Vladimir Putin is definitely putting on the clown suit. He's been doing a bunch of different ego boosting nonsense over the last year, while assaulting Ukraine and seizing the oil and gas pipelines and going after mixed territory, leaving the world to think he's gone straight from Sudetenland to Full On Crazy. Putin was KGB, then FSB. He's not stupid. Or wasn't anyway.
I just watched the new Jack Ryan movie, a Clancy reboot with modern politics and current events. Less Cold War, more modern "everybody is our enemy" situation we find ourselves in now. There are some glaring mistakes in it. For one, the New York Stock Exchange doesn't start trading at 9:00 AM. It starts at 9:30. You would think someone would fact check that before making the film, and at least fix that in the AR sessions and editing. They didn't.
For another, the bomb at the end, in water, was likely to knock down the bridge because water transmits explosions more strongly than air. Knocking down a major bridge in New York City is still a successful terrorist attack, and would still crash the markets, and would still enable the basic plan to work. Essentially, they screwed up the movie because they didn't stop the bomb and the financial side would have still destroyed the dollar and removed America from the playing field of international politics, meaning the villain won. They ignored the impact on the markets, and the effect of a bomb in the bay and the panic of evacuating Wall Street, and all its long term consequences, with short term crash and panic being the obvious result in the real world. They cheated in the movie, ignoring this, going for an unrealistic neat ending, rather than a realistic "the enemy won despite our best efforts".
In the real world, the New Soviet Putin is crazy like a fox. While his ego is going seriously weird, he remains on his game with taking over Ukraine and quietly killing off the population or driving them out of the captured territory through merely suggesting that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not being talked about, which is talking about them, and suggesting its very much considered. It did, after all, succeed in Yugoslavia. They go away with it. A few leaders took the blame, but the lands are cleared for expansion and the world is watch. Don't tell me that the French wouldn't jump on this to clear Marseille of mad bombers, and the Arab quarter in Paris. French doctrine is be French. Being anything else in France is antithetical to their cultural imperative. Arabs can't be there because they refuse to be French, ever. They are an occupying invasion force with a history of suicide attacks. Obviously, they've got to go. If the French don't act soon, the Arabs will nuke them.
And now that Iraq has fallen to the ISIS murder squads, and they've immediately recovered the chemical weapons the USA long suspected were there, and the ISIS troops took pictures of and blasted onto the internet, we can only conclude that nuking Iraq is a pretty good idea. 30,000 USA trained and paid for and armed Iraqi police and troops stepped back and let ISIS start their slaughter. This is more than a failed state. This is an enemy. And Russia laughs, because Gulf instability means more oil profits, and oil demand, for them. Turkey keeps voting for Sharia Law Islamists, Kurdistan now has a stronger chance to form without organized opposition in Iraq, and Iran already marched troops across the border, which is an act of war. Since Iraq is a failed state, they didn't bother declaring, that I am aware, because they're trying to hold onto Baghdad. I think they're going to lose. Maliki was a failure, doing the usual oppress your personal enemies game to distract from all your failures. Once again, the last 6 years of presidential policies are resulting in death and likely genocide. Which is okay as long as you have a good golf game in Palm Springs, right?
I have been listening to a scifi audiobook called Germline by Andrew McCarthy, a CIA analyst in exactly the same way that Tom Clancy wasn't. The author has written a story about future warfare, taken to the expected technological extremes of 60 years of the Land Warrior Program, human cloning, and rare earth element mines being the battleground in Kazahkstan, an allegory for Pakistan and Afghanistan, both of which have rare earth elements and uranium. As pointed out in the story, electronics work by rare earth elements. Stuff like Rhodium. If you don't have them, you can't manufacture with them or get the special electronics tricks these elements allow. Strip mining complex mountain edges is why the Gold Country is in the Sierra foothills. Mountains and remelting rock tends to concentrate elements naturally, particularly if they don't bind into source minerals and get left with otherwise pure quartz, concentrated into the smallest volume and area, making mining them ideal method of extraction.
Most Russian lithium came from concentrated second boiling pegmatites in the Ural mountains. A long narrow range where European plate attaches to the Asian plate. The writing style in the novel is sort of gonzo plus neuromancer doing All Quiet On the Western Front. It is a war story, and the best war stories are really about how much you lose in the process. The friends, your self respect, your sanity. You lose those in wars. It is nuts to think anything else. Wars are fought with money, and those funding the generals are usually cheapskates, where human debris and death are perfectly okay because they don't count. Dead heroes are worth more than live war wounded. Dead heroes can't complain the events didn't happen like that, and dead heroes are great recruiters for the hopeless and gullible. Join the army, save your country.
People joke that the Cold War is over, but we have a new war with the Russian Empire, which is already starting to take back its territory and recover its exploitation. Blame the FSB and vodka and oligarchs making it impossible for small business to work there. It's go big or go home in Moscow. If you want small, you have to leave Russia. That's how it is. No point arguing about it. A big company can afford to payoff the FSB, or work with them towards shared goals, pay for internal security, and results in the biggest profits for the top staff and owners. Russian mafia are those owners. And they are completely ruthless sociopaths. The head of Lukoil was an oil billionaire and was captured and jailed, spawning many interesting action movie plots, mainly because Putin wanted the money for himself. And now he has it. Russia is seriously nasty. We are kidding ourselves that what they are up to, recovering the USSR to exploit it all again, won't end badly. And cause a Land War In Asia.
We've lost Iraq. We don't care about Ukraine because we're trying to get Turkey to put in a pipeline instead, bypassing Russia for the same oil. Turkey is fighting an active war with Iran and Kurdistan, both of which want the eastern part of their country. It is in Russia's best interest for those wars to go hot so the pipeline won't get built, or gets blown up so much it is useless. This raises the price of oil and makes their only source of hard currency more valuable. Middle East instability is in their literal best interest. I imagine they are selling weapons, particularly anti-aircraft and probably methods to deliver chemical weapons payloads to their enemies via rocket, just to insure this keeps going as long as possible. And if things start to stabilize there, it is in their very best interest to blow up some oil loading platforms like Ras Tanura. That's the nightmare scenario.
It's as bad as nuking Tel Aviv, for all the trouble it will cause. The current US president won't even meet with the Israeli PM anymore, and has drastically increased the threats to Israel. And the Jewish voters in this country all voted for him, twice. Do they hate Israel? Will they vote for the next anti-Semitic president too? They used to be so vocal about that, but these days: silence. Honestly, the Middle East is nothing but zealots. They're going to shoot each other until they run out of bullets, and then they'll switch to swords. And when the swords break, rocks. That's the kind of people they are. Now that the oil is running out, they're way more desperate, more vicious, and getting their licks in before the easy weapons systems are all wrecked and they have to kill the hard way.
What is happening in ISIS is crying out for aerial bombardment. Blow up the refinery lost to terrorists in Mosul. Boom. Blow up the chemical weapons storage site they know all about at the Pentagon but weren't allowed to visit under Saddam or Maliki. No excuses now. Boom. We've lost Iraq. No reason not to destroy everything the ISIS guys can use against us. The entire population stepped aside to let them, so clearly they agree with ISIS as the guys who are more just, more right, and answering their deep abiding cultural need to slaughter everybody else. This is what happens when you try to force multiculturalism on a population that measures itself by how many blood feuds they have running, and how many enemies they've killed. Its just gotten back to normal, is all. From before Saddam's regime. He said we would reap a whirlwind by killing him. He was right.
ISIS is Obama's legacy in the Middle East. The instability in the world, and the regrowth of the Russian Empire, and those genocides are a direct result of the LAST SIX YEARS. Not of GWB, but BHO. Anybody who keeps blaming Bush at this point, when Obama has clearly made everything worse, everywhere he's done anything... his is a failed presidency. How will you vote? That is as much as you can do for this international mess.
Meanwhile, how will you adapt to the evolving gasoline price increases, the eventual sanctions against the USA for things like spare parts to keep your car running, silly electronic toys, and the exporting of your job to China or India? Every time the phone rings, and an Indian drip is trying to con you for money, which president made that happen? Bush had the Do Not Call List. Obama? "The Last Six Years... oh wait."
Enjoy your week. I'm sure it will be lovely. It is summer now. Soon enough we'll be looking back on the good old days, before 9/11, when international politics were international problems that had nothing to do with us. Sigh.
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