Yves here. This post presents some of the CIA’s less-than-proud moments, curiously omitted in a recently-published history of the CIA’s meddling in the Middle East, juxtaposed with some of its more recent miscues.
Read more...Yves here. This post describes, in a general way, some outcomes of our current Middle East adventurism, with the Islamic State as its current nemesis. However, at least one of Van Buren’s “worst-case outcomes” strikes me as not bad, which would be a thawing of hostilities with Iran. But I don’t see how Israel tolerates that.
But the looming issue behind all of these scenarios is that the game is being played to justify continued large budget allocations to the military-surveillance complex. The cost of defending the American is more guns in the guns versus butter tradeoff.
Read more...Asian stock markets continued to fall today, propelled at least in part by the adverse reaction to the Saudi announcement yesterday that they would let oil prices fall to $80 a barrel. And further reports indicate that the Saudis intend to keep oil prices low enough to force a realignment of prices not just among various grades of crude, but also for intermediate and long-term substitutes.
It is critical to remember that the Saudis have no compunction about imposing costs on other nations to maximize the value of their oil resource long term and hence the power they derive from it. Their oil price cut looks to be a strategic masterstroke.
Read more...Here Michael Klare argues that the use of energy as a weapon has become even more central in US foreign policy under Obama.
Read more...Yves here. One needs to read past the spin on the combatants and the hectoring of the Turks in this post. It does serve to explain why Kobani is a critical piece on the chessboard of the struggle in Kurdistan.
Read more...Yves here. This post focuses on ISIS as a symptom of what is wrong with US policy-making. One way of reading it is as an introduction to the role of Saudi Prince Bandar and the sway that the Saudis have had over US policy for decades. This obvious fact is curiously airbushed out of most […]
Read more...The intensity of US efforts to foment conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to be treated by Mr. Market as a nothingburger, as witnessed by a continued slide in oil prices and continued complacency in global stock markets. Yet it’s hard to miss that there are significant microeconomic implications of the uptick in warmongering. The Administration is clearly going all in for the guns part of the classic guns versus butter budgetary tradeoff.
Read more...Since the U.S. and EU began imposing and then widening and tightening sanctions against Russia, some U.S. allies have been getting second thoughts. The latest nation to begin severing ties with the U.S.-dominated Western alliance is arguably the most important yet.
Read more...As much as I was dutifully chugging along on a normal-NC-fare type of post, the fisticuffs that broke out in comments yesterday over America’s hypocritical and destructive foreign policies (320 comments, an unheard-of level for Links, particularly on a summer weekend), indicates that US war-mongering is the top concern of many readers.
It thus seemed more fitting to highlight a truly disconcerting interview of Hillary Clinton by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Altlantic, in which he came off as more temperate that Hillary. Here is why that alone is striking.
Read more...Back-of-the-envelope calculations the CIA processed suggest several hundred people, at least. And we don’t know where they are now.
Read more...Oil is at $100 owing to its peak production, not Ukraine, and ISIS presents the real risk.
Read more...ISIS has mastered digital strategy. But whose strategy? And what for?
Read more...If these jihadists are no longer controllable–and ISIS shows they are not–who are to be the foot soldiers of the United States and the Saudis in the region?
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