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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| The axis of catastrophe |
| 2018-01-05 |
| One of the underappreciated aspects of the crisis in Iran is its linkage with Venezuela. This collapsing Caribbean nation has a geostrategic alliance with embattled Iran. Some aspects are financial. Venezuela is relying on Iran and Syria to pull it out of the economic mire. "Facing potentially debilitating oil sanctions from the Trump administration, the Caracas government is searching desperately for new ways to get its most valuable commodity ‐ oil ‐ to awaiting buyers. ... The Venezuelan government is working with Iran and Syria to start construction this year on a new refinery in Syria that will process up to 140,000 barrels of oil per day, according to an announcement by Iran’s Research Institute of the Petroleum Industry." Other ties are military. Caracas closely coordinated with Iran's foreign legion, Hezbollah, to create a dual purpose criminal/terror network in the Americas whose primary target was the USA. What happens to this empire if Hezbollah falls from favor at home? In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation. ... As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments ‐ all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials. These links mean that risks now rising in each nation feed into the other. Like bankrupts who have guaranteed each other's scams as one declines it will pull the other down. Iran's woes increase Venezuela's -- and vice versa. But the chain of causality doesn't end there. North Korea is also suspected to be part of an internationally distributed WMD program, where Iran takes the lead in missile development and North Korea assumes the responsibility for nuclear warhead design and vehicle testing. ...The danger and opportunity for the Trump administration -- it's a two sided coin -- is that the entire Venezuela-Iran-North Korea axis could suddenly take off in an unpredictable direction. Push down in Tehran and Pyongyang may act up. There's enough complexity in the system to make it difficult to manage. The liberal punditry is finally realizing that you can't predict the future. Because GIGO, not because prediction is impossible. People routinely predict the future correctly. But that is exactly what they based the Obama Iran deal upon in the first place: a scenario that never came true. Now they warn: we don't know anything about Iran!The danger and opportunity for the Trump administration -- it's a two sided coin -- is that the entire Venezuela-Iran-North Korea axis could suddenly take off in an unpredictable direction. Push down in Tehran and Pyongyang may act up. There's enough complexity in the system to make it difficult to manage. The liberal punditry is finally realizing that you can't predict the future. But that is exactly what they based the Obama Iran deal upon in the first place: a scenario that never came true. Now they warn: we don't know anything about Iran! |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 Bright Pebbles, Well said. |
| Posted by: F. Theremble9645 2018-01-05 19:53 |
| #2 The liberal punditry is finally realizing that you can't predict the future. If you're economics is marxist then the economy will always seem a mystery. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2018-01-05 14:36 |
| #1 Link was b0rked: People routinely predict the future correctly. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2018-01-05 12:51 |