Wednesday, April 07, 2010
china confidential
Obama Ignores Muslim Persecution of Christians
Alicia Colon writes:Judging by the happy grin on a young Barack Obama growing up in Indonesia, it’s not surprising that he would be sympathetic to Muslim culture; but as president of the United States, which is still over 80% Christian, he should be demonstrating some balance in that sympathy. This, however, is not much in evidence because the increasing persecution of Christians around the world by Muslim jihadists is being given short shrift by this administration and their lackeys in the press.
Continue reading here.Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Islamist Turkey Arrests More Army Officers
Emboldened by U.S. President Barack Obama's outreach to "the Muslim world" and appeasement of Islamist Iran, Islamizing Turkey is cracking down on the traditional guardian of the country's secular system--the military. Click here for the story.
Tragically--for the United States, Europe, and Israel--the Obama administration has given Turkey the green light to go in the wrong direction, toward Tehran. Obama supports Turkey's bid to join the EU, even though the United States is not an EU member and has no business meddling in the matter. Moreover, the administration has quietly warned Turkey's military that Washington would strongly oppose a coup.
In the name of democracy promotion and protection, the administration is advancing the Islamist cause.IBD Agrees with China Confidential: Obama's New Nuclear Policy Encourages America's Enemies to Plot and Plan Pearl Harbor-Style Surprise Attacks
An excerpt from IBD's must-read editorial:Under policies announced by the Obama administration, a devastating chemical or biological attack on this country might merely awaken our very own Hamlet and fill him with a terrible sense of angst.
We have said before that rather than strive for a world without nuclear weapons, we should strive for a world without enemies willing to use them against us. Our retaliatory power should be unquestioned, as should be our willingness to use it. President Reagan called this proven and successful policy peace through strength. It has been replaced by a hair-splitting policy of nuance.
The U.S. is now promising not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attack America with biological or chemical weapons or launch a paralyzing cyberattack.
This is good news for our enemies to know — they can wipe out much of New York City, but as long as their signature is on that piece of paper, their capital is safe from becoming a pile of irradiated rubble. We are not making this up.
In this nuclear posture, which can best be described as slouching in a recliner, we renounce the development of any new nuclear weapons, thus ensuring the aging of our nuclear deterrent into obsolescence and irrelevance.
And we'll be getting rid of some old ones — the long-range, nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile, for example.
Our arsenal is to shrink by thousands of nuclear weapons, and we'll restrict the instances in which their use is an option. Worse yet, we'll tell our enemies when and if we will use them, eliminating the ambiguity that has helped keep us safe. Under President George W. Bush, our posture reserved the right to use nuclear weapons "to deter a wide range of threats," including biological and chemical attack.
Read the whole thing here.Mexico and the Failed State Revisited
By George Friedman
Stratfor argued March 13, 2008, that Mexico was nearing the status of a failed state. A failed state is one in which the central government has lost control over significant areas of the country and the state is unable to function. In revisiting this issue, it seems to us that the Mexican government has lost control of the northern tier of Mexico to drug-smuggling organizations, which have significantly greater power in that region than government forces. Moreover, the ability of the central government to assert its will against these organizations has weakened to the point that decisions made by the state against the cartels are not being implemented or are being implemented in a way that would guarantee failure.
Despite these facts, it is not clear to Stratfor that Mexico is becoming a failed state. Instead, it appears the Mexican state has accommodated itself to the situation. Rather than failing, it has developed strategies designed both to ride out the storm and to maximize the benefits of that storm for Mexico.
First, while the Mexican government has lost control over matters having to do with drugs and with the borderlands of the United States, Mexico City’s control over other regions — and over areas other than drug enforcement — has not collapsed (though its lack of control over drugs could well extend to other areas eventually). Second, while drugs reshape Mexican institutions dramatically, they also, paradoxically, stabilize Mexico. We need to examine these crosscurrents to understand the status of Mexico.
Mexico’s Core Problem
Let’s begin by understanding the core problem. The United States consumes vast amounts of narcotics, which, while illegal there, make their way in abundance. Narcotics derive from low-cost agricultural products that become consumable with minimal processing. With its long, shared border with the United States, Mexico has become a major grower, processor and exporter of narcotics. Because the drugs are illegal and thus outside normal market processes, their price is determined by their illegality rather than by the cost of production. This means extraordinary profits can be made by moving narcotics from the Mexican side of the border to markets on the other side.
Whoever controls the supply chain from the fields to the processing facilities and, above all, across the border, will make enormous amounts of money. Various Mexican organizations — labeled cartels, although they do not truly function as such, since real cartels involve at least a degree of cooperation among producers, not open warfare — vie for this business. These are competing businesses, each with its own competing supply chain.
Typically, competition among businesses involves lowering prices and increasing quality. This would produce small, incremental shifts in profits on the whole while dramatically reducing prices. An increased market share would compensate for lower prices. Similarly, lawsuits are the normal solution to unfair competition. But neither is the case with regard to illegal goods.
The surest way to increase smuggling profits is not through market mechanisms but by taking over competitors’ supply chains. Given the profit margins involved, persons wanting to control drug supply chains would be irrational to buy, since the lower-cost solution would be to take control of these supply chains by force. Thus, each smuggling organization has an attached paramilitary organization designed to protect its own supply chain and to seize its competitors’ supply chains.
The result is ongoing warfare between competing organizations. Given the amount of money being made in delivering their product to American cities, these paramilitary organizations are well-armed, well-led and well-motivated. Membership in such paramilitary groups offers impoverished young men extraordinary opportunities for making money, far greater than would be available to them in legitimate activities.
The raging war in Mexico derives logically from the existence of markets for narcotics in the United States; the low cost of the materials and processes required to produce these products; and the extraordinarily favorable economics of moving narcotics across the border. This warfare is concentrated on the Mexican side of the border. But from the Mexican point of view, this warfare does not fundamentally threaten Mexico’s interests.
A Struggle Far From the Mexican Heartland
The heartland of Mexico is to the south, far from the country’s northern tier. The north is largely a sparsely populated highland desert region seen from Mexico City as an alien borderland intertwined with the United States as much as it is part of Mexico. Accordingly, the war raging there doesn’t represent a direct threat to the survival of the Mexican regime.
Indeed, what the wars are being fought over in some ways benefits Mexico. The amount of money pouring into Mexico annually is stunning. It is estimated to be about $35 billion to $40 billion each year. The massive profit margins involved make these sums even more significant. Assume that the manufacturing sector produces revenues of $40 billion a year through exports. Assuming a generous 10 percent profit margin, actual profits would be $4 billion a year. In the case of narcotics, however, profit margins are conservatively estimated to stand at around 80 percent. The net from $40 billion would be $32 billion; to produce equivalent income in manufacturing, exports would have to total $320 billion.
In estimating the impact of drug money on Mexico, it must therefore be borne in mind that drugs cannot be compared to any conventional export. The drug trade’s tremendously high profit margins mean its total impact on Mexico vastly outstrips even the estimated total sales, even if the margins shifted substantially.
On the whole, Mexico is a tremendous beneficiary of the drug trade. Even if some of the profits are invested overseas, the pool of remaining money flowing into Mexico creates tremendous liquidity in the Mexican economy at a time of global recession. It is difficult to trace where the drug money is going, which follows from its illegality. Certainly, drug dealers would want their money in a jurisdiction where it could not be easily seized even if tracked. U.S. asset seizure laws for drug trafficking make the United States an unlikely haven. Though money clearly flows out of Mexico, the ability of the smugglers to influence the behavior of the Mexican government by investing some of it makes Mexico a likely destination for a substantial portion of such funds.
The money does not, however, flow back into the hands of the gunmen shooting it out on the border; even their bosses couldn’t manage funds of that magnitude. And while money can be — and often is — baled up and hidden, the value of money is in its use. As with illegal money everywhere, the goal is to wash it and invest it in legitimate enterprises where it can produce more money. That means it has to enter the economy through legitimate institutions — banks and other financial entities — and then be redeployed into the economy. This is no different from the American Mafia’s practice during and after Prohibition.
The Drug War and Mexican National Interests
From Mexico’s point of view, interrupting the flow of drugs to the United States is not clearly in the national interest or in that of the economic elite. Observers often dwell on the warfare between smuggling organizations in the northern borderland but rarely on the flow of American money into Mexico. Certainly, that money could corrupt the Mexican state, but it also behaves as money does. It is accumulated and invested, where it generates wealth and jobs.
For the Mexican government to become willing to shut off this flow of money, the violence would have to become far more geographically widespread. And given the difficulty of ending the traffic anyway — and that many in the state security and military apparatus benefit from it — an obvious conclusion can be drawn: Namely, it is difficult to foresee scenarios in which the Mexican government could or would stop the drug trade. Instead, Mexico will accept both the pain and the benefits of the drug trade.
Mexico’s policy is consistent: It makes every effort to appear to be stopping the drug trade so that it will not be accused of supporting it. The government does not object to disrupting one or more of the smuggling groups, so long as the aggregate inflow of cash does not materially decline. It demonstrates to the United States efforts (albeit inadequate) to tackle the trade, while pointing out very real problems with its military and security apparatus and with its officials in Mexico City. It simultaneously points to the United States as the cause of the problem, given Washington’s failure to control demand or to reduce prices by legalization. And if massive amounts of money pour into Mexico as a result of this U.S. failure, Mexico is not going to refuse it.
The problem with the Mexican military or police is not lack of training or equipment. It is not a lack of leadership. These may be problems, but they are only problems if they interfere with implementing Mexican national policy. The problem is that these forces are personally unmotivated to take the risks needed to be effective because they benefit more from being ineffective. This isn’t incompetence but a rational national policy.
Moreover, Mexico has deep historic grievances toward the United States dating back to the Mexican-American War. These have been exacerbated by U.S. immigration policy that the Mexicans see both as insulting and as a threat to their policy of exporting surplus labor north. There is thus no desire to solve the Americans’ problem. Certainly, there are individuals in the Mexican government who wish to stop the smuggling and the inflow of billions of dollars. They will try. But they will not succeed, as too much is at stake. One must ignore public statements and earnest private assurances and instead observe the facts on the ground to understand what’s really going on.
The U.S. Strategic Problem
And this leaves the United States with a strategic problem. There is some talk in Mexico City and Washington of the Americans becoming involved in suppression of the smuggling within Mexico (even though the cartels, to use that strange name, make certain not to engage in significant violence north of the border and mask it when they do to reduce U.S. pressure on Mexico). This is certainly something the Mexicans would be attracted to. But it is unclear that the Americans would be any more successful than the Mexicans. What is clear is that any U.S. intervention would turn Mexican drug traffickers into patriots fighting yet another Yankee incursion. Recall that Pershing never caught Pancho Villa, but he did help turn Villa into a national hero in Mexico.
The United States has a number of choices. It could accept the status quo. It could figure out how to reduce drug demand in the United States while keeping drugs illegal. It could legalize drugs, thereby driving their price down and ending the motivation for smuggling. And it could move into Mexico in a bid to impose its will against a government, banking system and police and military force that benefit from the drug trade.
The United States does not know how to reduce demand for drugs. The United States is not prepared to legalize drugs. This means the choice lies between the status quo and a complex and uncertain (to say the least) intervention. We suspect the United States will attempt some limited variety of the latter, while in effect following the current strategy and living with the problem.
Ultimately, Mexico is a failed state only if you accept the idea that its goal is to crush the smugglers. If, on the other hand, one accepts the idea that all of Mexican society benefits from the inflow of billions of American dollars (even though it also pays a price), then the Mexican state has not failed — it is following a rational strategy to turn a national problem into a national benefit.
The above report was republished with the permission of Stratfor.IT'S OFFICIAL: NO NUCLEAR DETERRENT AGAINST BIOLOGICAL ATTACKS ON US BY NPT NATIONS
The United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations. This revised assurance is intended to underscore the security benefits of adhering to and fully complying with the NPT and persuade non-nuclear weapon states party to the Treaty to work with the United States and other interested parties to adopt effective measures to strengthen the non-proliferation regime.
In making this strengthened assurance, the United States affirms that any state eligible for the assurance that uses chemical or biological weapons against the United States or its allies and partners would face the prospect of a devastating conventional military response – and that any individuals responsible for the attack, whether national leaders or military commanders, would be held fully accountable. Given the catastrophic potential of biological weapons and the rapid pace of bio-technology development, the United States reserves the right to make any adjustment in the assurance that may be warranted by the evolution and proliferation of the biological weapons threat and U.S. capacities to counter that threat.
-United States Defense Department Nuclear Posture Review Report, April 2010
Click here to download and read the full report.
Now consider that three of the world's worst regimes--Cuba, Iran, and Syria--are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They are also allies with stockpiles of biological weapons and ties to terrorist groups, including Iran's Islamist, Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.
For the first time, owing to the Obama administration's new nuclear policy, these avowed enemies of the U.S. have been assured by a U.S. administration that they can attack the U.S. with biological weapons--send smallpox-infected terrorists to walk among Americans, for example--without fear of triggering a U.S. nuclear retaliation. Iran is a possible exception because it is considered to be in non-compliance with the NPT.
Certainly, an NPT-party's chance of being obliterated as a result of sponsoring or aiding an anonymous biological attack on the U.S. has practically been reduced to zero. The potential rewards from a deniable attack--crippling the U.S.--far outweigh the risks.
For the first time, too, a terrorist-sponsoring nation that is also an NPT party can rest assured that it will not be subject to nuclear retaliation by the U.S. even if the aggressor pulls off another 9/11-sized mega-attack, using airplanes or ballistic missiles launched from barges or cargo ships, or sends waves of suicide bombers and assault teams to massacre Americans in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and apartment buildings, blow up trains, buses, bridges, tunnels, etc. One, two, three or more Pearl Harbor-like sneak attacks ... a dozen or more Mumbai-style swarming attacks and Moscow-style subway bombings ... the numbers of attacks and casualties don't matter in the eyes of the Obama administration ... as long as the weapons used against the U.S. are not nuclear weapons and the sponsoring state is an NPT party.
As for a U.S. ally, such as Israel, it can be bombarded with missiles, chemical and biological warheads, its cites can be leveled and rubbled--conventionally or with non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction--and still not come under the protection of the so-called U.S. nuclear umbrella. The Islamist enemy has been given assurances ... by the Obama administration.
Progress! Change! Insanity.
POSTSCRIPT: Obama and his helpers and their adoring media would have you believe that Muslim hatred for the United States is in part the fault of the U.S. because it has somehow disrespected Islam. Interestingly, Iran and Communist/atheist Cuba are allies even though Islamic resources are almost nonexistent in Cuba, Spanish translations of the Koran and other major Islamic books are not available in the country, and Cuba's few Muslims must pray in their homes since there is no Mosque in Havana and the state does not allow the construction of mosques. Similarly, Iran and Communist/atheist North Korea are allies and partners in nuclear and missile crimes.MAOISTS MASSACRE 73 COPS IN INDIA
India's "Red Taliban" have struck again, killing 73 policemen in a jungle ambush. Click herefor the story.
Read about the Maoist group's foreign links, including ties to China, here. China Confidential analysts believe the Chinese backing transcends arms supplies. China secretly supports the ultra-left insurgency as a way of countering India's rise. [Similarly, China sees a nuclear-armed Iran and Islamist terror as a way of countering and weakening the United States ... in spite of the Islamist (Uighur) threat to China itself.]
Click here for a long piece on the Maoist money trail inside India.China-Based Cyber-Spies Targeted India
The "Shadow Network" was based in Chengdu. For eight months, according to researchers at the University of Toronto, the Chinese network stole sensitive information from Indian government agencies, including security information relating to the Middle East, and email correspondence with the Dalai Lama. Click here for the story, and here to download the research report on which the news article is based.
The supposed independence of the espionage network is of course a sham.Liberal US Think Tank Pushing Pro-Islamist Propaganda Following Moscow Bombings
It follows this piece of garbage--here--about "root causes."
Digging for root causes ... addressing "legitimate grievances" ... prayer and healing sessions ... vigils and memorials ... speeches and essays ... understanding and rationalizing ... justifying and giving in ... appeasement and accommodation ... the liberal response to terrorism.Iran: Oil Sanctions are 'a Joke'
Click here for the story.
Obama has allowed Islamist Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Engagement (code for appeasement) has failed. Trying to strike a Grand Bargain with the devil has failed. Sanctions and containment will fail.
There is no diplomatic solution.
Appeasement fans the flames of aggression. Again, a mad mullah has threatened to attack Israel, as reported here.
Iran's intentions are clear (to everyone except dumbbell Democrats and an Obama-adoring media): to destroy Israel--all at once or over time, in stages--and to also destroy the United States. Not for nothing has Iran, with North Korean assistance, developed and tested a cargo ship-based ballistic missile launching system. Google EMP attack.
As China Confidential has warned, the U.S. could actually be Iran's first target. Whereas Israel would automatically obliterate its enemies if a nuclear device of any sort were to ever be used against the Jewish State, even anonymously, President Obama would most likely respond to an anonymous nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland by appealing for calm (assuming the attack was not of the EMP kind and communication systems are still operating), appointing an investigative commission and promising to find and bring the perpetrators of the atrocity--or "tragedy"--to justice, addressing prayer and healing sessions, quoting from "the holy Koran," and attending a series of nationally televised, Yes We Can Rebuild (insert a city name here) pop music concerts.
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Another odious propaganda piece from the Carnegie Moscow Center. Click here to read it.
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