COLLAPSE OF PASKISTAN A REAL DANGER

COLLAPSE OF PAKISTAN
A REAL DANGER


While some countries might benefit from a little more religion, too much religion could soon drive nuclear armed Pakistan into the hands of radical Islamists deeply antagonistic towards America.
The recent assassination of a governor for opposing strict blasphemy laws, which were used perversely against Christians and other non-Muslin believers, highlighted a deep religiosity within all section of Pakistani society. One of the governor’s bodyguards shot him 27 times while his other bodyguards watched. The assassin claimed he carried out the killing in the name of “The Prophet” and was applauded throughout the country, which is 98% Muslim. Tens of thousands demonstrated in support of the assassin, bringing together the most extreme and conservative elements, including groups of lawyers. For those who thought Pakistan was still a secular country there was a lesson to be learned and it is one that should resonate in Washington.
Pakistan is not, as many in Washington would like to believe, a moderate ally supportive of American foreign policy in the region. Instead, with the rise of Islamic extremism, there has been a growing anti-Americanism even as the country and its military benefits from yearly grants of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. The U.S. mainstream media has rarely shown any understanding of developing problems within Pakistan, especially the rising tide of extremism, much of it fueled by opposition from all sections of the society to the continued U.S. drone targeting of Taliban within the country’s borders. Little attention has also paid to Pakistan’s growing military links to China.
For the West, and for that region of the world, the real danger is Pakistan tearing itself apart because of the extreme religious fervor gripping its population. Opposition to the blasphemy laws brought together the Taliban and opposing militant Sunni sects, which make up more than 80% of the population, as well as Shiites, who often complain of persecution by Sunnis. Since the assassination of the governor, the voice of moderation has been silent further illustrating the fear secularists have of confronting such a wide ranging political bandwagon. Worrying for the judicial authorities is the fact the assassin was an officer from an elite police protection organization, which expressed praise for his actions. More than one thousand lawyers from a legal group until now considered liberal protested in his favor, further confirming the deep malaise within Pakistani society.
Since 9/11, America has poured tens of billions of dollars into Pakistan, all the time focused on how to persuade Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency, the ISI, to do Washington’s bidding in its war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Forgotten in Washington is how the ISI has always secretly controlled Afghanistan and that Pashtuns, who make up the Taliban, exist in very large numbers in Pakistan’s border regions and are naturalized Pakistanis. Therefore, by continuing to insist Pakistan fight its own people, Washington risks plunging Pakistan into a civil war. None of that has seemed to matter to members of Congress who protest privately, and often publicly, America is not getting bang for the buck in respect of Pakistan’s commitment to the so-called War on Terror. U.S. generals and others have complained the Pakistani military has not done enough to deal with extremists on its own soil.
Several years ago, that same Washington mentality led to a Bush policy, since expanded by Obama, of using the CIA to launch an unknown number of drone missile attacks within Pakistan. U.S. Special forces have also operated within Pakistan, seizing, detaining and assassinating targets. Pentagon estimates for the numbers of drone missile attacks are difficult to come by but media reports have sometimes put the figure at around 150, though in reality it could be well over 200. Those attacks, allied to efforts by Pakistan’s military operations against the Pakistani Taliban, have generated unheralded levels of anti-Americanism and have fed growing religious extremism throughout the country.
NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will leave behind a Pakistan riddled with deep antagonism towards America and a fast growing Islamic militancy. Over the years, Washington strategists have been too focused on what Pakistan can deliver militarily against the Taliban and have ignored the emergence of an educated class that favors a brand of Islam, closely resembling Wahabbism. During the 1980s, the religious education of the country’s middle class developed alongside Islam’s role in defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Islamic fervor that war induced has been revived as America’s war in Afghanistan has expanded to include attacks within Pakistan. For too long, growing religiosity in Pakistan, linked to political radicalism, went unnoticed in Washington circles as did the fact more and more of the country’s young military officers were strict Muslims. Some of them were educated in Wahabbi Madrasahs. There is growing concern among English-speaking Pakistani military elites that over time the army, which has kept Pakistan secular since its creation by the British in August 1949, may not be able to hold the line against the rise of radical Islam, especially as its ranks, and those of police forces and the judiciary, become infected with extremists spreading a religious virus.

ISRAEL'S MOSSAD NO LONGER INVINCIBLE

There was a time when the very mention of Mossad, Israel’s premier spy agency, sent shivers through its friends and enemies alike. It had an almost mythical status and its highly trained assassins were the stuff of Hollywood legend.
Mossad agents, male and female would be parachuted into a country or would arrive on its coastline from a submarine or fishing trawler. Teams providing technical back-up and other logistical support, including vehicles and escape routes, would already be in place. Kidon, as the agency’s assassins were known, would use guns, knives, chemical weapons, or secret means of assassination, which left few forensic traces. They even knew how to conceal a bomb in a target’s phone and activate it with a phone call. Their stealth and success at killing targets across the globe made their enemies fear them. Mossad spies also had a legendary status. Some were sleeper agents for decades, living a lie in other communities and waiting for a phone call or coded letter to activate them.
It has therefore come as a shock to the Israeli public and spy watchers across the globe that Mossad is showing signs it is no longer the invincible agency it was once cracked up to be. While much of its glamour and the fear factor it generated were promoted by Mossad itself, until recently it still had an unparalleled record achieving its goals.
Now, it can now be argued it has become cocky and overstretched. A former British intelligence officer, who spoke to American Free Press on condition of anonymity, felt Mossad had fallen into the trap of thinking it was so superior to its enemies it did not need to worry about them. In his view, it failed to recognize Israel has fewer friends across the globe and mistakes by Mossad, which might have been glossed over in the past, are now more likely to make headlines.
“Mossad was never going to maintain the level of success it once had because countries it targeted in the past have improved their intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities. Mossad has taken on more tasks that it can handle with the assets available to it. There is a finite limit to the number of jobs any agency can handle because training agents for work in the field is a costly, time-consuming job and top class talent is limited. Few people realize Israel’s growing dependency on the CIA for running ops in the Middle East is a sign of Mossad’s limitations,” the former British Intel officer explained.
The assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai in January 2010 was an operation the former Intel officer singled out as an example of Mossad’s decline. The 11-person hit team that carried out the Dubai killing was caught on camera and the agents’ identities compromised. So too was the way they operated, using fake passports and credit cards supplied by private American financial institutions. The operational base used for the hit was located in Europe, and not Israel, but even some of the people who ran it are now known to the German authorities. The former British spy has this to say about the Dubai hit:
“By any calculation, it was a disaster and it did a lot of damage to Mossad. Having those operatives on camera and later on an Interpol wanted list means their training was wasted. They are of no further value in the field. For that to happen was proof, if anybody needed it, that Mossad had become sloppy and overconfident.”
There is now evidence Mossad was recently been dealt an even bigger blow by the exposure of ten of its spies in Iran where it has been busy running a dirty war with the direct assistance of the CIA and U.S. Special Ops agencies. One element of this undercover war has been the targeted assassinations and abductions of Iranian scientists and other Iranian nuclear experts. Some of the Mossad-CIA operatives used in Iran were trained at a joint Mossad-CIA facility within an Israeli base close to Herzliya on the Mediterranean Sea coastline. The base is classified within CIA files as one of a number of U.S. military/intelligence sites in Israel. The sites have numbers from 51 through 56. Most of the sites contain military and technical equipment to be used in the event of a war with Iran but the one at Herzliya is also reserved for managing combined CIA-Mossad ops aimed at Iran.
Mossad and the CIA appear to have underestimated their Iranian counterparts because it took just one year for Iran’s internal security apparatus to unmask the spy network, which Iran says was involved in killing one of its scientists. Among the spies seized was a young man, who admitted he was trained by Mossad in electronic surveillance and counter surveillance, as well as in techniques for attaching bombs to cars. Israel did not deny Iran’s claims about the spy network. In the past year, Iranian intelligence has also captured and executed the leaders, and senior fighters, of the Jundullah terror network, which has been used by America and Israel against Iran. Much to the consternation of Mossad and the CIA, Pakistan has begun handing over Jundullah fighters it has captured to the Iranian military.

ONLY AN EMPIRE NEEDS BASES

At its zenith, the Roman Empire used military bases to assert its power in lands it conquered and Britain later did the same in its colonies. That appears to be the aim of the Pentagon, which has continued to build and expand military bases across the globe a time when the Obama administration is heralding a withdrawal from Iraq and a planned exit from Afghanistan.
In Iraq alone, the slow withdrawal has not prevented the Pentagon from planning for a future military presence in the country by updating some of the bases there to add clout to a large CIA presence housed in the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad. There is even talk of building a similar embassy in Afghanistan, as well as hardened sites to accommodate a reduced U.S. military presence well beyond the projected pull-out.
It is difficult to find an exact figure for the number of overseas military, naval and air bases, or to discover the cost of maintaining them. It is estimated there may be upwards of 1,000 known bases, with additional installations listed only on highly classified files. Among some of the overseas secret installations are CIA black ops centers and private prisons.
The sheer reach of the U.S. military complex is immense, especially in the Middle East where there are bases of varying sizes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Israel. Qatar, which has 200,000 citizens and twice as many foreign workers, has become a major U.S. military hub. Its Al Udeid air base is a major cog for handling intelligence gleaned from satellite and AWACs. Some operations previous dealt with at the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia have been moved to Qatar. Plans are believed to be under way to establish new facilities in Morocco and Algeria in order to further extend the U.S. reach in that part of the world. Nowhere in the Middle East, or the Horn of Africa, is insignificant when it comes to the eyes of Pentagon planners. A case in point would be the expanded naval base, Camp Lemonier, in the tiny nation of Djibouti, located between Yemen and Somalia.
Aside from strategic significance, the U.S. military presence in many countries has gone hand in hand with weapons sales. For example, Saudi Arabia is reputed to have spent up to $20 billion over several decades. Also rarely mentioned are secret supply centers for use in the event of conflict in various parts of the globe. For example, the Pentagon has financed the construction of underground weapons bunkers in countries like Israel, Jordan and Bahrain where a major naval project is close to completion. There are many new bases too in Eastern Europe, especially in areas formerly part of the Soviet Union. In all, there are few places across the globe where one cannot detect an American military footprint. One of the startling things about this empire basing mentality is the American people are never consulted and are rarely informed about the construction of overseas bases and their staggering costs. It should not be surprising to anyone that most overseas installations are close to countries with energy resources.
That means the Obama administration will be keeping a watching eye on the continuing unrest in on the Middle East. Any sign of trouble in Saudi Arabia would undoubtedly set alarm bells ringing in Washington because the House of Saud sits on the world’s largest oil reserves. Israel too would be concerned about a threat to the Saudi royals since they have had their tacit support to use Saudi airspace to bomb Iran. In fact, the House of Saud has pleaded with Israel and the U.S. to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and its military infrastructure.
If there was political unrest in Saudi Arabia from the country’s Shia minority, the Saudi military would stamp it out and it is unlikely the Obama White House would defend the protesters as it did when people took to the streets in Cairo. The hard fact is Tel Aviv and Washington care more about Saudi’s royal despots than they ever did Mubarak. The House of Saud holds the energy card and will be the major Arab player with Mubarak gone. When all is said and done, the Saudi royals, who are Sunni Arabs, see everything in black and white, even religion. They preach hatred against Shias, who are Persian, and are not especially keen on Christians either. It is always their way or the highway and they play tough. They once told their friends, Dick Cheney and George Bush if the U.S. ever pulled all its troops out of Iraq they would arm Iraq’s Sunnis.

MERCENARIES - GLOBAL MARKET- NEW IMAGE

MERCENARIES – GLOBAL MARKET
NEW IMAGE


They are no longer called soldiers of fortune or mercenaries because the Pentagon has rebranded them Private Military Companies and created a global market for their skills. But when all is said and done, they are hired guns not bound by international rules of war, who only answer to a complex web of global corporations.
Private Military Companies, or PMCs as they are known in the war trade, are capable of putting a small army on the ground anywhere in the world with the most modern equipment and highly trained soldiers of all nationalities. They will also provide jet fighter training, cyber warfare capabilities, diplomatic protection units, port protection and specialist assassination teams, or as some in that business like to call them “specific targeting mission units.” Just as they have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, PMCs have teams of interrogators for hire, with expertise in in-depth interrogations techniques. In effect, they can do everything a small nation might require of its military, intelligence agencies, Special Forces, air force and navy. While it is difficult to assess the numbers of mercenaries across the globe, it would not be unreasonable to conclude from available data there are at least 1.5 million, with 500,000 fully employed.
Killing for profit has become a lucrative business and to put it any other way would be to ignore the fact mercenaries are, as a rule, soldiers who have been trained to kill in regular armies and Special Forces. They have skills to sell, which are in high demand in a global recession. For America, which has been fighting two wars and running special counter-insurgency operations far and wide, it has been cheaper to hire mercenaries, who are not paid pensions or guaranteed long term medical care. The new reality is America, with support from Britain, has formalized the privatization of modern conflicts, small and large, as well as the security industry internationally.
The Pentagon and State Department have never produced exact figures for the numbers of mercenaries they have employed, though most estimates put the figure at over 150,000, and possibly as high as 250,000 during the height of the Iraq War. Without those boots on the ground, fulfilling a wide range of functions, America would not have been able to conduct two wars simultaneously and also undertake military and classified Special Forces ops in countries like Algeria, Yemen, Somalia and Iran, not to mention traditional commitments in S. Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
The role of mercenaries was back in the news recently with claims Blackwater Worldwide, also known as Xe, a major PMC that has earned close to $1 billion from Pentagon, CIA and State Department, was being funded by Middle East “interests” to train an anti-piracy army in Somalia. The region mentioned was Puntland, an independent part of Somalia, from where the country’s pirates operate. It was reported Xe, whose founder, former SEAL Erik Prince is now living in Abu Dhabi, had linked up with Saracen International, another big PMC registered in Beirut, to handle the Somali contract. Saracen was formerly Executive Outcomes, one of the most notorious mercenary outfits to emerge from the post Apartheid era in South Africa. One of its founders, who helped create Saracen, is Lafras Luitingh, whose military career included a long stint as a major in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau – CCB – an arm of the country’s Special Forces during Apartheid. The CCB was later shown to have carried out many authorized assassinations though the exact figure was never known. Saracen and XE function through a web of companies worldwide, making it difficult to know who owns and controls them.
Both Xe and Saracen have been reluctant to concede any involvement in Somalia but even if they are it is just one contract. The fact is they have plenty of countries, companies and corporations vying for their skills. Erik Prince was alleged to have offered the CIA the use of an antipiracy vessel he had designed with a drone capability, high-powered weapons and the speed to out-run anything the pirates possessed. These companies are innovative and are in competitive markets. Across Eastern Europe, from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria former soldiers are applying to join PMCs.
After 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw helped the Bush-Cheney strategy of rebranding mercenaries, first as military contractors and finally PMCs. Straw even suggested in a policy paper to parliament that the U.N. could save a lot of money by using PMCs rather than soldiers from national armies. The rebranding has been so-successful since 2001 that Obama has been able to spend heavily employing mercenaries. The tragedy is American taxpayers are funding private armies controlled by corporations, many of them not even registered in the United States.

ISRAEL READIES TO STRIKE

Israel has exploited the global fixation with the Libyan crisis to break a range of international laws while it secretly weighs the benefits of launching a second invasion of Gaza, or starting another war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The laws Israel has broken range from the planned construction of hundreds more Jewish settler homes on Palestinian land to the launching of a missile attack inside Sudan. The Sudan attack, which killed two men in a car near Sudan’s main port city, was carried out by Apache helicopters firing missiles of a type used only by Israel. The Sudanese government said it was an infringement of its territorial integrity and an attempt to drive a wedge between Sudan and Washington, following the normalizing of relations between the two countries. Before the attack, Israel blocked radar Sudan uses to track civilian aircraft in its own airspace. Some experts said the move could have led to a mid-air collision and exemplified Israel’s cynical use of military power. It was the second time in two years the Israeli military carried out attacks within Sudan. In 2009, it used missiles to target a convoy of cars it claimed were part of an arms smuggling operation.
Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, has also been busy running one of its familiar rendition operations, this time abducting a Palestinian engineer, Dirar Abu Sisi, in Ukraine and secretly transporting him to Israel. Sisi was responsible for redesigning Gaza’s only electrical power plant to run on diesel supplied by Egypt, making it less reliant on Israeli fuel supplies. His wife, who is Ukrainian, claims her husband was in her country applying for citizenship for him and his children because he thought Gaza was too dangerous for his family. On February 19, 2011, he vanished after being taken from a train by two men, claiming to be Ukrainian State Security agents. The Ukrainian government denied involvement in his disappearance and referred the matter to the U.N. On April 4, 2011, he reappeared in a court in Israel charged with being a Hamas rocket specialist. The Israelis alleged Hamas sent him to Ukraine to study Scud missile technology. The Palestinian Authority said his abduction was yet another classic example of Israel committing an “international crime.”
Meanwhile, there has been an increasing clamor in Israel for tougher action against Hamas and it has led to Israeli missile attacks on Gaza that have killed Hamas members and injured scores of civilians, including children. The excessive use of Israeli power, which a response to a recent Hamas rocket attack that injured an Israeli boy, signaled a growing desire by the Israeli government to launch another Gaza invasion. Such a move would draw the ire of surrounding Arab states and outright condemnation by Turkey and EU nations. Turkey has made it clear to Washington it will, under no circumstances, normalize relations with Israel while it acts like a bully.
Were Israel to launch an Operation Cast Lead II invasion of Gaza it knows it would likely face retaliation from Hezbollah, a Hamas ally. With that in mind, there are signs Israel is preparing to deal with Hezbollah, which gave the Israeli military a bloody nose in 2006. In a move, which smacks of Israel justifying military action before it begins, the Israeli military has circulated a map it says shows 1,000 Hezbollah underground sites in Lebanon. It claims the sites are for weapons storage and forward targeting and are in 270 villages beside civilian facilities, including schools and hospitals. In other words, if Israel bombs the sites in the near future, causing massive civilian casualties, it will say it warned Hezbollah it put the lives of ordinary Lebanese in harm’s way by locating its facilities near civilian structures.
Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has warned he will send forces into Israel if it attacks Lebanon. He also made it clear he possesses rockets capable of striking Tel Aviv. Hamas and Hezbollah both suspect Israel is gearing up for military action against them because it does not have Washington’s approval at this time to strike at Iran because of the tense political climate across swathes of the Middle East.

IRAQ EXIT TIED TO ISRAELI WAR PLANS?

IRAQ EXIT
TIED TO ISRAELI WAR PLANS?


White House pronouncements about an exit from Iraq may be more premature than at first thought because the U.S. military presence in that country is much larger than the Obama administration is prepared to admit. The reluctance of the White House and Pentagon to provide an accurate figure for our military footprint in Iraq, as well as neighboring nations like Jordan, may relate to credible reports Israel is preparing for conflict in 2011.

In 2010, the White House and the Iraqi leadership made much of the planned U.S. exit from Iraq, claiming U.S. troops would be withdrawn before the end of 2011 but like all such agreements the devil was in the detail. For example, the arrangement to exit Iraq embraced a continued, but considerably reduced, U.S. military presence for the sole purpose of training the Iraqi army. In the autumn of 2010, the Pentagon claimed to have 48,000 American military personnel in Iraq, the other nations of the once vaunted Bush coalition having withdrawn their soldier’s a long time ago. What the Pentagon statement failed to disclose was the number of contractor personnel within Iraq’s borders. That omission was significant since the U.S. military presence in any theater of conflict nowadays includes contractors. After Barach Obama became president, there was an increased recruitment of mercenaries, both American and foreign, employed by the Defense Department. By the close of 2009, it was estimated the increase was as high as 23% in Iraq alone.
In 2009, the Pentagon did not dispute reports that the total number of contractors working alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq totaled 242,647. However, in 2011, the true figure for the size of this new standing army could well be 300,000 if one includes contractor companies providing personnel for diplomatic protection duties and for ports and other security assignments on American soil. There are also contractor units working abroad for the CIA and a range of classified Special Forces and intelligence agencies
In Iraq, the true figure for the size of the U.S. military footprint could exceed 100,000. It is certainly not the 48,000 claimed by the Pentagon. The reason is that within CENTOM AOR – Area of Responsibility – the ratio of contractors to soldiers is generally 1:1 and sometimes 2:1.
Our military footprint in Iraq may be linked to the fact the Israeli military is secretly planning for conflicts in the Middle East in 2011. Therefore, it is unlikely the Pentagon will be willing to draw down the total complement of U.S. military personnel, including contractors, in Iraq. Recently, there have been credible reports Israel’s Defense Forces have plans for wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The reason for Israel’s desire to attack both groups is that Israeli military strategists see them as Iran’s allies, who could prove to be a thorn in Israel’s side the moment it attacks Iran. The Israeli thesis is attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah will weaken Iran’s future potential for retaliation. The fact there is little international appetite for an Israeli strike against Iran at the present time has forced Israel to reset what it perceives as more manageable objectives. Hezbollah in particular represents for the Israeli military and political establishment unfinished business and Hamas was not destroyed after the last Israeli campaign in Gaza.
One has to ask why Obama would chose keep 100,000 or more U.S. military personnel in Iraq going into 2011. The answer may be two-fold. First, he may be aware of Israel’s plans to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah and such a move could lead to attacks on American assets throughout the region. The same would be true, but on much more serious scale, if Israel suddenly targeted Iran. Washington must be aware the extreme Israeli administration led by Benyamin Netanyahu is capable of ignoring international opposition and attacking Iran without Washington’s approval. But, irrespective of Obama’s military strategy, one truth emerges from our continued presence in Iraq and it is the promise of an exit is as much a myth as the claim of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

CHINA'S PLANS TO SCARE AMERICA

CHINA’S PLANS
TO FRIGHTEN
AMERICA


China is convinced it will have the ability to strike and possibly destroy every American military base in the East China region within a decade. Its aim is to ensure America will not be able to come to the aid of allies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Chinese military strategists already have a plan to prove to Washington a conventional war with China would be unwinnable. Their overall objective is to shut the U.S. military out of East Asia by 2020.
If any of that seems far-fetched, or scare mongering, it certainly is not. Evidence now available to American military analysts confirms China is moving ahead quickly with the development of a powerful anti-ship ballistic missile with the potential to strike U.S. destroyers and more significantly aircraft carriers, which would be the floating platforms for an American military response should war break out between China and an American ally in East Asia.
The most obvious sign of China’s future intent is the rate at which it is building an offensive capability to threaten U.S. forward deployment forces and bases using massive quantities of conventional missiles of every kind. It already has a stockpile of missiles targeted at U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea. America’s two South Korean bases, Osan and Kusan, are only 250 miles from China. Presently, they have 1,000 theater ballistic missiles and 700 cruise missiles aimed at them. The American military also operates from three Japanese bases, Kadena, Misawa and Yakota. The Kadena base is approximately 400 miles from the Chinese mainland and the others two no more than 700 miles. China has 250 theater ballistic missiles and 1,000 cruise missiles targeted at those sites. While the Chinese lack theater ballistic missiles capable of striking Andersen air base on Guam, 3,000 miles away in the Pacific, within a few years that will change as China upgrades its bomber force and air-refueling abilities.
China’s near term strategy is a clever one fraught with risks. However, Peoples Liberation Army strategists believe it will succeed, if only because Washington will do everything to avoid a conventional war. In order to exploit what they see as Washington’s timidity, the Chinese have already begun to set in motion the creation of an area of denial. In other words, an area in which the Chinese will, over time, deny the U.S. military access. The steps to achieving that have begun and they involve several interlinking facets. First, China has moved ahead rapidly with a massive expansion of its convention missile arsenal. Those missiles, all of them with an offensive capability, will be aimed at U.S. bases. China is letting Washington know it is assembling its new strike potential in order to display what would happen in the event the American military coming to the aid of Japan or Taiwan. By making Washington nervous, China expects the Pentagon to situate its forces closer to Guam. That would then make it exceedingly difficult for those forces to be effective in a conflict.
Little attention has been paid to China’s expansion of its cruise missile arsenal, especially the land attack variety. The Department of Defense recently told Congress that it had suddenly discovered the Chinese had expanded its arsenal of land attack missiles with a 1,000 mile range by as much as 30% in one year. It had also increased the numbers of a new air-launched cruise missile, therefore giving jet fighters and bombers a stand-off strike capability. The Dept. of Defense was unable to confirm how many of the new cruise missiles were in service.
China has spent the past decade getting ready to fight a conventional war with America. According to the Department of Defense, China possesses the “world’s largest and most lethal short range ballistic missile force in the world.” Chinese military leaders know they would lose a conventional war were it to be fought today so they are working hard to change the balance of power. They feel sure by 2020 America will have no appetite for a war with China and will have been so convinced by then of that reality it will have reduced its military footprint in the region. That is a gamble the Chinese appear willing to take, including another that America will not go nuclear if Japan is on the verge of being overwhelmed by Chinas military.
A growing facet of China’s denial of area strategy, or as it could be defined, its setting of new boundaries, has been its belligerence on the high seas of the region. That too has been aimed at making America and its allies nervous and it has succeeded. In order to avoid conflict, the U.S. navy has begun retreating to areas China has determined are on the periphery of its area of denial.
The bottom line is China wants to be in a position to exercise total control of the seas around it by 2020. It hopes the more it builds an offensive capability threatening every U.S. military asset in the region the more America will back off, not wanting a conventional war it could easily lose. Chinese logic is that success will come from Washington accepting a conventional war with China would be unwinnable. Of course, China has not calculated on what it might lose in such a war or that America could prove to be more militarily resilient than China thinks.

SAUDIS RISK INCITING RELIGIOUS WAR

SAUDIS RISK
INCITING RELIGIOUS WAR

Propping up a Sunni dictator was not the main reason the Saudis sent tanks into neighboring Bahrain. Their real aim was to strike at Iran by suppressing the majority Shite population in Bahrain. They also wanted to send a message to Saudi Shiites that if they protest, they will do so at their peril.
The House of Saud, a close ally of Washington and Israel, has been the most divisive Arab nation in decades, spreading Wahabbism, the most militant form of Islam, through the Middle East and Asia. One of the tenets of Wahabbism is that Sunnis are heretics, very much on a par with Christians. Saudi riches created the Madrasah schools from which many of Al Qaeda’s fighters emerged and the oil rich Kingdom was the home to the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.
The movement of Saudi forces into Bahrain marked the first time an Arab nation sent troops and tanks into a neighboring Persian Gulf country. The response from nations like Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, which have majority Shiite populations, was outrage. They believe Tel Aviv and Washington encouraged the Saudis to prop up the dictatorship in Bahrain because they did not want to see another Shiite-run state in the region. The White House claimed the president was not consulted by the Saudis but that was met with derision in Iraq and Iran. Any military movements across borders in the Middle East cannot happen without the Israelis and the Pentagon knowing about them. There is so much surveillance from air, land and sea military columns leaving Saudi territory would have popped up on a computer screen in the U.S. 5th Fleet H.Q. in Bahrain. The Fleet, which is stationed there with the express purpose of spying on Iran, would have been alerted once Saudi tanks and armored personnel carriers headed for the border with Bahrain.
Some Saudi news outlets conveniently reported Washington had not been informed, insisting Saudi King Abdullah made the decision after talks with the al-Khalifa royals in Bahrain. Behind the scenes, Washington would have had every reason to support a Saudi decision to providing military backing for its neighbor. After unrest in Tunisia spread to Egypt it quickly became clear Obama was happy to support protest movements in those nations, and military action in Libya, but Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen were off-limits. Protesters in those nations would get no support from Washing even if they were beaten, rounded up, tortured and shot in the streets. From Obama’s perspective, those three “friendly” dictatorships were important to his foreign policy. Saudi Arabia was the biggest oil producer and Bahrain was home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. As for Yemen it was not important if its forces were gunning down protesters as long as it continued to back America’s counter insurgency war in the Arabian Gulf.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who rarely makes public pronouncements joined Iraqi leaders, including Prime Minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, in warning the Saudis they were in danger of provoking sectarian strife throughout the region. Perhaps that is exactly what the Saudis are hoping for in the months ahead. Their goal may be to draw Iran into retaliating or supplying the Shiite opposition in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia with weapons. That would make it easier for the Saudis and the Bahrain royals to use excessive force against Shiites in their own countries. Such a policy would suit Israel’s strategy of fomenting divisions and thereby weakening its neighbors. Nevertheless, like the Israelis, the Bahraini and Saudi royals see Iran as the source of all ills in the region and have been waiting for an opportunity to strike out at the Shiites in their midst. Their suppression of Shiites in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain could, however, generate a rising tide of sectarianism, which might destabilize the entire region and result in Sunnis and Shiites slaughtering each other from Lebanon to Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.
One of the glaring ironies of the ongoing strife in the Middle East is how the region is awash with weapons supplied by the world’s major arms dealers, including the ones who agreed to bomb Libya, namely the U.S., France and Britain. The weapons Gaddafi has used against his own people were bought from the U.S., France, Britain, Israel, China and Russian. The weapons provided to his opponents, via the Saudis, will have been bought by the Saudis on the international market. They will be reimbursed by Britain, France and the U.S. No matter which regime falls or rises, the global arms industry benefits. It supports both sides and is always looking for new customers. Whoever replaces Gaddafi will be encouraged to spend oil revenues on military hardware while ordinary people remain trapped in poverty.

Missed POSTS:-

THREAT TO CHRISTIANS
A STARK REALITY


The State Department’s sudden concern about Christians in Egypt, Iraq and Nigeria is a little late in coming given how the persecution of Christian communities has been gaining momentum since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the Middle East alone, as many as 500,000 Christians have fled Iraq in the last seven years and there is an ongoing attempt to force Christians to leave neighboring countries such as Syria and Egypt. Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Christian population numbered 800,000, representing 3% of the population. Then, it was a secular society and Christians did not feel under threat. The U.S. invasion and subsequent overthrow of Saddam changed all of that and plunged the country into a sectarian cauldron. Ever since, Christians and their churches have been under threat from Muslim extremists, especially, but not exclusively, Al Qaeda. The Catholic archbishop of Baghdad is on record claiming we are witnessing the decline and death of Christianity in the Middle East. His warning is credible considering the fact one hundred years ago Christians represented 20% of the Middle East population whereas the figure today is closer to 5% and dramatically falling.
Most experts looking at the recent explosion of anti-Christian feelings and the persecution of Christians believe they are a direct result of U.S. policies in the region, including Washington’s unquestioning support for Israel and its inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Some say the problem is wider in that Muslims associate Arab Christians with a West, which has supported dictatorships throughout the Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The State Department only made its feelings public after the New Year’s Day attack on a Coptic Christian Church in Alexandria, Egypt, in which twenty-one worshippers died. That happened months after the slaughter of Christians in a Baghdad cathedral, leaving many to wonder why Washington had not spoken out earlier about the threats facing Christians across the Middle East and also in countries like Pakistan.
Another irony of the State Department’s posturing is that it should have intervened before now to let Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, know he cannot continue to receive massive American finding if he persists in treating his country’s Christians as second class citizens. By doing so he is in effect depicting them to Muslims as lesser beings. Egypt has 8 to 10 million Coptic Christians but they are denied the rights of Muslims in education, the judiciary and property ownership yet the Copts existed in Egypt prior to the emergence of Islam. According to the Middle East Quarterly, in an attempt to avoid discrimination, 50,000 Coptic university graduates became Muslims in a two-year period.
The focus, however, should not be restricted to the Middle East because the ant-Christian violence from that region has spread into Islamic communities worldwide and the State Department has made no attempt to acknowledge it. Two of the most dangerous countries for Christians today are Pakistan and Nigeria. In the case of Pakistan, it survives on billions of dollars of U.S. aid and Western oil companies have a big stake in Nigeria.
Pakistan has experienced a rising tide of attacks on Christians since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and hundreds of CIA drone attacks against Taliban elements within Pakistan’s tribal belt. Pakistan also has a blasphemy law, which is directed at Christians and other religious groupings. It is a piece of legislation, which should have no place in a society that claims to be democratic and is our ally. The more the Obama expands his military campaign into parts of Pakistan the more violence likely Christians there will suffer.
From the Horn of Africa to Nigeria, the persecution of Christians has gained momentum with the spread of militant Islam. The greatest danger is the religious war between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria spreading across the continent. On March 7, 2010, more than 500 Christian men, women, children and babies were hacked or burned to death in villages south of Jos in the middle of the country. The bigger picture is that more than 60,000 people on both sides of the religious divide may have been killed in the past decade. It is believed the largest numbers of dead were Christians and, to the dismay of most observers on the ground, the authorities have failed to bring the perpetrators to justice. In fact, Nigeria’s military is a brutal, ill-disciplined force detested by Christians and Muslims alike. Many extreme Islamic groups, including Al Qaeda, regard Nigeria as the ideal breeding ground for their plans to spread an anti-Christian message across Africa. That spells a real danger the West must address sooner rather than later.
Christians face an uneasy and troubled existence in most Islamic nations across the globe yet the Middle East nation that embraces Christians, and to which many Iraqi and Egyptian Christians have fled, is Lebanon. Its constitution mandates its president, who is also the commander of the armed forces, must be a Maronite Christian. Not surprisingly, Washington’s support for Israel has made life difficult for Lebanese Christians, who suffered as much as Muslims when the Israelis carpet bombed town and cities in 2006 and contaminated large swathes of the countryside farmed by Christians with cluster bomb droplets supplied by Washington.