Simmering Hope

If you are trying to understand what’s going on in the Persian Gulf, keep reading the following article.

The U.S.-Saudi Dilemma: Iran’s Reshaping of Persian Gulf Politics is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Abstract from the article:

“Ironically, Iran owes its thanks for this historic opportunity to its two main adversaries — the Wahhabi Sunnis of al Qaeda who carried out the 9/11 attacks and the “Great Satan” that brought down Saddam Hussein. Should Iran succeed in filling a major power void in Iraq, a country that touches six Middle Eastern powers and demographically favors the Shia, Iran would theoretically have its western flank secured as well as an oil-rich outlet with which to further project its influence.

So far, Iran’s plan is on track. Unless the United States permanently can station substantial military forces in the region, Iran replaces the United States as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf region”

More:
“While Iran already is well on its way to accomplishing its goals in Iraq, it needs two other key pieces to complete Tehran’s picture of a regional “indigenized security arrangement” that Vahidi spoke of. The first is an understanding with its main military challenger in the region, the United States. Such an understanding would entail everything from ensuring Iraqi Sunni military impotence to expanding Iranian energy rights beyond its borders to placing limits on U.S. military activity in the region, all in return for the guaranteed flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and an Iranian pledge to stay clear of Saudi oil fields.

The second piece is an understanding with its main regional adversary, Saudi Arabia. Iran’s reshaping of Persian Gulf politics entails convincing its Sunni neighbors that resisting Iran is not worth the cost, especially when the United States does not seem to have the time or the resources to come to their aid at present. No matter how much money the Saudis throw at Western defense contractors, any military threat by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council states against Iran will be hollow without an active U.S. military commitment. Iran’s goal, therefore, is to coerce the major Sunni powers into recognizing an expanded Iranian sphere of influence at a time when U.S. security guarantees in the region are starting to erode.

Of course, there is always a gap between intent and capability, especially in the Iranian case. Both negotiating tracks are charged with distrust, and meaningful progress is by no means guaranteed. That said, a number of signals have surfaced in recent weeks leading us to examine the potential for a Saudi-Iranian accommodation, however brief that may be”

From AP:
“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued the following statement on Sunday night:

“Tonight, talks broke down over Republicans’ continued insistence on a short-term raise of the debt ceiling, which is something that President Obama, Leader Pelosi and I have been clear we would not support. A short-term extension would not provide the certainty the markets are looking for, and risks many of the same dire economic consequences that would be triggered by default itself. Speaker Boehner’s plan, no matter how he tries to dress it up, is simply a short-term plan, and is therefore a non-starter in the Senate and with the President.

“In an effort to reach a bipartisan compromise, we are putting together a $2.7 trillion deficit reduction package that meets Republicans’ two major criteria: it will include enough spending cuts to meet or exceed the amount of a debt ceiling raise through the end of 2012, and it will not include revenues. We hope Speaker Boehner will abandon his ‘my way or the highway’ approach, and join us in forging a bipartisan compromise along these lines.”

Immediate reaction of the market : U.S. stock futures down more than 100 points.

Meanwhile, from Global Research comes the following information:
- An audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs, revealed that the Fed provided more than $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders responded to the audit by saying, quote, “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”
- The 13 trillion was not even paper money; it was computer keyboard issued
- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described the “cut, cap, balance” bill, proposed by Republicans, as one of the worst bills in the history of the country.
- Unemployment is not quite 9.2%, more likely around 30% (maybe even higher)
- Greece didn’t really get any bailout funds at all. All of the bailout funds were given by European creditor governments to the banks that held the Greek bonds. And Greece was told, “Well, there’s a 50 billion euro loss on your bonds that have gone down. You have to sell off and privatize €50 billion of your land and property in the public domain.”

I wonder if it is the harbinger of the USA collapse? Because right now it looks like the probability of global economic collapse is around the corner.
Are we doomed?

News agencies reported that today, July 20, 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy met to seek common ground on fighting the debt crisis before July 21, 2011 European summit. Again the EU government chiefs are trying to find a Greek rescue solution, that would be more palatable to their respective taxpayers. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said in an interview that the summit could be a “make-or-break moment” for the euro region. The rescue package is believed to be around 110 billion euros ($156 billion).

What is to be understood? That Greek is the Achilles tendon of EU? What about the other group of countries pejoratively named PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greek, Spain)? Is it going to be enough capital available to bail them out?

An interesting article from February 2011 is worth reading as it sheds some light on why the stock market did and would go short on euro.

In the mean time, things are not nice and dandy in the United States either. While President Obama was in talks with German Chancellor Merkel regarding Greek’s rescue package, remember that he has a bigger fish to fry at home, where the Federal Reserve is preparing for the possibility that the United States could default. What’s going to happen if the world’s biggest economy runs out of cash on August 2? In Washington, lawmakers were working on a plan to raise the U.S. debt ceiling with market-pleasing(operative word being ‘pleasing’) proposals to cut spending. Congress must approve an increase in the $14.3 trillion U.S. debt ceiling by August 2 or the government will run out of money to pay its bills.

Karma is a bitch, isn’t it? Years ago Latin American countries have been lectured ad nauseam by Uncle Sam over where to make budget cuts and how to address their debts. Ten years ago, Argentina defaulted on about $100 billion in debt. In a dramatic role reversal, the USA faces the same problems, only multiplied a thousand fold.
I found it sadly ironic that ‘Brazil, the region’s economic powerhouse, which just a decade ago had to come to Washington to ask the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, is now the United States’ fourth-biggest sovereign creditor — holding about $211 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, according to U.S. data from May’ (source: Reuters)

More from Reuters:

Below are the top 10 largest holders of U.S. debt as of the end of October 2010

– China, mainland: $906.8 billion

– Japan: $877.4 billion

– United Kingdom: $477.6 billion*

– Oil exporters, which include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria: $213.9 billion.

– Brazil: $177.6 billion

– Hong Kong: $139.2 billion

– Caribbean banking centers, which include Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Panama: $133.7 billion

– Russia: $131.6 billion

– Taiwan: $131.2 billion

– Canada: $125.2 billion (No wonder we are getting anxious and at the same time mad when politicians like Hillary Clinton asks for a revision of NAFTA to favor them even more than it does right now. Seriously?)

It remains to be seen if the market is going to experience the dreadfully predicted ’second dip’ and throw us all into a deeper recession, or if that powers that be are going to provide a life line.

The moment I saw the ‘breaking news’ related to Osama Bin Laden alleged death, I thought and felt that something was fishy and I kept wondering what was behind the smokescreen.
The news came too conveniently at the time when President’s Obama birth certificate stirred so much controversy. It sounded desperate, hence hard to be taken other than with a grain of salt.

Bin Laden suffered from kidney disease- among other illnesses- requiring dialysis. It’s very hard to believe that he had the strength and the money to orchestrate international terrorist movements.

Following is an article from Global Research, written by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

“SKEPTICISM: The Agendas Behind the Bin Laden News Event
The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said, “was not armed.”
The firefight story was instantly suspicious as not a single SEAL got a scratch, despite being up against al Qaeda, described by former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as ‘the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817
Every original story detail has been changed. It wasn’t bin Laden’s wife who was murdered by the Navy SEALs , but the wife of an aide. It wasn’t bin Laden’s son, Khalid, who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but son Hamza.
Carney blamed the changed story on “the fog of war.” But there was no firefight, so where did the “fog of war” come from?
The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video.
No explanation has been provided for why an unarmed bin Laden, in the absence of a firefight, was murdered by the SEALs with a shot to the head. For those who believe the government’s story that “we got bin Laden,” the operation can only appear as the most botched operation in history. What kind of incompetence does it require to senselessly and needlessly kill the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet?
According to the US government, the terrorist movements of the world operated through bin Laden, “the mastermind.” Thanks to a trigger-happy stupid SEAL, a bullet destroyed the most valuable terrorist information on the planet. Perhaps the SEAL was thinking that he could put a notch on his gun and brag for the rest of his life about being the macho tough guy who killed Osama bin Laden, the most dangerous man on the planet, who outwitted the US and its European and Israeli allies and inflicted humiliation on the “world’s only superpower” on 9/11.
When such a foundational story as the demise of bin Laden cannot last 48 hours without acknowledged “discrepancies” that require fundamental alternations to the story, there are grounds for suspicion in addition to the suspicions arising from the absence of a dead body, from the absence of any evidence that bin Laden was killed in the raid or that a raid even took place. The entire episode could just be another event like the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin event that never happened but succeeded in launching open warfare against North Vietnam at a huge cost to Americans and Vietnamese and enormous profits to the military/security complex.
There is no doubt that the US is sufficiently incompetent to have needlessly killed bin Laden instead of capturing him. But who can believe that the US would quickly dispose of the evidence that bin Laden had been terminated? The government’s story is not believable that the government dumped the proof of its success into the ocean, but has some photos that might be released, someday.
As one reader put it in an email to me: “What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of their ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible.”
Governments have known from the beginning of time that they can always deceive citizens and subjects by playing the patriot card. “Remember the Maine,” the “Gulf of Tonkin,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “the Reichstag fire”–the staged events and bogus evidence are endless. If Americans knew any history, they would not be so gullible.
The real question before us is: What agenda or agendas is the “death of bin Laden” designed to further?
There are many answers to this question. Many have noticed that Obama was facing re-election with poor approval ratings. Is anyone surprised that the New York Times/CBS Poll finds a strong rise in Obama’s poll numbers after the bin Laden raid? As the New York Times reported, “the glow of national pride” rose “above partisan politics, as support for the president rose significantly among both Republicans and independents. In all, 57 percent said they now approved of the president’s job performance, up from 46 percent.”
In Washington-think, a 24% rise in approval rating justifies a staged event.
Another possibility is that Obama realized that the the budget deficit and the dollar’s rescue from collapse require the end of the expensive Afghan war and occupation and spillover war into Pakistan. As the purpose of the war was to get bin Laden, success in this objective allows the US to withdraw without loss of face, thus making it possible to reduce the US budget deficit by several hundred billion dollars annually–an easy way to have a major spending cut.
If this is the agenda, then more power to it. However, if this was Obama’s agenda, the military/security complex has quickly moved against it. CIA director Leon Panetta opened the door to false flag attacks to keep the war going by declaring that al Qaeda would avenge bin Laden’s killing. Secretary of State Clinton declared that success in killing bin Laden justified more war and more success. Homeland Security declared that the killing of bin Laden would motivate “homegrown violent extremists” into making terrorist attacks. “Homegrown violent extremists” is an undefined term, but this newly created bogyman seems to include environmentalists and war protesters. Like “suspect,” the term will include anyone the government wants to pick up.
Various parts of the government quickly seized on the success in killing bin Laden to defend and advance their own agendas, such as torture. Americans were told that bin Laden was found as a result of information gleaned from torturing detainees held in Eastern European CIA secret prisons years ago.
This listing of possible agendas and add-on agendas is far from complete, but for those capable of skepticism and independent thought, it can serve as a starting point. The agendas behind the theater will reveal themselves as time goes on. All you have to do is to pay attention and to realize that most of what you hear from the mainstream media is designed to advance the agendas”

It made the news around the world: new revelations courtesy of WikLeaks are going to shed light on secret correspondence between the U.S. State Department and various U.S. embassies around the world. Allegedly WikiLeaks is in possession of almost 3 million documents, including sensitive diplomatic cables sent to Washington from the American embassy in London.
The revelations may be include among others allegations of corruption against politicians in Russia, Afghanistan and other Central Asian nations, information on the U.K politics and documents showing that Turkey has helped Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The threat sent shivers on diplomatic world, and prompted the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman to pay a visit to the U.K Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him about the content of the documents. Supposedly the sensitive documents contain details of secret discussions on the return of the Lockerbie bomber to Libya, among other information related to the U.K. politics.

On Wednesday, U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley said that the possible release would “put national interests at risk.”
“We are prepared if this upcoming tranche of documents includes State Department cables. We are in touch with our posts around the world. They have begun the process of notifying governments that [the] release of documents is possible in the near future”

WikiLeaks twitters showing how the U.S. government, in anticipation of an imminent expose, is briefing its allies on what to expect.

Newspapers around the world published articles warning about the WikiLeaks documents.
Russian Kommersant daily said that the documents contain the U.S. evaluation of the political situation in Russia and the unflattering characteristics of some Russian leaders.
According to Daily Mail “ There are fears of even the most apparently trivial secrets being hugely damaging. One British official said they feared that mutual American and British contempt for the French would emerge.‘Moaning about the French was practically a sport,’ he said”

The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, claimed that the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv warned the country’s foreign ministry that some of the cables could concern U.S.-Israel relations.

The Washington Post reported that the files will contain allegations that the U.S. has supported the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization that has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984.

The U.S. says it has known for some time that WikiLeaks held the cables.
No one has been charged with passing them to the website, but suspicion focuses on Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak.

As per Global Research “WikiLeaks’ founder, Australian activist Julian Assange, has no home address but he often pops up in Sweden and Iceland, where Internet anonymity is protected by laws. He is being hunted by Pentagon investigators and is suspected of releasing confidential U.S. State Department documents.

Julian Assange in July 2010

“The WikiLeaks website does not have a central office or any paid staff and its operations are run only by a small dedicated team and some 800 volunteers. Its servers are spread all over the world and do not keep logs, so governments cannot trace where the information is being sent and received from” (Global Research)

I suspect that the revelations are going to damage the international relationships to some extent. However, what I am more interested in is to read the truth about the E.U. and Middle East corruption or the deals made by the whole world with China and India or the annihilation (ethnic cleansing) of the Tibetans or the genocide in African countries. Instead of that we are going to read some embarrassing diplomatic gaffes.