Tag: war

Iran vs Israel

One has to give credit where it is due.  For all of his observable anti-Americanism, Obama nevertheless appears to be doing a better job of giving priority to American interests on the foreign affairs front than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney:

As debkafile
reported after that Obama snub, the wrangling with Washington has
reduced Netanyahu’s options to start standing alone and making his own
decisions. Obama’s latest words underline this. The prime minister can no longer
avoid his most fateful decision and one that is critical to Israel’s
survival: to attack Iran and disrupt its nuclear program or live with an
anti-Semitic nuclear Iran dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish
state and a threat to world stability.

For two weeks, the Israeli prime minister has dodged and ducked around
the White House message. Instead, he has kept on bombarding Washington
with high-powered messengers. They all came back with the same tidings:
the US President is not only fed up with Israeli pressure but more
determined than evade any military engagement with Iran.

The hostilities between Iran and Israel certainly have the potential to be dangerous, but neither country are a direct national security interest of the United States.  Neither is a military ally and both countries could perish in a mutual nuclear conflagration and it wouldn’t effect the USA in the slightest.  If Israel decides to attack Iran, or if Iran decides to attack Israel, the only concern of the USA should be to prevent the war from going regional by keeping the Sunni Arab nations out of the conflict.  Given the fact that Israel has no serious allies and most of Iran’s neighbors are varying degrees of hostile towards both Israel and the Shi’ite Persians of Iran, there is little reason to believe that a war between them is likely to draw in a substantial number of third parties.

Nor should anyone take the hysterical posturing by American Jews about the potential for a second Holocaust if the USA does not intervene seriously.  Ehud Barak, the Israeli Minister of Defense, has estimated that a war with Iran would last one month and cost Israel around 500 dead.  In a worst case scenario.

Death of a gamer

One of the murdered diplomats was a respected EVE player:

On Tuesday, Sean Smith, a Foreign Service Information Management Officer assigned to the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, typed a message to the director of his online gaming guild: ”Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” The consulate was under siege, and within hours, a mob would attack, killing Smith along with three others, including the U.S. ambassador.

In his professional and personal life, Smith was a husband and father of two, an Air Force veteran, and a 10-year veteran of the Foreign Service who had served in Baghdad, Pretoria, Montreal and The Hague. But when gaming with EVE Online guild Goonswarm, he was a popular figure known as “Vile Rat,” and alternately as “Vilerat” while volunteering as a moderator at the internet community Something Awful. Smith’s death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by the State Department and reported widely in the news media. But the first people to report Smith’s death were his friends. Their reaction was shock and mourning.

“My people, I have greivous [sic] news. Vile Rat has been confirmed to be KIA in Benghazi; his family has been informed and the news is likely to break out on the wire services soon,” wrote Goonswarm director Alex Gianturco in a message mirrored to Something Awful at 11:21 EST. “Needless to say, we are in shock, have no words, and have nothing but sympathy for his family and children. I have known Vile Rat since 2006, he was one of the oldest of old-guard goons and one of the best and most effective diplomats this game has ever seen.”

According to his friends, Smith had emerged as a key leader for the community, and was known as a senior guild diplomat who helped engineer the destruction of Goonswarm’s chief rival, the Band of Brothers. He let his guildmates design his tattoo. On Wednesday, Gianturco posted an obituary for his friend of more than six years. “He was on jabber when it happened, that’s the most fucked up thing,” Gianturco wrote. “In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened – incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘FUCK’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.”

In addition to bringing this a little closer to home for everyone who has belonged to an online guild, Vile Rat’s death tends to belie the ridiulous “da masses wuz mad about da movie” narrative being pushed by the Obama administration in a feeble attempt to absolve itself of any responsibility for the deaths of the diplomats. The fact that their own guards was seen taking pictures of the compound before the attack tends to indicate that the attack was a planned and purposeful operation.

Free trade and war

Yet another pillar in the free trade theory appears to be on the verge of falling:

China declares economic war on Japan

China is trying to hurt Japan economically, to gain leverage in its campaign to take control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. In the 2010 confrontations, China took revenge on Japan by terminating shipments of rare earth minerals, needed for manufacturing of many of Japan’s electronic products. In the current confrontation, the Beijing government is encouraging the Chinese people to demonstrate and protest against Japanese businesses in China. The government urged protesters not to use violence, but that part of the message is clearly not getting through. Protesters torched a Panasonic factory and Toyota dealership, looted and ransacked Japanese department stores and supermarkets in several cities. China’s National Tourism Administration ordered travel companies last week to cancel tours to Japan over the weeklong National Day holiday in early October. AP and Bloomberg

Chinese Communist Party urges punitive sanctions against Japan

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is urging strong punitive sanctions against Japan, for its “well-orchestrated plan” to take control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, according to the CCP’s official newspaper:

“The “nationalization” of the Diaoyu Islands by Japan after “purchasing” them from a “private owner” is ridiculous and cannot change the fact that they are Chinese territory. … China should take strong countermeasures, especially economic sanctions, to respond to Japan’s provocations. Military consideration, however, should be the last choice.

The United States has frequently used Article XXI Security Exceptions of the WTO (taken from the earlier General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) to impose economic sanctions on other countries. The security exception clause says a country cannot be stopped from taking any action it considers necessary to protect its security interests. That means a country can impose sanctions on enterprises, financial institutions, organizations and even other countries’ central and local governments. Taking a cue from the US’ practice, China can use the security exception clause to reduce the export of some important materials to Japan.

China didn’t announce any sanctions against the Philippines in April, but it froze banana imports from that country in response to Manila’s aggressive attitude in the Huangyan Island dispute. Though the economic countermeasure forced the Philippines on the back foot, it also harmed the interests of some Chinese enterprises.

So it is important for China to devise a sanction plan against Japan that would cause minimum loss to Chinese enterprises.

The US’ capability to impose economic sanctions on other countries is based on its economic strength, huge share in global trade, financial institutions and global intelligence network. China, too, has the capability to impose sanctions on other countries now that it is the second largest economy, has the largest foreign reserves, and is the largest exporter and second largest importer.

An analysis of Sino-Japanese economic interdependence shows that Japan’s economy will suffer severely if China were to impose sanctions on it. China’s loss would be relatively less. … So it’s clear that China can deal a heavy blow to the Japanese economy without hurting itself too much by resorting to sanctions.

Apart from its reliance on China, Japan has been suffering from other economic ills. First, Japan’s massive government debt is increasing substantially. … Third, Japan’s fiscal deterioration is likely to continue. There are enough indications that Japan’s economic growth in 2013 will slow down or slip into another recession. The irreversible trend of long-term economic downturn, combined with Japan’s aging population, will eat into the country’s household savings, and the declining purchasing power of the Japanese will increase Japan’s fiscal debt. …

But instead of blindly boycotting Japanese goods, China should work out a comprehensive plan which should include imposition of sanctions and taking precautionary measures against any Japanese retaliation. China should also have several rounds of policies ready to undermine the Japanese economy at the least cost of Chinese enterprises.

Furthermore, in case Chinese enterprises suffer because of the sanctions, the Chinese government should be prepared to compensate them. And once China imposes sanctions on Japan, the government should ensure that all enterprises in the country, domestic and foreign, obey the rules.”

China and Japan have only been trading since diplomatic ties were normalized in 1972; China became Japan’s largest trading partner in 2004. A war between two of the world’s largest economies would permanently shatter the oft-heard argument that trade eliminates the possibility of war. It’s an argument that should always have been dubious, however, as England’s many wars against the various principalities in India and the USA’s Middle East wars have all followed the inception of large-scale trade with the region.

Once more, we see that free trade delivers precisely the opposite of what it promises. And, as Generational Dynamics adroitly points out, trade actually expands the range of warfare as well as providing an economic weapon that can be wielded against the trading partner. Even when trade is not a cause of the war, it provides a means of fighting it.

Lest anyone think I am setting up a strawman here, consider this article by a free trade advocate at the Mises Institute: “The Classical Liberals of the nineteenth century were certain that the end of the old Mercantilist system–with its government control of trade and commerce, its bounties (subsidies) and prohibitions on exports and imports–would open wide vistas for improving the material conditions of man through the internationalization of the system of division of labor. They also believed that the elimination of barriers to trade and the free intercourse among men would help to significantly reduce if not end the causes of war among nations.”

A classic gaffe

Mitt Romney commits a classic gaffe by inadvertently stating the obvious:

US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney questioned the feasibility of the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, according to video footage published Tuesday by US magazine Mother Jones.

“I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard,” Romney said at a $50,000-per-plate fundraising dinner on May 17. “One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

Considering that the Begin-Sadat accord was nearly 40 years ago and there is still no peace in sight, I think that’s a safe conclusion. Of course, why should the Palestinians be interested in peace until they get their land back? Israel has a right to the land by right of conquest, but that very right means that they will likely have to fight to hold it.

Manchuria redux

I think Japan will find it considerably harder to take China if there is a round two:

The Middle East has been a tinderbox for decades. But there’s a problem with our intervention in Afghanistan in particular, and that is the fact that both Pakistan and India, not far away, have nuclear weapons. India is reasonably stable but Pakistan is another matter entirely, and the last thing we need is for a conflict to spread into that country.

The worst of the unrest, however, isn’t there and isn’t being widely-reported. It’s in China.

China and Japan have had a long-running territorial dispute over some a handful of islands. Over the weekend what had been a simmering issue turned into a real problem with Chinese rising up and doing something extraordinary: They are demanding WAR with Japan.

These are not just people waving signs either. They are burning Japanese-linked stores and factories, from sushi places to car dealers. Automobile owners are being ejected from their vehicles on a forcible basis and their cars destroyed. And while I’m sure some official agitation is involved this appears to have caught a number of people by surprise, including officials from Japan and the United States.

It is really remarkable how clearly socionomics predicts these things. Not the specifics, but the generalities. I mean, who would have ever imagined that war between China and Japan could be a genuine possibility in the next ten years? The drums of war are beating and one can hear them nearly everywhere. We’ve all forgotten the Japanese occupation of the 1930s, but it is very clear that the Chinese haven’t.

WND column

President Supervillain

If we are to take the Obama administration seriously, Egypt is not an ally of the United States and the U.S. ambassador to Libya was assassinated due to a cheesy video that was released on the Internet several months ago. While the incompetence of the current administration has often been on display and never been in doubt, the way in which the White House first paved the road to the Benghazi incident, then completely bungled its response to the assassination, is indicative of new depths of ineptitude.

An atheist critique of Sam Harris

A former Muslim, Theodore Sayeed, writes a long article criticizing Sam Harris and his godless militarism on Mondoweiss:

For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their “reflexive solidarity” with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work. The End of Faith opens with the melodramatic scene of a young man of undetermined nationality boarding a bus with a suicide vest. The bus detonates, innocents die and Harris, with the relish of a schoolmarm passing on the facts of life to her brood, chalks in the question: “Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion?”

To which historians will answer: Because it is not….

It occurs to me that as much of a renegade as I am from Islam, I’m not alone in my betrayal. Sam Harris too is an apostate from the intellectual atheist tradition of Russell and Mencken that was built on the twin pillars of anti-mysticism and anti-militarism.

I found it interesting that Sayeed begins with precisely the same quote from The End of Faith that I did, and notes precisely the same blunder which many atheists unsuccessfully attempted to defend back in 2008. One thing Sayeed caught that I did not is Harris’s tribal identification with Israel and his continued attempts to defend Israeli militarism despite his repeated condemnations of tribalism. Readers may recall that in my own email exchange with Harris, he admitted that he was actually attacking tribalism rather than religious faith; the primary danger of religious faith was that it had the potential to create and exacerbate tribalism.

But, as Sayeed demonstrates, despite his atheism, Harris himself appears to be subject to a tribalism that is older than either Christianity or Islam, the two religions he primarily criticizes. And it is potentially significant to note how little he criticizes either Judaism or Israel, despite the fact that there is considerable criticism of the latter from secular Europeans who share his atheism.

Now, I don’t dislike Sam. Unlike Dawkins and Myers, I don’t think he’s an intrinsically dreadful individual. But his primary problem, aside from his apparent tribalism, is that he is simply not sufficiently detail-oriented or logical enough to be capable of successfully addressing the intellectual challenges he sets himself.

TIA: the meme spreads

Courtesy of Scott Atran, the argument that religion does not cause war has now reached both Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education:

it’s not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it’s the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature “Why I Am an Atheist” on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that “attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea.” It’s proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that “only a small minority of recorded wars” have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. “Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science,” says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. “Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful.”

The Science article is entitled “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict” and appears in Science 336, 855 (2012). The relevant passage cites The Encylopedia of Wars and states: “In fact, explicit religious issues have motivated only a small minority of recorded wars. There is little religious cause for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts and world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international conflict.”

Given the absurd assertions by science fetishists who insist that I do not understand science, I find it more than a little ironic that a number of real scientists are not only making use of my ideas, but my methods as well, in publishing professional peer-reviewed science.

Impeccable and ironic timing

As per Robert Prechter’s socionomic principle of the habitually delayed reaction of government to events, it is often a counterintuitive indicator of coming war when the democracies cut their military forces to minimal levels, which is why these British force reductions are somewhat ominous:

n which case Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, is taking an enormous gamble when he claims that the 20 per cent reduction in the size of the standing Army will be made up for by a sizeable increase in the number of reservists to 30,000. Ever since the Coalition announced last summer that it was downsizing the Army from around 102,000 to 82,000 as part of its cuts to the MoD budget, senior officers have been struggling to find a way to maintain some semblance of its war-fighting capabilities while reducing this once proud institution to its smallest size since the Duke of Wellington took on Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

Their task has been made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the Government’s decision to shed 20,000 jobs was dictated entirely by budgetary requirements rather than any grand strategic vision for our Armed Forces. For the changes announced by Mr Hammond yesterday are simply designed to cut spending. As most officers know only too well, the demands made on the 100,000-plus Army during a decade of almost continuous combat operations have stretched its resources to breaking point.

Nor is there any reason to believe – despite the Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to be completed by the end of 2014 – that the next decade will not be as challenging.

It’s interesting to see that the British Army is now smaller than it was after the disarmament program that followed the Great War and preceded World War II. There are obvious parallels to “the Geddes Axe” and the 10-Year Rule.

“In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Britain faced serious economic woes and heavy defence cuts were consequently imposed by the British Government in the early 1920s as part of a reduction in public expenditure known as the “Geddes Axe” after Sir Eric Geddes. The Government introduced the Ten-Year Rule, stating its belief that Britain would not be involved in another major war for 10-years, and was abandoned in 1932.”

In the interwar period, the Regulars were reduced to 115,000, supported by a 150,000-strong reserve, the Territorial Army. That compares to today’s planned British Army of 82,000 plus 30,000 reservists. It’s interesting, is it not, to see how the force minimization tends to correspond to periods of economic weakness. The historical patterns are suggesting that large-scale war is on the horizon, the question is where and with whom?

However, it is the USA that matters most in this regard, and I don’t think its forces have been cut quite as drastically yet. So, I suspect we’ll need to see similar cuts in the USA, and more economic contraction, before this part of the pattern can be considered complete.

Flowers of the Arab Spring

Ain’t democracy grand! It’s an interesting result, given that it means American Jews can no longer justify US subsidies to Israel on the basis of it being the only democracy in the Middle East.

Islamist Mohamed Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood was declared Egypt’s first democratic president on Sunday by the state election committee, which said he had defeated former general Ahmed Shafik with 51.7 percent of last weekend’s run-off vote.

Of course, some of those democratic enthusiasms might prove to be just be a little problematic. “Egypt’s New President: Our Capital ‘Shall Be Jerusalem, Allah Willing'”