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The quiet coalition has come together to reverse the decline of the opposition rebel forces in Syria, according to this nice front-pager in Wednesday’s Washington Post. Much like in the case of Libya, the Obama Administration is hanging back and letting the local “market” determine his military response. He simply refuses to take the strategic [...]
Nice Washington Post story about how the U.S. is training Ugandan soldiers (along with some from Burundi, Sierra Leone and Djibouti) in Uganda on how to do battle with Islamic extremists in Somalia – namely the al-Shabaab group affiliated with Al-Qaida. Both the fear and the hope are encapsulated in a nifty little paragraph: Ever since [...]
As Bashar Assad looks more internationally isolated by the day — and far more vulnerable to Western economic sanctions than uber-bad boy Iran — it behooves us to think through what general advantages accrue with his eventual fall. To date, most of the thinking has focused on Iran’s loss of its right-hand proxy in transmitting [...]
Comes from Bloomberg: China Gets Cheaper Iran Oil as U.S. Picks Up Tab for Hormuz Straits Patrols Brilliant huh? But a wonderful capture of the illogic of Obama’s “strategic pivot” to East Asia: the more we try to hem in China there, the more they seek breakout situations elsewhere around the world. Picking and embracing [...]
Great Washington Post piece on China’s intense desire for stability on Korean peninsula, thus the clear backing of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong Eun. Wrap-up paragraph says it all: The notion of a democratized Korean Peninsula with U.S. troops positioned directly along the Chinese border — one scenario in a North Korean collapse — is [...]
WSJ lead story about Chinese developing a ballistic missile designed to fragment – like a cluster bomb – on the deck of a U.S. carrier and wipe out all aircraft and personnel. Naturally, it’s unbelievably provocative to us, because in our world view, U.S. carriers get to come right up to the coast of any [...]
Nice piece in the New York Times on Tuesday, previewing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s much-anticipated announcement of almost a half-trillion in defense cuts over the next decade.As Mark Thompson just noted, not a whole lot of details. We are told that the U.S. military will no longer plan to fight two wars simultaneously – long [...]
My favorite – and most frustrated – anti-nuke activist Helen Caldicott believes Fukushima drives Japan out of the industry and – by extension – kills the industry worldwide. But telling WSJ piece last Friday suggests otherwise, for the best reason: (print ed. subtitle: “Few civilians want bombs, but leaders see plutonium playing role as deterrent.” [...]
You get two variants of this logic: 1) if the US leaves Iraq, Iran wins automatically (or it’s won already because the Shiite majority actually rules); and 2) even more than al-Qaeda, Iran is the real beneficiary of the Arab Spring. Both judgments are wrong in the way that America’s capacity for frantic self-doubt and [...]
[Co-written with Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory LLC] The demise of Col Qaddafi, a despicable despot who should have met this or a worse fate sooner, will likely give rise to power grabs in Libya by groups whose agendas will often be anything other than what meets the eye. Despite many power holders’ [...]
