody agreed that this was the option that they liked,” said an administration official with knowledge of the meeting.

So on Thursday morning, a number of national security officials went to work at the White House believing the strike was imminent. But only a small number of principals—President Trump, Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and national security advisor H.R. McMaster among them—had knowledge the strike would happen Thursday night.

I’m not giving up on the God-Emperor yet. It is the mark of a good leader to permit his subordinates to make decisions, to act upon those decisions, and then hold them accountable for the subsequent consequences. But this is a very good reminder that he wasn’t ever anything more than a long shot. And, it must be said, at least we’re not already at war with Russia over Ukraine, as would have almost certainly been the case had Hillary or one of the other Republicans been elected. In any event, Trump is going to have to learn to stop reacting like an emotionally incontinent woman trained by Pavlov whenever he sees children on television. He was elected to build a wall, send them back, and keep Americans out of war, not play Middle East kingmaker.

We don’t know yet that this is a complete debacle. But does appear to be, at minimum, a blunder, though possibly a necessary one. Trump will learn, as all U.S. Presidents eventually do, that foreign policy is a lot harder than domestic policy. War is a very serious business; would that U.S. politicians and generals would learn to treat it that way.

UPDATE: Or neither? After further discussion offline, I believe one of two scenarios are in play. One is the obvious “give the neocons their head” scenario I mentioned. The other is a much bigger one which I will not discuss in public, but would be very surprising and significant indeed. I’ve already written it out for the record; if events proceed accordingly, I’ll post it after the fact.

In the meantime, I would suggest trusting the God-Emperor until there is considerably more evidence that he is actually going to send ground troops to Syria to fight Syrian, Iranian, and Russian troops there. There is almost certainly much more going on here than meets the mainstream media’s eye.

Neoconning the God-Emperor

At some point, Donald Trump is going to have to realize that there is a reason the neocons and their global policeman approach failed:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that it is now his responsibility to resolve the humanitarian and political crisis in Syria as he opened the door to military action in the country. Trump upped the ante in a Rose Garden press conference after having said earlier in the day that the the chemical weapons attack is a ‘terrible affront to humanity.’

‘My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,’ Trump declared, suggesting with the statement that he may be reconsidering his directive to US diplomats to take their focus off removing Bashar al-Assad from power.

The ‘horrible, horrible’ sarin gas attack that killed small children and ‘beautiful babies’ had a ‘big impact’ on the president, who declared Wednesday that the attack ‘crossed a lot of lines.’ ‘When you kill innocent children, innocent babies…with a chemical gas that is so lethal…that crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line,’ Trump said, making reference to Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 threat to Assad.

No one actually gives a damn about Syrian children, except that they not be permitted to reside in the West. It’s unfortunate that the God-Emperor appears – appears – be falling increasingly under the sway of the Washington wormtongues whispering about being presidential in his ears.

Perhaps the God-Emperor needs to get out of the White House and start listening to the American people again rather than his observably unreliable intelligence agencies.

It’s really rather remarkable how “the international situation” operates as a “hey shiny” distraction for politicians. People have been getting brutalized and slaughtered in the Middle East for 6,000 years. If humanity is really fortunate, they’ll be getting brutalized and slaughtered there 6,000 years from now. To believe that it is any concern of yours, much less that you can do anything about it, is the height of folly.

And, of course, that’s assuming that the whole “chemical weapons attack” isn’t a false flag in the first place, which is very, very far from a safe assumption.

The Russians have already called BS:

The United States, Britain and France have proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would condemn the attack; the Russian Foreign Ministry called it “unacceptable” and said it was based on “fake information”.

Shutting down the enemy

Hungary has the brains to starve the parasite:

Hungarian lawmakers on Tuesday approved legislation that could force the closure of a prestigious Budapest university founded by US billionaire investor George Soros, sparking fresh protests. The English-language Central European University (CEU), set up in 1991 after the fall of communism, has long been seen as a hostile bastion of liberalism by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

MPs in the 199-seat parliament, dominated by Orban’s Fidesz party, voted 123 in favour and 38 against the legislation affecting foreign universities operating in Hungary.

The new rules ban institutions outside the European Union from awarding Hungarian diplomas without an agreement between national governments. They will also be required to have a campus and faculties in their home country — conditions not met by the CEU.

Failure to comply would mean the CEU could not accept new student intakes from 2018, and possibly close by 2021.

Their next step should be to target all foreign-funded NGOs. NGOs are the stealth army of everyone from the CIA and the Roman Catholic Church to wealthy private parties. If I were in government, I would not permit a single foreign NGO to operate within my country’s borders. They reliably do far more harm than good, as the recent series of color revolutions and civil wars tends to demonstrate.

Unserious about war

This is why the Western militaries are going to lose their next major war. They simply are no longer serious about warfighting; as the Z-man observes, they are more interested in posturing than victory:

Way back when the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing assumption among those who were in charge was that it would be a cakewalk. The people would embrace us as liberators. People who had some clue about how the world works knew it would be an ugly mess, as is the case with all wars. War is, by definition, the ugliest of human activities. It’s purpose is to kill and destroy.

Inevitably, stories turned up about abuses. One essential way to prepare soldiers for war is to dehumanize the enemy. Men, even trained killers, are not going to kill people they see as sympathetic. There’s no way to finely calibrate the mind of a soldier so in every war there are abuses, even when care is taken to avoid them. That’s why things like the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened. War is and always will be an ugly business.

That knowledge should lead Western governments to use their technological and economic advantages to avoid getting into wars with the barbarians on the edge of civilization. Instead, they start wars they never intend to win, so they can preen and pose about their virtue and morality, when something terrible inevitably happens. It means some guy in uniform gets to be strung up in order to please the vanity of our rulers.

Remember, most militaries that suffered catastrophic defeats had been previously successful. The US military can’t even claim the same. As for the virtually nonexistent militaries of the Great Britain, France, and Spain, they can’t even defend their own borders.

If the USA is foolish enough to go to war with North Korea, things may turn out very, very differently than everyone is expecting.

Nail bomb in Russia

A nail bomb thrown onto a train by a suspected terrorist has ripped through a carriage in St Petersburg killing at least 12 people and injuring 50 more today.


The terrifying incident, which is being investigated as a terror attack, took place on a train that was travelling between Sennaya Ploshchad and Sadovaya metro stations.


The attack has left dozens injured, including children, and witnesses described seeing a man throwing a backpack onto the train moments before the explosion and a second explosive device was found and made safe in a nearby station.

20 years ago, one would assume Chechens. Now, given all the insane war drums beating, it could be anyone from Ukrainians to the CIA.