Friday, December 9, 2016

Patrick Henningsen — New Obama Executive Order Opens Door for Unlimited Arms to Islamist Terrorists in Syria


Obama loses it, does stupid shit.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama issued a White House memorandum (see full text below) to both the US State and Defense departments which waives any arms export control restrictions on providing ‘military assistance’ to any and all ‘foreign forces’ in Syria, according to a White House press release issued today. Presumably, this includes not only guns and ammuniation, but also lethal TOW Missiles and RPGs (and anti-aircraft units?) for tens of thousands of extremist foreign fighters and salafi terrorists currently operating inside Syria, as well as thousands of US-trained and equipped fighters waiting in camp in both Turkey and Jordan.
This desperate move by Obama can only mean two things. Firstly, it demonstrates that the US and its allies are doggedly determined to prolong one the bloodiest and dirtiest wars in recent history. Secondly, it signals a last-ditch act of desperation on the part of a President who will be viewed as a perennial loser in a failed proxy war that lasted over 5 years, costing tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
21st Century Wire
BREAKING: New Obama Executive Order Opens Door for Unlimited Arms to Islamist Terrorists in Syria
Patrick Henningsen

21 comments:

GLH said...

"President who will be viewed as a perennial loser"
I have viewed O as a loser since about six months into his first term when I found that he had never intended on having a public option. If you look up perennial loser in the dictionary it will have O's picture.

bbbar said...

He's been doing stupid shit for eight years, starting with his cabinet announcements before his inauguration and going downhill from there. You're correct that his recent Syria policy is particularly stupid. Do the geniuses in his administration think they can still win in Syria? I know they're that evil, but are they that clueless?

The Rombach Report said...

"Do the geniuses in his administration think they can still win in Syria?"

Not likely. They can't even figure out if the enemy is ISIS or Assad.

MRW said...

He's been doing stupid shit for eight years, starting with his cabinet announcements before his inauguration and going downhill from there.

Yup. I remember that letdown.

Peter Pan said...

And Trump thinks O is a "great guy".

MRW said...

✔✔✔

Well, it is a club of 45.

Matt Franko said...

The gulf states want those pipelines thru Syria.... they have to eat too...

The Rombach Report said...

"The gulf states want those pipelines thru Syria.... they have to eat too..."

Mark Twain once said... "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." If so, does Syrian civil rhyme with Spanish civil war, 1936-39?

Matt Franko said...

idk Ed... seems like this Syria thing is over energy for food trade between gulf and Europe...

US moving out and no European navy to secure the sea routes.... and no way for them to build their own they dont have the technology...

They have shown capability of securing land masses though so the rhyme might be "one by land..."

John said...

No doubt Obama will get another Nobel peace prize.


Matt: "The gulf states want those pipelines thru Syria.... they have to eat too..."

If the West had any sense, that would be the way to bring the jihadi Gulf states down from within. That would mean conservative nationalists taking power, using the wealth of the region on the people, not on F15s, recycling the petrodollars through Wall Street and using oil as a lever over the other advanced industrialised countries.

Global Jihadi HQ in Riyadh, outsourced by Washington, has a lot of petrol left in the tank, even if it means corpses in US and European cities. Who cares! The prize is another American century.

Matt Franko said...

John that is changing US below 2m bpd from the cartel nations and dropping rapidly... and that might be mostly non-gulf nations...

They are in deep shit... have to turn to Europe and the warrior class there is still depleted only 2 gens out from ww2 so they are going to have to try to do it themselves... but with Russia backing Syria it doesn't look good ...

New KSA guy looks like warrior class so they are going to give it a go anyway...

John said...

Matt: "...that is changing US below 2m bpd from the cartel nations and dropping rapidly... "

US barely imported any Middle East oil until relatively recently, yet the policy has been the same since 1945: Washington controls the oil through its client states who depend on Washington from being overthrown by their own people. Access to oil has never been the issue, as State and DoD declassified papers have repeatedly made clear. Like the Pentagon papers, these energy papers are simply ignored except by the "revisionist" school of history, who take declassified papers seriously. The issue is the control of oil so as to use it as a lever on Europe and Japan, and now China. That's the strategy. It's not an opinion.

Before the oil shock in 1973, Washington's policy was to induce its Gulf client states to significantly increase the price of oil. The 1973 war allowed the Washington-backed Gulf states to raise the price dramatically, as had been carefully orchestrated by Kissinger and the other grand strategists in Washington. Like the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq's WMD and numerous other nefarious policies, the reasons for the oil price jump are an open secret. Even Foreign Affairs - Foreign Affairs, for heaven's sake! - had a detailed article about how Washington was behind the OPEC oil shock. There are some very good scholarly books on it too: John Blair, Pierre Terzian, Ian Skeet, to name a few.



Tom Hickey said...

The issue is the control of oil so as to use it as a lever on Europe and Japan, and now China. That's the strategy. It's not an opinion.


Right.

Control access to finance, resources and it is not necessary to control territory directly. This is how the British Empire operated through control of the seas and London as the center of finance. The US just took over that model post WWII and upgraded it. The American Empire is the British Empire.

The core is still the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, called "five eyes" since intelligence is shared. The other developed countries — Europe, Japan, and South Korea — are vassals, and the ROW comprises the colonies. The US still occupies the vassals militarily, which is an essential aspect of NATO, for example. As NATO has expanded toward Russia, the Empire has added more territory it has under its control.

Those that resist are the adversary and are subject to isolation and regime change.

Of course, the public narrative is completely different, but only people that are ignorant of history and international relations fall for the propaganda.

John said...

Tom,

Once you add the power of Washington's military to bomb countries back to the stone age, the power of the Fed and the dollar and the Washington-led IMF (sanctions, freezing assets, etc), the Washington-led WTO and the refusal or acceptance to trade with other countries, on top of the control of oil, you have an historically unparalleled world dominance.


"...but only people that are ignorant of history and international relations fall for the propaganda."

And that's the other power they have, the propaganda machine that goes by the name of the media. It's difficult to figure things out, but once the first crack of light is glimpsed it doesn't take long to figure it all out. That's where the hope is. I've seen friends go from mainstream "patriotic" conservatives to radical antiwar and antiglobalization radical leftists because they realised that something didn't quite fit. And that opened up the floodgates. Investigating one thing leads to another and then another.

The Rombach Report said...

"Once you add the power of Washington's military to bomb countries back to the stone age, the power of the Fed..."

How true! In the wake of Fed QUANTITATIVE EASING, maybe the Federal Reserve should be seen as a part of the Defense Department. This is where perception becomes reality and there is a good case to make that the Fed became inadvertently weaponized during QE2. Enough market participants perceived QE to be Fed money printing, and so they did the logical thing and pursued the 'RISK ON' trade of selling the $, and selling inflation sensitive long duration Treasury debt, while simultaneously buying equities, credit sensitive financial assets, and COMMODITIES.

QE2 commenced in November, 2010 and by January 2011, food riots broke out in Algeria and Tunisia due to sharply higher prices for basic foodstuffs like flour, cooking oil, sugar, corn, etc. Protests led to the fall of the Tunisian government and spilled over into Libya resulting in the fall of Qadaffi and disruption of oil production sending oil prices higher. Mubarik fell in Egypt, and the turmoil spread to Syria where it is still playing out. Governments in North Africa and the Middle East fell like dominoes as a practical consequence of Fed QE policy.

Peter Pan said...

What can NZ keep an eye on? They are geographically remote.

Matt Franko said...

not so fast Bob:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/russia-vladimir-putin-eyes-south-pole-antarctic-exapansion-1503643

GLH said...

John, "And that's the other power they have, the propaganda machine that goes by the name of the media." You should probable add in education. People don't suspect that they are paying for propaganda indoctrination when they pay for college.

Matt Franko said...

"People don't suspect that they are paying for propaganda indoctrination when they pay for college."

Hate to break the news to you but F=ma is not propaganda....

Tom Hickey said...

John, "And that's the other power they have, the propaganda machine that goes by the name of the media." You should probable add in education. People don't suspect that they are paying for propaganda indoctrination when they pay for college.

This is extremely important and relates to the concept of normal paradigm in science. Science is done and taught within the prevailing aka "normal" paradigm and stepping out that paradigm is strictly forbidden unless one is a highly qualified theoretical person working at the margin and even they have to be prepared for ridicule and perhaps pressure. In fact, even is someone very highly qualified takes a step "too far", the can be ostracized.

Education is based on the prevailing cultural world view as the basic framework that provides the foundation for what counts as knowledge in the society because it generates the ultimate criteria. World views are implicit, being communicated through culture and language use. They are too embedded and complex to be articulated explicitly in their entirety. They are like the air for us other surface creatures and water for fish.

The framework provided by the world view can be used to generate different ideological positions that are compatible it. These ideologies need not be compatible with each other and this creates separate groups within a society that vie for dominance.

A society may also have more that one world view operational. For example, in contemporary societies it is often the case that a particular religious world view will conflict with another or with the humanistic and naturalistic aka scientific world view, which itself is susceptible to various POVs.

Right now, there is a huge conflict over which world view and which ideologies will dominate education in the US. The Koch Bros. are making large investments in shaping this, for instance. To some degree the home schooling movement is about making space for education in the fundamentalist biblical world view and the ideology of particular sects. Common core is the attempt to impose a normal paradigm on US education.

Anyone that thinks eduction is not a form of propaganda is not paying attention. Where absolute criteria independent of world view are lacking, choices are make both implicitly and explicity.

Tom Hickey said...

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” ― John Maynard Keynes

The same can be said of most other aspects of life.