The UN Commissioner for Human Rights condemned Israel today. She said 'Israel is to be condemned in the strongest terms for refusing to protect Paleostinians. Israel should provide Paleostinians the same protection as Israelis. As a direct result of Israeli actions, millions of innocent Paleostinian civilians are in danger of being slaughtered by the army of the Caliphate.'
The Jordanian government set up by the Moslem Brüderbund looked shaky from the beginning, say experts. Even though the liquidation of King Abdullah last year seemed to satisfy Islamic demands, Jordanian traditions of women's rights remained. As a result the Caliphate attacked, routed a demoralized Jordanian Army, and raised their black flag over Amman.
Millions of Paleostinians have fled west across the Jordan to shelter behind the Israeli defensive fence in the Jordan valley. This fence, called by the UN yet another Israeli apartheid wall, is designed to be a tripwire rather than a formidable barrier. So Paleostinian refugees heading for Israeli shelter may have only a brief period of security.
President Clinton has condemned the attack by the Caliphate Army, but reaffirmed the US policy established by her predecessor of non-involvement in the Middle East. 'The citizens of the former countries of Iraq, Syria, and Leb chose through their submission to embrace the Caliphate. Who are we to disagree with this freely expressed choice?' she said.
Although Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... and most of the oil-exporting Emirates have announced an oil embargo against the US and Europe in protest, it is not expected that this will have any impact. The US of course is now self sufficient in energy from fracking and alternative fuels.
Most European governments have also confirmed their policy of non-involvement. The British PM, Ali Hassoun, said that he is hurt by the Saudi attitude, given all that Britannia has done to satisfy Saudi requests for equal status of Sharia law in the United Kingdom. European stocks dropped by 50% across the board on fears of an economic crisis from the shortage of oil.
Russia however sees this an opportunity to get back into the Middle East following the loss of its client state, Syria. It see Israel as a natural ally, given close ties with the economically successful Russian community in Israel. Right now President-for-Life Putin is engaged in talks with Israeli PM Lieberman. On the agenda are more supplies of the successful smart ground attack robots developed between Israel Military Industries (IMI) and Russia's Almaz-Antey.
Both India and China are taking more cautious attitudes. Obviously they are concerned about their hugely profitable partnerships with Israel in technology, and both have been very damaged by Islamic insurgency. India in particular, following the implosion of Pakistain into a set of warring Moslem factions, has little to offer in direct military support since its army is fully occupied on India's Western border.
Turkey of course is in a perilous situation. It is no longer in NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and organization.... . It has been demoralised by the unification of its Kurdish provinces into Kurdistan. Natural gas and oil supplies from Russia, Israel, and Kazakhstan are diminishing. And many Moslems in Asian Turkey (although not Arabs) are, after a generation of strict Islamicisation by PM Erdogan, listening favourably to the message of the Caliphate.
It is now even rumoured that the two most powerful armies in the region, the IDF and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (both with unacknowledged nuclear weapons) are exchanging intelligence about the Caliphate Army, Unlikely as this collaboration may seem, both countries are expected to soon be in at war with the Caliphate.
The most surprising event, however, has been the reaction of the Islamic State of Gazoo. They have agreed to accept the right of Israel to exist, have placed its fighters in special units under the control of the IDF, and are negotiating to extend Israeli citizenship to all Gazooks.
[DAWN] These are familiar questions in Pakistain's current dark times: is the state failing, has it failed, will it fail? These are all questions that have appeared in ink in Pak newspapers, fallen from the lips of new analysts, been scattered around by politicians.
A centrepiece in the scientific analysis of governance, a sense of gravity, is invested in the idea; and, consequently, 'state failure' is imagined as an objective standard against which existing inadequacies can be tabulated.
In the chaos of Pak politics — the inveterate corruption, the endemic nepotism, the lack of oversight and objectivity — the prospect of standards, especially objective ones, gleams and glistens. In this climate of developing-nation despair, therefore, the term "failed" state has been embraced.
Foreign commentators, many of whom make their living on their expertise on Pakistain's unravelling, have offered their own affirmations. Writing in 2012, following the immediate release of the Failed States Index 2012, Robert Kaplan — the chief geopolitical strategist for Stratfor — dictatorially declared: "Perversity characterises Pakistain." Many of his ilk have happily followed suit, heaping all sorts negative terms, each supposedly attached to the pristine numerical objectivity of the 'failed states measure'.
The new colonialism, like the old, presents the shadows of intervention as weightless
As it turns out, the term "failed state" is a hoax designed precisely to capitalise on the insecurities of struggling sovereignties like Pakistain.
In an article published in The Guardian newspaper over a year ago, commentator Elliott Ross exposed both the term's origins and the nefarious intentions for whose fulfilment it was coined. The term and the Failed States Index which accompanies it is the child of a man named J.J. Messner, a former lobbyist for the private military industry.
Not only does Mr Messner not disclose this inconvenient fact about his past employment history, he also refuses to release any of the raw data that goes behind the index that he publishes.
Despite this, many political scientists who are usually quite vigilant about trawling through each other's data to verify claims have accepted the presence of the index in their midst.
As Ross explains, this is not an accident. The term itself was coined by two men, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, both employees of the US State Department in 1992. In an article appearing in Foreign Policy (which also hosts the dubious index, that has since been renamed the Fragile States Index), the duo argued that new countries emerging on the world's map were incapable of functioning or sustaining themselves as members of the international community.
What these weak countries (which, it was implied, were near-delusional in imagining themselves as functioning equally in the international realm) needed was the 'guardianship' of the Western world. This, in turn, would ensure the 'survivability' of these poor hapless countries (Pakistain among them).
In simple terms, the idea of state failure itself was premised on the assumption that weak or new states should allow and welcome intermeddling from Western overlords whose 'guardianship' was really something to be grateful for.
Unsurprisingly, in the years hence, the term has become a mainstay of justifying interventions and intermeddling via the 'guardian' countries themselves or international institutions whose hold over global economics permits them similar licence.
An attached plethora of jargon has emerged to support and affirm the concept, which is now alloyed with partners such as 'ungoverned spaces'. All of them are geared towards the central purpose of defining countries in the developing world as crucially, inherently and ultimately lacking.
The moral underpinning of this framing is that imperial overreach is not something dirty and unwarranted, colonial and corrupt, but necessary, even benevolent. The intervening states are grandfathering, helping along, assisting, and aiding. They are not meddling, provoking, or engaging in self-interested puppetry geared towards accomplishing their own strategic interests, positioning their pawns for their own proxy wars.
Words and typologies determine the way we see the world and our own position in it. The dominance of the jargon of state 'failure' means not simply the lens of the world averted from the moral wrongs that emit from intermeddling but also Pakistain's own image of itself.
Poised against the idea that Pakistain is a 'failed' country, the definition of nationalism or its attached patriotism becomes in turn equally deluded. If the world heaps the vacuous term 'failure' in order to whitewash the strategic intermeddling of the more powerful on our borders, those opposing it imagine global isolation as a response.
In this oppositional game, opposing the vocabulary of failure seems to require, in turn, a denial of all inadequacies, an imagined utopian purification all poised on a turning away from the world. The cumulative result is a double distortion, where actual problems are hidden away under the dictates of political gloss from within countries or from their would-be overlords without.
In studying international politics and global demarcations, those who are or would be analysts of Pakistain's condition, or of the post-colonial quandaries and infrastructural inadequacies of any developing country, must be wary of the vocabulary of development and global benevolence.
In the proliferation of glib terms like 'failure' and 'rentier' and 'ungovernability' are the mis-characterisations and deceptions of the new colonialism. Like the old, it presents the shadows of intervention as weightless and the obligations of aid as never, ever, nefarious. The arrangement of data, the selection of criterion, and the ranking of the always-wanting must, because of this, be open to epistemological questioning.
The idea of the 'failed' state is a fiction; digging out from its wreckage of selfhood and illusory sovereignty requires not its discounting, but a double challenge that goes beyond both the incorrect characterisations of others and the real flaws we know to be our own.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#2
Paks flatter themselves if they think anybody wants to colonize them. It's toxic. Nobody needs that kind of trouble. Wall them off and let them stew in their own juices.
[DAWN] The elephant is already in the room and surely by invitation this time. A panic-stricken civilian administration has handed over the security of the nation's capital to the army at its own peril.
The Triple One Brigade, whom we hear about mostly in times of military coups, is now deployed around key government installations. All this is happening as Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who ain't the brightest knife in the national drawer... and Tahirul Qadri ...Pak politician, and would-be dictator, founder and head of Tehreek-e-Minhajul Quran and Pakistain Awami Tehrik. He usually resides in Canada, but returns to Pakistain periodically to foam at the mouth and lead demonstrations. Depending on which way the wind's blowing, Qadri claims to be the author of Pak's blasphemy law. Other times he says it wasn't him... threaten, separately, to force the government out through a 'revolution march', providing enough fuel to keep alive our ever-active rumour mill. The development is ominous nonetheless.
One does not expect anything like the storming of the Bastille on Aug 14. Neither Khan's young brigade, nor Qadri's few thousand fanatical followers are the vanguard of revolution. But the government's own ineptness and paralysis is proving to be its unravelling. An absentee prime minister, a sulking interior minister and some, other irrelevant members of the cabinet do not evoke much public faith in a crumbling power structure.
An absentee prime minister and a sulking interior minister do not evoke much public faith
True to his self, Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... plans to counter the Pakistain Tehrik-e-Insaf ...a political party in Pakistan. PTI was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party's slogan is Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem, each of which is open to widely divergent interpretations.... 's (PTI) long march with unprecedented pomp and show on Independence Day starting with a military parade and the hoisting of supposedly the biggest-ever national flag. Curiously, this military drill is not a routine part of Independence Day celebrations; it is taking place as the civilian administration has abdicated the responsibility of security of the capital, leaving it to the army to handle reported terrorist threats.
This lends some credence to the opposition allegation that it is a deliberate move by the government to involve the military in the political conflict — with dangerous consequences. For sure, Article 245 has routinely been used in conflict zones in order give legal cover to security forces fighting insurgencies. But this provision has rarely been invoked in urban areas in times of peace.
It was in 1977 that the army was summoned by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ...9th PM of Pakistain from 1973 to 1977, and 4th President of Pakistain from 1971 to 1973. He was the founder of the Pakistain Peoples Party (PPP). His eldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto, would also serve as hereditary PM. In a coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto was removed from office and was executed in 1979 for authorizing the murder of a political opponent... at the height of the Pakistain National Alliance movement in Lahore and Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... under Article 245. And that 'mini martial law' was perhaps the beginning of the end of the Bhutto government. Article 245 was later also invoked by Nawaz Sharif in Karachi in 1998.
Surely one cannot draw a parallel between the situation then and now, but the outcome may not be very different. What is worse this time is that the army has been called in even though there has not been any serious incident of violence or a law and order situation that cannot be handled by civil law-enforcement agencies.
One wonders whether it is pure naivety on the part of the prime minister or whether he actually believes the army will come to his rescue in a time of crisis. Sharif needs to take a lesson from history for his own sake. It is a great plunge to take from the politics of confrontation to the politics of survival.
One oft-repeated argument offered by the government is that the invocation of Article 245 was linked with the operation in North Wazoo meant to give legal cover to the troops dealing with any Lion of Islam backlash. But why has this only been exercised in Islamabad? Why not Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. , Lahore or Karachi? Interestingly, the provision has been invoked more than six weeks after the start of the operation. Is there any explanation for why now? Particularly since there has been virtually no major terrorist incident in the city during that period that it would require extraordinary measures?
It is now open season with Khan and Qadri having clearly pronounced their intention of bringing down the Sharif government. They may not be following a prepared script, but it is apparent that they cannot achieve their goal in a constitutional way.
There is no way Imran Khan can force early elections with his party's relatively small presence in parliament. He certainly would not have the support of any other political party for his demand. Early elections would only be possible if Sharif agreed to dissolve the National Assembly. But why would he do that with no serious challenge emanating from within the house?
The only option left to Imran Khan is to increase public pressure through violent street protests. It is a big gamble that may have worked in a cricket match but surely not in the complex game of politics.
Let us assume that the PTI is somehow able to mobilise hundreds and thousands of people for a prolonged sit-in and completely paralyse the capital. A protracted stalemate with the government unable to use the coercive power of the state would inevitably lead to complete chaos and anarchy. This scenario would only strengthen the military's position as the sole arbiter of power.
Much before this stand-off, the military had already started reasserting its authority through rising tension with the Sharif administration on Musharraf's treason trial and a host of other policy issues. The public profile of the military leadership has further risen with the North Waziristan operation.
The well-publicised picture of army chief Gen Raheel Sharif spending Eid with his soldiers on the frontline and with the IDPs in Bannu came as a sharp contrast to the prime minister missing from the scene and spending time between his two favourite destinations — Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... and Murree. Sharif's lacklustre attitude has increasingly raised questions about his leadership capability.
All that was certainly in Imran Khan's calculations when he decided to up the ante, declaring war on the Sharif government. However, alcohol has never solved anybody's problems. But then, neither has milk... it is not going to be that simple. The PTI leader seems to be in a hurry to grasp power, but he may not be the winner in the endgame.
Army intervention, which he may well be aware of, would not put him on the throne. There is no probability of early elections even if Imran Khan is able to create a situation for Sharif's exit. It will not be the politicians, but the generals who would then decide the future course. It is yet another episode of the Pak political soap opera, a tragi-comedy.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/06/2014 00:00 ||
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The will in the West to address the crisis in the Middle East simply does not exist, and the press has moved on from covering the ISIS threat. Only a massive oil shock -- or worse -- would refocus the West's attention, and by then it would be far too late to do much of anything about it. It'll become interesting when the press can deflect blame from Obama Co.
Posted by: Uncle Phester ||
08/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
I predict ISIL will attempt a major terror attack on a US city in the next 12 months to offer legitimacy to their "caliphate." ISIL will tell us what they are going to do, do it, and then tell us they did it. ISIL is an extremely arrogant and self assured bunch, much more public and less stealthy than AQ.
When the attack occurs, and it will make 9/11 look like a warm up act to the Rolling Stones, the media will have to do mental gymnastics worthy of Zardari and Imran Khan to transfer the blame away from Obumble.
Of course, I have said from the beginning, the handlers of the empty suit WANT a major catastrophe, either economic, civil strife, or terrorist related to declare martial law, suspend the rule of law and institute a coup placing the empty suit at the top as a figure head for the real string pullers on the left.
Pelosi, Reid, the mass media, and Hollywood will find out what happens to useful idiots when the totalitarians take over.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
08/06/2014 10:51 Comments ||
Top||
#2
One additional comment:
Oil shock? with the United States as the worlds leader PRODUCER and EXPORTER of oil?
The fact the US exports more oil than KSA while remaining energy dependent is a bit of news that the mass media has buried.
If the EPA would quit writing regulations for ten minutes, we could build refineries, pipelines, and infrastructure to make use of the vast glut of oil we are now producing.
Of course, that does not mention natural gas, which major US oil companies are now flaring billions of cubic feet of natural gas because we don't have pipelines or refining facilities to utilize a "clean" fossil fuel AND natural gas prices in the NE and West are spiking because of supply problems.
Oil shock? Probably a bigger scandal for the empty suit administration than the coming ISIL terrorist attack coming to a major city near you.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
08/06/2014 10:57 Comments ||
Top||
#3
We're not the worlds largest exporter of oil. We are producing a lot, and can produce a lot more, and not using what natural gas we have to replace domestic coal would help even more.
But we're not in as good a situation as I keep seeing us described as having. I wonder if BHO's gang-that-can't-shoot-straight is pushing the meme to keep from having to restore drilling licenses to all the places they've blocked, on federal lands and offshore.
Drivel from WaPo. The next war will begin when this one is over, and it's not over yet.
[Washington Post] After nearly a month of round-the-clock carnage and terror, Gaza and southern Israel experienced something new on Tuesday: calm.
Once an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire kicked in at 8 a.m., there were no rocket attacks or missile strikes. No tunnel infiltrations or shelled schools.
But there were no celebrations or declarations of victory, either. Just a single, haunting question: If this war is truly over, how long until the next one begins?
Both Israel and Hamas went into the fight seeking to change the underlying dynamics of a situation that has produced three rounds of combat in less than six years while crippling the Gazan economy. But after 29 days of fighting that claimed nearly 2,000 lives, it is far from clear that either side has.
That could mean the next round of battle kicks off in the coming few years, months or even days if both sides do not get enough of what they want during negotiations set to begin in Cairo on Wednesday.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Depends how much reconstruction money USA the world pours into Gaza.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Wazoo
