The circling back to the Assads continues

If it's Friday, it must be time for another White House strategy on Syria --

Reinforce Jordan’s and Lebanon’s defenses as ISIL is pushed south and west. Enhancing counter-ISIL support in both nations is expected to provide enhanced contingency planning so a strong defense plan is in place and reinforced, the official said. Lebanon likely will have doubled security assistance in its armed forces to protect against ISIL’s and other terrorist groups’ encroachment, the official said.

Lebanon's border with Syria is jointly, if tacitly, managed by the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah. And there's no way for the US to be claiming any contribution to helping Lebanon resist encroachment without some back-channel communication with Hezbollah -- which in any event is also using its control of parts of the border to give the Assads another lifeline to the world.

Brilliant plan.

Don't believe the plain English

David Brooks, expressing patience for the fact that none of the Republican candidate economic plans add up --

At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable. What matters is how a candidate signals priorities. Rubio talks specifically about targeting policies to boost middle- and lower-middle-class living standards.

David Brooks, after the fiscal cliff imbroglio three years ago, expressing impatience with voters continually believing in economic plans that don't add up --

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters. The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money. Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way. Most members of Congress are responding efficiently to the popular will. A large number of reactionary Democrats reject any measure to touch Medicare or other entitlement programs. A large number of impotent Republicans talk about reducing the debt, but are incapable of forging a deal that balances tax increases with spending cuts.

It seems that the voters aren't supposed to interpret candidate promises the same way as the pundit class. 

Turf accountancy

Among the bizarre questions in the CNBC hosted Republican presidential primary debate last night --

QUINTANILLA: Governor Bush, daily fantasy sports has become a phenomenon in this country, will award billions of dollars in prize money this year. But to play you have to assess your odds, put money at risk, wait for an outcome that’s out of your control. Isn’t that the definition of gambling, and should the Federal Government treat it as such?

From The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes --

Or, to change the metaphor slightly, professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Solving Syria will involve more of this

Unlike last week's exercise in Russian foreign policy trolling in Moscow, the above meeting might actually be constructive. The Sultan of Oman's delegate on foreign affairs, Yousef bin Alawi bin Abdullah, meets Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Bringing in a player who is (a) not compromised by military involvement, and (b) has a clue what they are doing, usually helps.

Photo: Oman News Agency.

Good luck, Speaker Ryan

The general phenomenon is well covered in the news today, but for a sample of the immature histrionics that Hillary Clinton had to face yesterday regarding Benghazi, it's tough to beat Representative Peter Roskam from Illinois, who had the demeanour of one of those fantasy sports losers yelling at the television as his picks go bad.

Iraq afflicted by analogy excess

Bush administration operative Peter Wehner in yesterday's New York Times bemoaning the crude rhetoric of Ben Carson --

Such rhetorical recklessness damages our political culture as well as conservatism, a philosophy that should be grounded in prudence, moderation and self-restraint. That doesn’t mean that conservatives should not use language that inspires people to act. But they should respect certain rhetorical boundaries. There are some places they shouldn’t go.

Peter Wehner in his former Bush administration operative role, attacking conservative critics of the Iraq war in 2006 --

Why is Mr. Fukuyama so sure people in Iraq and elsewhere don't long for democracy? Just last year, on three separate occasions, Iraqis braved bombs and bullets to turn out and vote in greater numbers (percentage-wise) than do American voters, who merely have to brave lines. Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face?

As Corey Robin has elaborated many times, the notion that there was a pre-Trump or indeed pre-Obama golden age of restrained conservative rhetoric is simply laughable.

Also, Asma gave him a shopping list

Perhaps only the White House would be shocked that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin troll everyone by having a Moscow love-in. Remember when US officials were sure that the Russians were coming around to the idea of easing al-Assad out!

Pedant's Corner

Washington Post

Meet Justin Trudeau, the Liberal who just ushered in Canada’s first political dynasty.

Canada's head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, from the ultimate political dynasty.

From Russia with missiles

Barack Obama, 2 October --

Iran and Assad make up Mr. Putin’s coalition at the moment. The rest of the world makes up ours.

Above, Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi today holding a letter from Vladimir Putin in which, according to al-Abadi's press office, he stressed --

Russia's desire to develop bilateral relations with Iraq in various fields, especially in armament and exchange of information to counter Daesh (ISIS) terrorist gangs. In turn, the Prime Minister Dr. Al-Abadi stressed Iraq's desire to build better relations with Russia in order to serve the interests of the two peoples, noting that Iraq faces today a fierce war against Daesh terrorist gangs and needs every international effort to get rid of these gangs and there is a common coordination with Russia on the importance of eliminating terrorism.

The British taxpayer is the one falling into the piranha pool

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's mania for Chinese investment has no better illustration than the way he's trying to use their still small commitment to invest a new nuclear power plant to lock in a massively expensive power source with unknown long-term consequences (BBC):

£89.5 Price per MW/hr guaranteed to EDF by government 
£44 Current price per MW/hr of wholesale electricity in UK

A brilliantly diabolical plot to financially cripple a western country!

ISIS and other bad dudes

Pentagon --

An Oct. 15 coalition airstrike in northwest Syria killed Abdul Mohsen Adballah Ibrahim al Charekh, also known as Sanafi al-Nasr, a Saudi national and the highest ranking leader of the network of veteran al-Qaida operatives sometimes called the "Khorasan Group," according to a Defense Department statement issued today.

One of the US criticisms of the Russian military campaign in Syria is that they are attacking targets other than ISIS.

The "Khorasan Group" -- a name made up by the US government -- is not ISIS.

Just wait until they hit traffic on the Roosevelt Bridge

Pentagon spokesman trying to make the locations in Iraq seem more vivid when the discussion is of how soon the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) can retake Ramadi from ISIS --

If I were going to put it in more colloquial terms, I would say the ISF are probably around Falls Church, if it was Washington, D.C., that we were talking about; maybe they're coming in onto Arlington at this point, just to give you a sense of what this is like. So, they haven't entered the city center proper, but they're certainly kind of in the outer suburbs, if you will.

Bad cop, worse cop

New York Times news analysis, 31 July 2015 --

“We believe that a world in which there is a deal with Iran is much more likely to produce an evolution in Iranian behavior than a world in which there is no deal,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said just before the deal was announced.

A selection of news headlines over the last 2 days --

Iranian-American journalist convicted, Iran news agency says

Iran tests new precision-guided ballistic missile 

Russia's Syrian bombing gives boost to Iran

But imagine how crazy the Iranians would be acting if there was no nuclear deal!

Bypassing the Bosphorus

Reuters --

Russia and Syria carried out what appeared to be the first major coordinated assaults on Syrian insurgents on Wednesday and Moscow said its warships fired 26 missiles at them from the Caspian Sea, a sign of its new military reach. ... The rockets would have passed over Iran and Iraq to reach their targets, covering what Shoigu described as a distance of almost 1,500 km (900 miles), the latest display of Russian military power at a time when relations with the West are at a post-Cold War low over Ukraine ... But in Iraq, the head of parliament's defense and security committee said Baghdad may request Russian air strikes against Islamic State on its soil soon and wants Moscow to have a bigger role than Washington in fighting the group. Iraq's government and powerful Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias question the United States' resolve in fighting Islamic State militants, who control a third of the country, saying U.S.-led coalition air strikes are ineffective. “We might be forced to ask Russia to launch air strikes in Iraq soon ... and that depends on their success in Syria," Hakim al-Zamili told Reuters.

That should be the definitive falsification of Barack Obama's claim -- dubious even when uttered last week -- that Russia's coalition consists only of the Assads and Iran. And by the way, those missiles crossed battle space that the US coalition is trying to control. Of course from the crisis=opportunity perspective, isn't this now the ideal time to completely exit Iraq?

Maybe leadership is the problem

The Wall Street Journal offers backhanded excuses for the attack on a MSF hospital in Kunduz --

But if the Afghans and the world want the U.S. to lead the fight against terrorists, they have to understand that sometimes innocents will die because civilian casualties are part of the terrorist strategy.

The pivoting friend

In his news conference yesterday, President Obama provided a fairly vigorous defence of his Syria policy, based mostly on the actual or likely ineffectiveness of the proposed alternatives. However one gap in that defense was evident in his claim that proof of Russia's weakness in its Syria response is that its coalition has 3 members -- Russia, the al-Assads, and Iran, while his coalition has everyone else:

Iran and Assad make up Mr. Putin’s coalition at the moment. The rest of the world makes up ours.

Missing from his Russia coalition list is Iraq, which provides overflight permission for Russian military support to Assads and beyond that says it is in a new military pact with the others against ISIS, which of course is now clear is simply a fig leaf to protect the Al-Assads. And there's the stretched logic of the Obama Iraq policy: if the Al-Assads sustain ISIS by their brutality, and ISIS now is a trans-border threat to Iraq which US support to Iraq is helping them contain, isn't the US now thus undermining in its own policy since the Iraqi government supports the Al-Assads?

How many miles do we need for that?

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde understanding all too well the phrase needed to get the attention of global policy elites flying to yet another Very Important Meeting (this time in Lima) to save the world's economy --

I am calling on policymakers to make a policy upgrade to address the current challenges,

Then she called for the new policies to be "limousined" to implementation.

The long cold war

Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times (subs. maybe req'd) --

West blew its peace dividend in 20-year party of consumption and speculation ... The world’s short peace is ending. Errors of western policy — from bungled intervention in Iraq to non-intervention in Syria — only partly explain the return of conflict. More important is the lethal combination of economic volatility, a youth bulge, disruptive technology and the viral spread of a lethal ideology. The west had its peace dividend after 1991. We blew it in a two-decade party of consumption, leverage and speculation. First came the financial hangover; now comes the geopolitical reckoning. Dealing with it will mean relearning the arts of grand strategy and war.

His view of the four-part cocktail that has contributed to the current turmoil is certainly plausible. But linking it to a supposed economic binge is not so clear -- although such an argument sheds further light on the often moralistic tones of austerity advocates: ISIS is just another blowback from fiscal profligacy!

But in any event, what about the point the end of the Cold War was wasted in geopolitical terms? Another perspective would be that the Cold War cast an especially long legacy in Islamic countries. Islamist terrorism has many roots, but some key pre-1991 milestones are the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and another al-Assad's consequence-free crushing of a revolt (Hama), the politics around that episode itself the result of Cold War calculations. Then there are the former USSR central Asian republics that never quite liberalized and of course Saddam Hussein, who had played a few cold war cards of his own in a game that had a long way to go even when the cold war formally ended.

There was an economic and financial party, with the booze flowing most freely in financial centres. But linking this to Islamism requires almost Kissingerian intellectual gymnastics.

Choose horse carefully

Washington Post a few months ago ---

Mohammed [bin Naif] met with President Obama in the Oval Office on Dec. 12, discussing terrorism and regional issues. At the time, F. Gregory Gause III, a prominent international affairs professor at Texas A&M University, called Mohammed “America’s favorite Saudi official.” Gause cited the good cooperation between U.S. officials and the Saudi Interior Ministry.

Saudi Press Agency yesterday --

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior as well as Chairman of the Supreme Hajj Committee, this evening inspected the command and control center of Hajj security at the headquarters of the Public Security in Mina ... The crown prince expressed pride in the praise by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of the venerable efforts of the security men in the service of pilgrims, despite what happened in the stampede in Mina and that this does not reduce the size of the efforts made by them.

If someone was looking to shove America's favorite Saudi official out of the way, the fact that he's Chairman of the Hajj committee during a disaster that killed nearly 800 people could be very convenient. For anyone who's bet the farm on him continuing in his role, it could be awkward.

US Senator threatens foreign leader

Ted Cruz at the Values Voters Summit:

And if the Ayatollah doesn't understand that [US won't allow him to have a nuclear weapon],  we may have to help introduce him to the 72 virgins.

Feeding the birther fever

From the White House web front page, something that could be read two ways.

First they came for the highly leveraged

RTE on the public inquiry witness statement of overstretched property developer Johnny Ronan who was caught out by the Celtic Tiger bust in 2008 --

He said [his company] Treasury's relationship with NAMA [state troubled asset company] began well but deteriorated and the agency also forced them to sell their entire Chinese business. Mr Ronan signed off his statement to the banking inquiry with the words "Arbeit macht frei", a German phrase, which means "work makes you free".

Billionaire investor Tom Perkins writing to the Wall Street Journal last year --

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

The rich aren't like you and me. They have more sense of grievance.

[note: Ronan even translated the phrase into Irish -- “Arbeit macht frei” nó, i nGaeilge, “Tugann saothar saoirse”]

Worst corporate rebranding ever

The insistent Web ad informs us that Bayer MaterialScience is now Covestro.  One could understand Volkswagen wanting to push the history eraser button, but Bayer, really? By that standard, the arrival of Eir is the epitome of good taste. 

Is that a manager or technical grade?

Pentagon announcement of latest strikes in Syria and Iraq --

Recent coalition airstrikes have killed a senior leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and an al-Qaida explosives expert, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said today. Cook confirmed the Sept. 10 death of senior ISIL leader Abu Bakr al Turkmani and the July 5 death of French national David Drugeon, an al-Qaida operative and explosives expert. The press secretary said the coalition airstrike that killed Turkmani near Tal Afar, Iraq, “will help disrupt ISIL operations in the Tal Afar area and shows that their leadership is not beyond the coalition's reach.” Turkmani, an ISIL administrative amir, was part of al-Qaida in Iraq before joining ISIL and was a close associate of many ISIL senior leaders in Iraq, Cook said.

Muscat Sultans 2 -- Washington Drones 0

Statement from Oman Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In response to the Royal Orders of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said and as per a request of the US government to assist in settling the case of the US citizens detained by the Yemeni security units, the concerned authorities in the Sultanate, in coordination with the Yemeni authorities in Sanaa, have managed to release two of the US citizens as they were transported this night from Sanaa to Muscat on board of an aircraft of the Royal Air Force of Oman in preparation to return home.

This carefully worded statement, among other things, refers to the Houthi militias who were holding the foreign citizens as "Yemeni security units." Anyway the point is that the usual US government approach of attempting to recover hostages -- meaning military operations and blanket refusal of ransom demands -- looks like it's been sensibly dropped in this case. Instead Oman, which has carefully kept neutral in the Yemen war -- at risk to itself in various ways -- was able to spring the detainees. It might be worth trying this "ask someone local for help" in other Middle East contexts as well.

Democracy, Whiskey, TED

Showing that the TED concept is fearless, Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi speaks at an independently organized (as per *) TED event in Baghdad.

If it doesn't happen on an EU border, it doesn't happen

Reuters --

The death toll in South Sudan from the explosion of a fuel truck this week has risen to 182, a regional official said on Friday. The blast occurred on Wednesday as crowds gathered around the tanker to gather fuel after it had veered off the road. An official had earlier said the toll could keep rising as South Sudan did not have adequate facilities to treat the burns. " ... Such incidents have happened before in the east African region where fuel tankers often have to travel long distances along potholed roads and pass through poor communities. There are almost no tarmac roads in South Sudan, one of Africa's poorest nations, which has been mired in conflict since December 2013. 

Strategic complaining

White House statement 2 weeks ago at end of visit of Saudi King Salman --

Finally, the two leaders discussed a new strategic partnership for the 21st century and how to significantly elevate the relationship between the two countries. His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman briefed the President on the Kingdom’s views regarding the strategic partnership. The President and King Salman directed officials in their respective governments to explore appropriate ways to move forward in the coming months.

Saudi Press Agency today --

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud made a telephone call today to U.S. President Barack Obama. During the call, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques expressed, in strong wordings, condemnation and disapproval of the grave Israeli escalation, at Al Aqsa Mosque, in Al-Quds, brutal aggression against worshippers at its plazas and the violation of the sanctity of Islamic sanctuaries. The King called for exigency to exert internationally concerted, serious and expedite efforts and offices to stop it, exigency of the UN Security Council intervention to take all prompt measurements to stop violating the sacredness of Al-Aqsa Mosque, protect the Palestinian people and religious sanctuaries, awarding the Palestinian people its legitimate rights, asserting that such aggression, flagrantly, violates the holiness of religions and gives a hand to fan extremism and violence, in the entire world. 

Presumably the "new strategic partnership" included the possibility that such problems could arise because after all the White House would never make such a prominent announcement about a totally meaningless strategy, right?

Another kind of fact check

With the pundits having thrown their Donald Trump toy against the wall and picked up the Carly Fiorina one instead, we better start paying attention. The fact checkers are working busily on some of last night's more extravagant claims, but among the problems with that methodology is that a claim which is simply in circulation without contradiction and/or lacks any definitive evidence can skate by unnoticed, despite its gravity. So here's Fiorina --

By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know [Iran IRGC head] General Suleimani's name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al- Assad.

That's both widely reported, denied only by sources that lack credibility (i.e. Russia), and plausible given the scale-up of Russian involvement in Syria over the last weeks.

But is it true? Even if the meeting happened, was it Iran talking Russia into something, or vice versa, or even a joint plan that might eventually see both of them dump Bashar al-Assad as long their other interests could be secured in a post-Assad Syria?

If it's widely accepted that Russia and Iran are there only to back al-Assad, then the chances of a messy compromise -- which is all that can save millions of Syrians from misery at this stage -- further recedes. So Fiorina's claim, which came as part of an explicit burnishing of her furrin policy credentials, could lead to some serious dead-ends.

Is he still our guy?

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - A shadowy spy master formerly the right-hand man to toppled President Blaise Compaore seized power in Burkina Faso at the head of a military coup on Thursday, less than a month before elections meant to restore democracy in the West African state. General Gilbert Diendere, who for three decades served as Compaore's chief military adviser and operated an intelligence network spanning West Africa, was named as the head of a military junta called the National Council for Democracy.

The photo is then Colonel Major Gilbert Diendere, chief of staff of the president overthrown in last year's coup (with today being the counter-coup). The occasion of the photo was the 2010 Operation Flintlock, which is a joint Pentagon and European annual military exercise with militaries in West Africa; Diendere was the local host that year. The 2015 host is the Boko Haram-butt-kickers in Chad.

No doubt the Pentagon types thought he was a heckuva guy.

U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson