Good guy Gulf

Charles Krauthammer railing against the Iran deal in the Washington Post --

Imagine how Iran’s acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our control over the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century. 

The US period of keeping the Gulf open for commerce includes the time during the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein came up with the strategy of attacking Iranian oil tankers, which prompted a US-led multinational intervention to protect oil coming from Iraq and the Arab Gulf countries -- but not from Iran. The de facto alliance with Saddam meant turning to a blind eye to an Iraqi air force missile attack on the USS Stark, killing 37 sailors, and a grudging US apology to Iran when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 people.  Understandably, Iran is not so excited about the US commitment to open waterways in the Gulf.

Obama to Middle East: Can you please hold?

From President Obama's Iran deal press conference --

Now, in terms of the larger issues of the Middle East, obviously that’s a longer discussion. I think my key goal when I turn over the keys to the President -- the next President -- is that we are on track to defeat ISIL; that they are much more contained and we’re moving in the right direction there. That we have jumpstarted a process to resolve the civil war in Syria, which is like an open sore in the region and is giving refuge to terrorist organizations who are taking advantage of that chaos. To make sure that in Iraq not only have we pushed back ISIL, but we’ve also created an environment in which Sunni, Shia and Kurd are starting to operate and function more effectively together. And to be in a conversation with all our partners in the region about how we have strengthened our security partnerships so that they feel they can address any potential threats that may come, including threats from Iran. And that includes providing additional security assurances and cooperation to Israel, building on the unprecedented cooperation that we have already put in place and support that we’ve already put in place. It includes the work that we’ve done with the GCC up at Camp David, making sure that we execute that. If we’ve done those things, then the problems in the Middle East will not be solved. And ultimately, it’s not the job of the President of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East. The people of the Middle East are going to have to solve some of these problems themselves. But I think we can provide that next President at least a foundation for continued progress in these various areas.

The next President won't be in office until January 2017. That's 18 months from now. And his goal is just to have some started some processes by then!

The strands of Saddam

A strange echo of the July 1990 Saddam invasion of Kuwait in the identity of the Chattanooga Tennessee shooter Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez --

KUWAIT, July 17 (KUNA) ­­ The Interior Ministry on Friday confirded that the man who killed four US marines in two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday was not "of Kuwaiti origin." The "terrorist" who was subsequently killed, as US officials confirmed, was "of Jordanian origin, born in Kuwait" in 1990 during the Iraqi invasion of the country. 

That was a tough time to be born in Kuwait, especially to a non-Kuwaiti family and to a nationality (most likely Palestinian) that was seen as insufficiently loyal to the coalition against Saddam. "Jihadi John" is also from that era.

The rogue state network

Reuters --

Russia plans to supply Syria with 200,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) per year via the Crimean port of Kerch, two trading sources told Reuters.

It looks like the Russian sanctions busting plan is to invade enough places and prop up enough dictators so that there will be a trade zone that they entirely control.

Note the White House summary of a President Obama phone call with President Putin:

The leaders committed to remain in close coordination as the JCPOA [Iran deal] is operationalized and also expressed a desire to work together on reducing regional tensions, particularly in Syria.

Khartoum's safe harbour

Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir meeting Saudi King Salman in Mecca. An unpleasant conjunction with Nick Kristof's gripping, depressing reports from Sudan.

Photo: Saudi Press Agency.

One reason why the IMF shouldn't be in the room

IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus looking over the shoulder of a politically terminal ill Indonesian President Suharto as he signs the 1998 bailout conditions, while below, a picture from today as IMF Managing Director looks over the shoulder at Euclid Tsakalotos and the Greek finance minister's desk with a similar daunting list of demands on the table.

Photos: Francois Lenoir/Reuters at the Eurogroup and Agus Lolong/AFP via Getty in 1998

Fly the oligopoly skies

It's quite an achievement for the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins to write an entire pro-US airline article on the latest cartel accusations and never mention the most recent evidence of a cozy cartel: all the airlines getting together to complain about the most significant new entrant in international service,, the Arab Gulf airlines.

When sharks collide

Isn't it a bit odd that the 2016 Honda Pilot ad is a family in the aforementioned minivan singing Weezer's Buddy Holly, a song that two decades ago was the epitome of pop rock cool, and whose video referenced a show, Happy Days, that had spawned the expression "jump the shark" which was in its heyday at that time ... and now that song, by attaching itself to an ad for a minivan, has, er jumped the shark?

Debt default while remaining in a currency union? Impossible!

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Monday 4 July 1932, page 9.

Image Source: National Library of Australia.

There's always an Irish angle

Text of a certain letter

Athens, 12 June 1975 

Sir, On behalf of the Government of the Hellenic Republic, I have the honour to inform Your Excellency that Greece hereby applies to become a member of the European Economic Community in accordance with the provisions of Article 237 of the Treaty establishing that Community. 

(s.) Constantine Karamanlis [PM of Greece]

That letter was sent to, and acted upon, by the then president of the EEC Council, Garret Fitzgerald, the Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs!

If only there was a group in Syria fighting both the Assads and ISIS

New York Times --

On the edge of Damascus, insurgents opposed to both the Islamic State and the Assad government launched a new offensive on government positions in the Jobar neighborhood — a once bustling region long reduced to rubble by shelling and airstrikes. In the northern province of Aleppo, insurgents battling the government range from the Nusra Front to local rebels that have in the past received American support. They are fighting Mr. Assad’s army on one front, and the Islamic State on another.

The new labels keep coming

The "Troika" seems so long ago now. Statement from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker --

He will have a conference call among the "Euro-Institutionals" (with the President of the Euro Summit, the President of the Euro Group and the President of the European Central Bank) on Monday morning.

This seems to be the first appearance of the phrase "Euro-Institutionals" and interestingly it's a new threesome that excludes the IMF.Note by the way that the president of the Euro summit is Donald Tusk of Poland, which is not a Euro country. Good luck to the Greek people keeping track of the evolving architecture this week. 

Picking a head of state

It's incidental to the main issues, but one lesson of the Greece crisis is that if you're going to have a president in a parliamentary system, it might be better to have the position directly elected by the people and disentangled from parliamentary procedures, as Ireland does. The current Greek political impasse began when the parliament couldn't elect a president, a decision forced prematurely by the former prime minister Antonis Samaras. One dimension of Lebanon's latest political drama is the inability of its parliament to elect a president. Parliamentary election of the president is a mechanism that hasn't served the eastern Mediterranean very well!

It was the barrister wot done it

Former Irish Minister of Finance Charlie McCreevy obliquely explains the country's botched financial regulatory structure prior to the crash --

The new regulatory structure was set up during my time and culminated in two separate Bills in 2002 and 2003. In 1998 the Government agreed in principle to the setting up of a single regulatory authority for financial services. Interestingly, the idea of an SRA was first mooted in 1989 but it was decided not to go ahead with same at that time. We asked Michael McDowell to chair the implementation advisory group.

Kuwait and Iraq

There's a hint of the complexity of identity in the Arab and Islamic world with the seemingly incidental detail that 8 of the 27 victims of the bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City were flown to Najaf, Iraq, for burial. These identities move across national boundaries, especially at times of crisis. It's part of what makes analyzing the region in terms of the role of states so difficult.

Eurogroup asterisk

Statement from former French Minister of Finance (including during the botched 2010 Greece bailout) and current Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde  --

I welcome the statements of the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank to make full use of all available instruments to preserve the integrity and stability of the euro area.

She presumably refers to this statement --

Euro area Member States intend to make full use of all the instruments available to preserve the integrity and stability of the euro area.

But: that's not a Eurogroup statement. It's a statement issued by ministers of finance from the 18 EU countries that use the Euro, excluding Greece. Indeed, the statement is titled as a "ministerial" statement, in tacit recognition of the irregular status of that meeting.

Don't forget their home base

There's understandable focus in the news today on what look like ISIS-inspired attacks in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait.

But the death toll from those combined attacks is swamped by the toll from a single ISIS attack on the previously "liberated" Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani (145 dead). The scale of the assault appears partly due to the Kurdish militias having become overstretched during a successful southward assault towards Raqqa.

Among the bizarre things about the current "debate" over what to do about ISIS is that direct ground intervention against them, or their symbiotic Assad regime counterparts, is off the table. Meanwhile, communities and countries that already have a lot on their plates are left to grieve and cope with the consequences.

Photo: a grieving Kurdish family on the Turkish side of the border. REUTERS/Murad Sezer.

800 years and counting

In the same-sex marriage dissenting decision today of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, one paragraph opens as follows --

Both of the Constitution’s Due Process Clauses reach back to Magna Carta.

What then follows is the preposterous logic of "strict constructionism" on full display: constitutional articles have to be interpreted in their intended meaning at the time, and at the time what they really meant was based on what somebody in England wrote, in 1215.

Also, it will be commented on by everyone, but the most laughable of points in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent is --

Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.

He's oblivious to the role that he, and four other judges, played in selecting George W. Bush as US president in 2000, and the enormous consequences for Americans -- and Iraqis! -- that flowed from that.

Not like that bold boy, Mr Varoufakis

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde with several key Eurozone finance ministers but especially Ireland's Michael Noonan.

Photo: European Council photo service.

New meaning of in the red

Mr Yanis Varoufakis, Greek Minister for Finance, seemingly proudly holding up what looks to be an entirely red font and mostly strikethrough version of whatever economic plan Greece is proposing to the Eurozone finance ministers.

Photo: European Council photo service.

UPDATE: The document appears to be an evolved version of an earlier leak and it's worth reading the overall take of former IMF staffer Peter Doyle.

States' wrongs

From US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting (albeit entertaining) rant in the court's decision today upholding the tax credits in "Obamacare / SCOTUScare" --

The Court predicts that making tax credits unavailable in States that do not set up their own Exchanges would cause disastrous economic consequences there. If that is so, however, wouldn’t one expect States to react by setting up their own Exchanges?

Because of course American history is full of example of the states taking quick action to rectify problems affecting people, especially low income people, in their territory!

US hostage policy meets Parkinson's Law

The White House has looked at current US policy regarding hostages and has seen what everyone else sees, which is dead hostages.

So there's a new policy. That policy involves the creation of:

Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell 
Hostage Response Group 
Intelligence Community Issue Manager for Hostage Affairs
Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs 
Family Engagement Coordinator

And there'll also be grant program to fund NGO support to hostage families.

With a real push, all that could be in place at about the time the training of Syrian rebels actually happens!

It's as realistic that Liam Neeson's Bryan Mills has a real-life solution to hostage situations as this new plan.

The real victims

Speaking just now in the US House of Representatives, Louie Gohmert, Republican from Texas, has compared the injustice of the murders in Charleston South Carolina to the way Israel is treated in a UN report.

Update with exact text:

Of course, then there is the judge side of me. Having sentenced people both to prison and to death, the judge side of me says, from what we know, it sure cries out for the death penalty, but we will let the justice system in South Carolina take care of that. In the meantime, as we think about injustice, it is also hard not to think of our friends and our allies in Israel who have trouble finding any friends. They are persecuted on every side. We got this report from the U.N., an article talking about it from Marissa Newman of The Times of Israel: ‘‘Israel slams ‘politically motivated and morally flawed’ U.N. Gaza report.’’

Source: Congressional Record, House, 23 June, H4588.

Heighten the Contradictions

George Will, for one, welcomes the impending Greek chaos (Washington Post) --

This protracted dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable, growth-suppressing entitlements.

Another terrorism vs hate crime word game

White guy who kills lots of people motivated by Internet messaging and operating through self-start = Loner

Muslim guy who kills lots of people motivated by Internet messaging and operating through self-start = Lone Wolf

Most insincere handshake ever

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, inexplicably invited to a Eurozone finance ministers meeting about Greece despite the IMF having walked out of the talks with Greece, shakes hands with the Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis.

Technically, Mme Lagarde was there to brief the ministers on the vacuous findings of their Eurozone assessment, which blithely assures that Greece is not a problem, with enough CYA language in case it is.

She then told the post-meeting news conference that "the key emergency in my view is to restore the dialogue with adults in the room" -- a classic exposition of the SuperTechnocrat view of the world that has gotten us to this point.

Photo: Media Service of the EU Council

You Hashemites all look the same

US House Republican hawk Dana Rohrabacher writes in the Wall Street Journal, in what's mostly a love-letter to General/President Sisi of Egypt --

Better to look to the embattled region itself—to Jordan’s King Hussein, to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the leaders of formative Kurdistan, to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. 

Elsewhere in the article, he refers to Ronald Reagan. He's stuck in those years in his knowledge of Jordan too. King Hussein died in 1999. His son, Abdullah, is the current King of Jordan. 

Middle East outrage alert

Statement from Iraqi government --

Legal Department in the Ministry of Planning announced the conditions of contract for civic, electric and mechanic engineering, written pledge has to be signed by the contracted side with, that it don’t deal with Zionist entity [Israel], institution and companies. It will not deal with them in the present and future, and consider them as an integral condition for the contract. Contract will be terminated in case of violation with paying the appropriate compensation to the side of contract, as well as it will be subjected to the legal consequences.

Greece Countdown

Statement from Central Bank in Athens --

Equally important will be the reaffirmation and articulation in more specific terms of our partners’ willingness to provide debt relief, as initially stated at the Eurogroup meeting of 27 November 2012.

It's worth reading that statement in full, since it has been frequently misinterpreted. In particular, certain econo-pundits have focused on the 4.5% primary budget surplus target as proof of austerity madness, when the same statement clearly indicated there would be massive debt relief in the medium-term. It's the failure to achieve consensus on that latter part of the plan which has aggravated the situation.

The Damascus no-hit zone

Former Israeli Ambassador the US Michael Oren has an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal; it's mostly about the poor state of Obama-Netanyahu relations and mostly about how that's Obama fault, but along the way he drops in this interesting claim --

But parallel to the talks [Israel-US discussions about Iran] came administration statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking Iran pre-emptively. 

So part of Israel's calculation in its strikes against Bashar al-Assad had to be whether the White House might disclose them in order to put a little heat on Israel about its ability to strike across borders.

It's almost as if the White House wasn't that keen on any military action against Assad!

UPDATE: It turns out that Oren's article draws from his forthcoming book in which the above is not the only scoop. Another being that the idea of offering Assad a joint Russia-USA chemical weapons disarmament plan came from an Israeli minister.