fahrenheit451:363

We do indeed live in interesting times.

And that's cold bloody comfort for the 99.999% of human society who are at best mere spectators of the events unfolding in the Middle Eastern imbroglio aka Iran /Iraq /Syria.

Having brazenly violated recognised tenets of International Law as well as long held diplomatic norms and conventions, POTUS Trump as Commander-in-Chief threatened in the most egregiously graphic terms to annihilate Iranian cultural sites should the government in Tehran consider some sort of retaliatory action against the US for its assassination of General Soleimani.

Even the most reliably docile and compliant lickspittle NATO lackeys of the US were moved to point out that Trump's apocalyptic threat,if enacted,would constitute a war crime.

Trump and his coterie of war-mongering Neocon hawks -Pompeo et al blithely acknowledged this a couple of days later and muttered something about of course the'll be obeying international law on this matter.

Meanwhile, elements within the Iranian leadership ordered the firing of some ballistic missiles at targets inside Iraq being used as airbases for US led coalition forces.

Trump's tweeted response to this Iranian violation of International Law etc. was "All is Well"...

The UK government's posture on any of this is utterly and entirely superfluous and irrelevant and has no bearing on the situation.

Bluff,bluster and a vainglorious recapitulation that Britain used to be something 100 years ago are simply the ill rehearsed soliloquy repeated by idiots; full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Footnote: Book of Romans 3:10-12

fahrenheit451:261

There's a quote that's been mis-attributed to Winston Churchill about jaw,jaw being better than war,war.

it's a good quote,mis-attributed or not. Back in January 2003,I planned and curated a Poetry exhibition at Wakefield Cathedral on the Iraq war at the time using  the title , "Jaw,jaw war,war". Anyhow...

It's a good day today, June 12 2018 ; the world has opted for more life in preference to nuclear self-immolation.

Presidents Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands and called each other friend.

And the Washington DC neocon neanderthals and their liberal global interventionist cousins are pissed off beyond belief.

Clearly they didn't see this one coming or they might with the benefit of hindsight in the next few days,as the new reality sinks into their troglodyte consciousness, claim to have done so but are not best pleased about it at all.

The inimitable practitioners of Realpolitik such as Bismarck and Talleyrand however,would no doubt be enormously pleased at the success of the Singapore summit.

Trump has brilliantly blindsided the very neocon hawks who had supposed that it was they who had taken Trump's vision hostage and had cowed him into submission to their nefarious schemes.

The thing is,that might still be partially the political / ideological status quo. Syria,Iran,Israel are still on countdown to something infinitely far more dangerous than whatever the state of the present multilateral imbroglio is in.

Yet, Trump and Kim Jong Un with the energetic involvement of China,South Korea and Japan riding to both their rescues have pivoted the world away from nuclear hellfire and damnation.

And the Obama/Clinton democrat liberal global interventionists and the McCain/Bush/Cruz reptilian republican neocons who want a Forever War are now wallowing in their own customised slough of despond.

And Schadenfreude is their only companion.

fahrenheit451:193

Another day, another test missile fire from DPRK aka NorthKorea. The missile was again reported as flying over sovereign Japanese airspace.
US Secretary of State Tillerson has  " demanded " that both China and Russia take firm measures against DPRK.
This is what an international  diplomatic relations kind of Groundhog Day looks like in a world of supposedly independent sovereign nation states.
The UN security Council is due to convene later on today in order to discuss this latest North Korean missile incident.
It's only a few days ago that the security council passed a resolution imposing additional sanction against DPRK for its nuclear bomb tests.
Business Insider UK of 11 September applied lateral thinking to this seemingly intractable and worsening Korean imbroglio.
" When Jocko Willink‏, a former US Navy SEAL who is now an author and occasional Business Insider contributor, was asked on Twitter how he would handle the North Korean crisis, he gave an unexpected answer that one expert said just might work.
Willink's proposal didn't involve any covert special operation strikes or military moves of any kind. Instead of bombs, Willink suggested the US drop iPhones.
"Drop 25 million iPhones on them and put satellites over them with free wifi," Willink tweeted last week.
While the proposal itself is fantastical and far-fetched, Yun Sun, an expert on North Korea at the Stimson Center, says the core concept could work.
"Kim Jong Un understands that as soon as society is open and North Korean people realize what they're missing, Kim's regime is unsustainable, and it's going to be overthrown," Sun told Business Insider.
For this reason, North Korea's government would strongly oppose any measures that mirror Willink's suggestion.
Sun pointed out that when South Korea had previously flown balloons that dropped pamphlets and DVDs over North Korea, the Kim regime had responded militarily, sensing the frailty of its government relative to those of prosperous liberal democracies. "
The off the cuff proposal has the major advantage of not involving as a central feature of its implementation the thermonuclear annihilation of several million people.
China and Russia  have seemingly been placed in the onerous position of having to do a favour for their greatest adversary and most potent military threat aka the USA.
And its all China and Russia's fault if the USA has to resort to military action against DPRK if events don't work out as the neocon Washington establishment wants them to.
I'd go with the iphones strategem.

fahrenheit451:185

There's an old saying about the definition of insanity being someone who keeps on repeating failed actions over and over and expecting a different result.

Syria.The Middle East in general. United States foreign policy.

Gleaned from today's  South Front website

ISIS AND ‘MODERATE REBELS’ UNITE EFFORTS AGAINST SYRIAN ARMY IN EASTERN HAMA COUNTRYSIDE. GOVT FORCES COUNTER-ATTACK

 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allied groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have united efforts with ISIS in an attempt to cut off the Salamiyah-Ithriyah-Khanassir-Aleppo road, the only government supply line to Aleppo city.

On August 23 and August 24, HTS artillery units conducted a massive bombardment campaign shelling Syrian Arab Army (SAA) positions along the road. At the same time, ISIS attacked the SAA at Wadi al-Adib and Shayk Hilal and even temporarily cut off the road near as-Saan.
Pro-militant sources, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), claimed that the SAA suffered a number of tactical setbacks and that ISIS could use the situation in order to recapture a large area in the Uqayrabat pocket.
However, then reports started appearing that the SAA, the Qalamoun Shield Forces and the National Defense Forces (NDF), backed up by Russian attack helicopters, launched a counter-attack in the area and recaptured some points that had been lost to terrorists.
Clashes are ongoing. The situation remains tense.

It's only a few short weeks ago that the CIA ( aren't they part of the US state ? ) announced its withdrawal of military support for the ragbag coalition of forces commonly referred to as the Free Syrian Army. Then again elements of the US military are still actively stationed inside fortified installations inside Syria assisting and advising the very same FSA.

Meanwhile the clowns of the Turkish regime's governing elite have let it be known that they are mightily displeased with the US continuing its support- military and financial to the YPG ,the Syrian Kurdish faction who themselves co-operate with some elements of the FSA.

Erdogan's genuinely racist,xenophobic authoritarian regime despises the very existence of all Kurds everywhere and considers them an existential threat to his greater Turkey.

There is nobody in Washington, either in the Trump administration itself or amongst the politicians in Congress or amongst the Military/Security apparatus, who has ever been called upon to debate and explain in public the strategic rationale and constitutional justification for the US opposing the legitimate sovereign state of Syria and for supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The ongoing Islamic terrorist outrages across , not only the european continent but in south east asia,the horn of Africa and a broad range of countries stretching from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east of Africa seems to be of little concern to the Neocon/ liberal interventionist warmongers in Washington. Maybe they can't bomb or threaten to bomb or regime change everywhere all at once like back in the good old old days.

We are most assuredly dans la merde.

fahrenheit451:180

Nothing signifies the utter,crass stupidity of  the USA's  infantile,venal militaristic posturing than the current on going and seemingly escalating spat with the DPRK ( North Korea ).
The Byzantine convolutions and convulsions of Washington DC domestic politics aside, it would in theory have to take the US Congress to actually declare War,were it so inclined to do so over this latest hissy fit of theirs.
Not that the highly inconvenient constitutional necessity has ever impeded Neocon psychopaths from gerrymandering contentious and mainly bogus UN security council resolutions that allow the Pentagon a smoke and mirrors loophole to go ahead and wreak havoc on a historically unprecedented scale - Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice),Afghanistan,Libya,Syria.
President Trump's Hollywood-manque poorly scripted, sub-Churchillian rhetoric about fire and fury,yatta-ta-yatta is of itself not terribly enlightening other than it helps to highlight another facet of this entire useless,burdensome farrago of the US chucking the teddy out of its pram.The undiplomatic verbiage has even managed to upset John McCain, the terminally ill warmonger,neocon hawk supreme and soon to be ex-senator from Arizona.
The deep, deep state of CIA,career military and political thin tank neocons do crave for wanton carnage and global instability as long as it seems to favour US corporate interests long term. The spat with the DPRK doesn't accord with the preconceptions of their playbook and so it isn't welcome.
Which is worrying for them; ever since a Heritage Foundation report from 2013 concluded that the US ruling elites and their military-industrial complex are no longer capable of fighting a two front war.  Read and enjoy :-

http://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-measure-superpower-two-major-regional-contingency-military-the-21st-century
Today’s military is too small to meet the two-MRC test credibly. Moreover, the qualitative advantage that the U.S. military has long enjoyed is eroding as advanced military capabilities proliferate around the world. The capabilities of U.S. forces are also deteriorating as platforms and systems age and as critical modernization programs are delayed or even cancelled.
Building a two-MRC force for the 21st century means increasing the size of the U.S. military, modernizing existing platforms and systems, and investing in advanced air, sea, and land capabilities. This will require resources above the levels proposed by the Obama Administration. Over the next decade, building a reasonable two-MRC force for the 21st century will cost roughly $70 billion more per year than the projected cost of the current defense program, which averages approximately $550 billion per year.

Section I: What It Takes to Be a Military Superpower

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has measured the fundamental adequacy of its force posture in terms of the ability of U.S. forces, without national mobilization, to defeat two nation-state adversaries in geographically separate theaters nearly simultaneously. From the time it was first articulated in 1991, the two-theater-war standard has undergone repeated reviews and revisions. The fundamental reason that the two-theater-war standard still survives is because no credible alternative has ever been proposed. Senior decision makers across five Administrations, Republican and Democrat, have been unable to avoid the reality that, in a world of continuing globalization and growing political and military uncertainty, the U.S. needs a military that is large enough and has a sufficient range of capabilities to cover multiple major military contingencies in overlapping time frames.
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No-one will be bombing anyone anytime soon,unless,of course there are those too stupid to comprehend what really is at stake were they to act so precipitously.
The term  " Schadenfreude " seems appropriate at this juncture.