ANALYSIS: Foreign policy views of the leading candidates unknown or all-too-known
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- Written by Henry Adams
BACKGROUND: Saudi Arabia's oil war is not going well
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- Written by Henry Adams
Syria is not only a civil war, a religious war, and a proxy war, it is now also an important factor in an oil war instigated in 2014 by Saudi Arabia. -- U.S. mainstream media were slow to call attention to this development, but that Saudi Arabia's decision to drive down the price of oil is an "oil war" was noted in the New York Post in Dec. 2014 by Ralph Peters the retired lieutenant colonel who became (in)famous in 2006 when he proposed redrawing the map of the Middle East in Armed Forces Journal. -- According to Peters, Saudi Arabia was "doing what the Obama administration lacked the guts to do: It’s smacking down our enemies," viz. Iran and Russia.[1] -- A few months later, though, Berlin-based Leonid Bershidsky argued that Saudi Arabia's price war was aimed principally at the North American fracking industry.[2] -- A Pakistani journalist observed that Saudi Arabia was in danger of falling into a trap of its own making. -- Saudi Arabia's effort to sustain its budget expenditures in the face of steeply declining oil revenues risks bankrupting the country: "[I]nstead of driving producers of expensive oil from the market and feasting on a recovery in oil prices, the expected addition of Iranian oil to the market will knock prices down further."[3] -- A few weeks later, after Russia intervened militarily in Syria, Bershidsky argued that Saudi Arabia's oil price war was now aimed Russia, and the world could therefore expect "a more active shoving match between the world's two biggest oil exporters, which already are at odds over the Syrian conflict. . . . if the Chinese economy continues performing worse than expected, that market may become too small for the Russians and the Saudis. -- Both economies are oil-dependent and retaining market share is a matter of survival."[4] -- Blogger Tyler Durden also believes that the price war was not going well for Saudi Arabia: "the kingdom is literally going broke as the budget deficit is set to come in at an astounding 20% of GDP and the current account plunges into the red as well. -- As for the Russians, not only did they not abandon their support for Assad, they in fact struck up a closer alliance with Iran, whose oil supply threatens to add to the global deflationary supply glut once sanctions are fully lifted."[5] -- Thus the Saudi oil war has been "a miserable failure thus far." -- Last week, however, the London Telegraph reported that "Saudi Arabia has vowed to continue flooding the global market with oil despite the collapse in Brent prices to a 12-year low, insisting that it will not cut output until Russia and other non-OPEC countries agree to share the burden." -- Saudi Arabia, it seems, is still intent on "flushing out rivals."[6] -- But if a piece published Saturday by Global Research is to be believed, the Saudi regime is more likely to be flushed out first.[7] ...
BACKGROUND: Summary of Hersh's critique of Obama's Syria policy
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- Written by Henry Adams
Seymour Hersh mounted an attack on Barack Obama's anti-Assad, pro-Erdogan Syria policy last month with a long, detailed article on the website of the London Review of Books. -- (The piece also appears in the Jan. 7, 2016, number of that exceptionally intelligent publication.) -- The assertions of the article have been judged to be beyond the pale by U.S. mainstream media and all but blacked out, for reasons that will be obvious from this brief... -- SUMMARY: Hersh reports that the Pentagon concluded in 2013 that Obama's decision to aid so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels in their effort to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was in fact "arming extremists" and decided to do something about it without informing Obama.[1] -- "The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success.’ -- So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing U.S. intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State." -- In addition, the Joint Chiefs found a way to downgrade the quality of weapons being shipped to Syrian rebels covertly (Hersh notes in passing, by the way, that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Benghazi to help organize the gun-running when he was killed in Sept. 2012, another datum that is unacceptable to U.S. mainstream media). -- Hersh also demonstrated at some length that the Joint Chiefs are far from sharing Obama's (and the U.S. mainstream media's) anti-Russian views. -- Hersh's chief source in this piece is an unnamed "former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs." -- He has other sources as well: "Imad Moustapha, now Syria’s ambassador to China, . . dean of the I.T. faculty at the University of Damascus, and a close aide of Assad’s," an unnamed "Washington foreign affairs analyst," and Christina Lin, "a scholar who dealt with Chinese issues a decade ago while serving in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld." -- They told Hersh that Chinese-Turkish tensions are rising because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is helping Muslim Uyghur fighters get to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, and Chinese leaders believe it likely they will later return to wage a separatist campaign in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China. -- Hersh also interviewed U.S. Army Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was canned by President Obama for, according to Hersh, telling the truth about Syria and supporting cooperation with Russia, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii 2nd), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who is publicly taking the same position....