Catalan Capitulation?

The reaction to the Catalan independence vote in the mainstream press and European capitals has been to condemn the brutality of the police crackdown while upholding the legal position of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy (see Steven Erlanger's "For E.U., Catalonia Pits Democratic Rights Against Sovereignty").

For the always-pessimistic take on democratic possibilities, see Yves Smith's "Catalonia Blinks in Secession Staredown." She thinks Catalan leaders are signalling that they are not going to declare independence:

Continued over-the-top use of force could move public sentiment the other way in Catalonia. But the unyielding position of the central government means that Catalonia would need to engage in a sustained campaign, meaning over a period of years, to make it painful enough to Madrid to force it to relent. I’d rather be proven wrong, since Rajoy represents a particularly ugly face of neoliberalism, but the rapid backpedaling by the separatists says they know they don’t have enough support among the public to go toe to toe with Madrid.

I was under the impression that Puigdemont, because of the police crackdown, had a rare opportunity to act. But Smith sees sign of wavering. And Smith's track record of cynical predictions is excellent.

Brexit Post-Mortem

The reason the neoliberal status quo has been around for as long as it has -- 40 years and counting, ten years longer than the social democratic consensus following World War Two -- is that it has proven agile at quickly adapting to threats.

Two recent examples. First, the Arab Spring, which, after stunning victories in Tunisia and Egypt, was completely rolled back thanks in large part to the export of jihad by the U.S. client states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Next, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was easily co-opted by Obama's 2012 presidential campaign, with a hefty assist from New York City's Finest.

What is happening in the case of Brexit is more of the same. The neoliberal status quo lost the vote last Thursday but has been winning ever since. The first significant casualty might have been Podemos in Spain's parliamentary elections on Sunday. Going into the vote, many predicted that Podemos would replace the Socialists as the number two party behind the ruling conservatives. It didn't happen. While Podemos didn't lose ground, neither did it gain any. The Popular Party actually picked up seats. The reason for Podemos' lackluster showing is being explained as voter risk-aversion following the currency and equity markets turmoil on Friday following the Brexit vote.

The markets have calmed since. Brexit will not be another Lehman Brothers. The narrative that is cohering to the point that it is close to being chiseled in stone is that the successful Leave campaigners, leaders like UKIP's Nigel Farage and Tories Boris Johnson (BoJo) and Michael Gove, have not a clue what Britain is to do now that its people have actually voted to separate from the European Union. This confusion is crystallized in a much-cited column written by BoJo for The Telegraph, "I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be," where he basically dismisses the reasons for a Leave vote by both the right and the left: Immigration will continue and so too will free trade. Britain will negotiate for itself a Norwegian membership in the common market.

Cameron must have been mindful of this dearth of leadership atop the Leave campaign. His 90-day exit is looking like the smart move at this point. Given another week like the last one, the Leave Tories will be so discredited they will not be able to govern. Cameron's Remainers will keep control of the Conservative Party, better able to join Labour's parliamentary putschists -- assuming they are somehow able to rid themselves of the troublesome Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (which I don't think they will be able to do) -- to finagle avoidance of Article 50, whether through a re-vote or artful negotiation.

The problem in all of this are those hard-shell anti-neoliberal voters, both left and right, who have grown deaf to the mellifluous hymns sung in praise of unfettered markets. Bigger is not better. And I would argue that a solid majority of voters in countries throughout the West have come to believe this, which is a real problem for the governing elite. This majority can be tamped down here and there by means of fear and focusing on division within its ranks, but it will not go away.

I would guess that over the next few years the major parties in the capitalist core will continue to splinter.

Elites Feeling Queasy This Morning: Brexit Triumphs by a Million-Plus Votes

Markets are down but not breathtakingly so in response to the triumph of Brexit at the polls yesterday. The Leave campaign ended up winning 52% to 48% -- more than a million votes -- over the Remain campaign. Cameron has announced his resignation effective in 90 days.

As Yves Smith makes clear in her flinty, dour post, "Brexit: The Crisis Begins," jockeying to shape the separation of the UK from Brussels will commence immediately. Cameron will be distracted by leadership battles among his Tories. Smith dusts off a post by Willem Buiter from 2008, "How likely is a sterling crisis or: is London really Reykjavik-on-Thames?," to sketch a worst-case scenario for Britain, which she then takes global in the final two paragraphs of her post:

And with the US growth sputtering, our economy will feel the effects. Roughly 25% of S&P earnings come from Europe. The strong dollar will weigh on exporters. Europe is a major export market for China, and China may allow the renminbi to slide. Earlier this year, a devaluation of the renmibi was also seen as having the potential to trigger major upheaval. A flagging US economy going into the election hurts Clinton and Democrats generally. And this vote will embolden other separatist movements, most important, Le Front National. 

No matter how this plays out, the UK and EU will have to blaze a difficult path. And this rupture is taking place when advanced economies almost without exception have singularly weak leaders. We are in for a rough ride, and the portents suggest it will be much rougher than it needs to be.

I would like to accentuate the positive. With the Brexit vote people showed, as they did in Rome on Sunday, that they are not the zombies who inhabit the leadership level of political-economic class. The majority is willing to cast aside the bankrupt zombified neoliberal consensus and strike out in a new direction, even if it is not clear exactly where it will lead. This is cause for great hope.

For decades we have been told that "There Is No Alternative!" And things have steadily worsened. Now we have proof that, after forty years, people are willing to scrap the neoliberal paradigm and begin anew.

The future is no longer foreclosed.

Point of No Return: President Hillary and the Demise of the European Union

I feel decent this morning for the first time in more than a week. Stress and strain on the job has led me to abandon this page. I feel like I am back at an SEIU local where I worked ten years ago, which was the closest I have ever come to being a member of a cult. Everyone was fucking each other, lying to each other, drinking and drugging, calling in sick, etc. My current situation is not anywhere near as bad. But I am ten years older, and working a 12-hour day doesn't get any easier.

So I am entertaining the idea of mothballing Burdens. My horizon looks bleak: overtime, staff retreats, six-day work week after six-day work week. We'll see. I think I can manage one post a week.

Enough about me. What about the world in which we live? Yesterday's primary results solidified last week's consensus coming out of New York. It is going to be a Trump vs. Hillary race to the bottom. Trump swept five Eastern states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Maryland -- in commanding fashion, and Hillary almost equaled his performance, losing only Roger Williams' colony.

The big takeaway from yesterday is a post this morning by Nate Silver, an avowed Trump denier: "It’s Trump’s Nomination To Lose. (Well, at least if he wins Indiana.)" With the Kasich-Cruz pact to derail Trump quickly disintegrating, even FiveThirtyEight thinks Trump's path to 1,237 is all but assured. For a moment I was swayed by a Van Jones interview I saw at the beginning of this month where he argued that the GOP was headed straight for a brokered convention because Trump had proven unable to win consistently more than 50% of the vote. Well, he has proven it repeatedly in April. And I think he will do very well in California. I was hoping for a battle royale at the Republican National Convention, maybe even an event where Trump would march his delegates out.

For the Democrats, I was hoping that Bernie could win New York and California and a few other states along the way and bring his children's crusade to the City of Brotherly love where another convention fight would be staged. Remember, it was the meltdown in Chicago in 1968 that brought about the McGovern reforms that led to McGovern's nomination in 1972 and Carter's nomination in 1976, and which superdelegates were created in 1984 to counteract. So convention meltdowns have a big historical impact.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there will be any convention meltdowns. If anything happens, it will be the big unions backing Hillary (SEIU, for one) attempting to lure disaffected youth back into the corrupt Democratic Party by staging direct action type mobilizations against Trump, possibly even at the GOP convention in Cleveland. I hope youth are too shrewd to be appropriated by Hillary, but in this regard I am not too confident; after all, there was a push in March by MoveOn to mobilize against Trump.

What does a race to the bottom between Hillary and The Donald look like? It is hard to know how the deep the depths, but deep indeed I imagine they will be. A guy who works on the same floor of the building where I work came into the office last week and handed me a sheet he had printed out. It was from The New York Times, based on the "NYT 4/19/16" he scrawled on the bottom of the page. There is no byline. I will retype the key sentences:

Meanwhile, her [Hillary's] negative ratings have been rising and now outweigh her positives by 24 points. That makes her seen no more favorably than Cruz is. Her only salvation is Trump's net negative is minus 41.

Combine these high marks of disapproval for both front runners with the low voter turnout numbers from the 2014 midterm elections, which were so low you had to go all the way back to the total war mobilization of World War Two to find comparable figures, and we could see participation levels as poor as the 1920s. And while this is proof of a broad distrust of our political system, it does not represent the kind of revolution that is called for.

At this point it looks like Clinton will muddle through. Fear usually trumps hope. By the time November arrives, Trump will be so thoroughly demonized the Rubio-voting soccer mom crossover will more than make up for any hardhat crossover in the opposite direction, leaving the election to be decided by black and Latino turnout. All hail Hillary.

We will have to look for regime change elsewhere.

Though "four more years" yawns at us, I am convinced now more than ever (and not just because I am reading Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) that we are headed for some sort of collapse.

This page since its inception has been preoccupied with the fracturing of the current Pax Americana neoliberal paradigm. From the fiscal cliff, Cyprus, the coup in Kiev, sarin in Ghouta, ISIS in Anbar, Syriza's Greece, Afghanistan, the refugee crisis in Europe to World War Four in Syria the paradigm is quaking.

Europe is critical. The unipolar world of Pax Americana is dependent on a supine, fraudulently monolithic Europe. That party has ended. Obama's meek and exhausted goodbye junket to the continent drove the message of defeat home.

The ceasefire in Syria is over. In the new phase of fighting the U.S. alliance with Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is more manifest than ever. The only thing keeping it from popular consciousness is a polite, conspiratorial elision by the mainstream media.

Renewed fighting in Syria and Iraq means a surge in refugees to Europe. Yemen is cued up to be even worse. All in time for the June 23 Brexit referendum. (Interestingly, in 1975, Year 1 of neoliberalism, the Brits voted by a supermajority to remain part of the European Community. It will be much closer this time.)

Even if the UK votes to stay in the EU, the continent will continue to fray because war in the Middle East is going to accelerate. The sheikhs of the Gulf are engaged in an arms buying bonanza, while the Saudis are in full tilt PR smokescreen mode. The panic is palpable. The captive USG is doing its part by sabotaging Obama's remaining legacy achievement, the nuclear deal with Iran. This can't end well. Hillary, more beholden to the neocons and the Saudis, will only make things worse.

And we haven't even mentioned the militarized Asia pivot or NATO's New Cold War with Russia, both of which were initiated absent public support. This is a "no future" horizon.

Russian Military Power, Syrian Federalization and Merkel's Refugee Deal with Turkey

Recently I've been wrong about two of the biggest issues facing the West: war in Syria and the European refugee crisis that it has helped to create. I didn't think that the February 27 U.S.-Russia negotiated ceasefire in Syria (minus territory controlled by Nusra and Islamic State) would work. It has for the most part. There have been violations from the outset, but the agreement has held; so much so that last week Putin announced the withdrawal of the bulk of Russian forces from the war-torn country. (The S-400 missile defense system will stay of course.) Then in Brussels on Friday Turkey and the Europe Union actually settled on a Rube Goldbergesque plan to stem the flow of refugees to Europe.

What is going on? It looks as if the warpig Western leaders are -- finally -- turning the battleship around. We should be incredulous since the neoliberal coin of the realm is stamped with the motto "In war we trust." But something is definitely happening here.

Whenever the reporting largely goes blank in The New York Times you know that it is not for lack of action on the ground but because a political decision has been made to put out the lights. It happened in Ukraine after the junta got its clock cleaned in Debaltseve. The paper, which had three reporters -- Andrew Kramer, David Herszenhorn and Neil MacFarquhar -- regularly filing dispatches, basically stopped reporting on the Donbass conflict. Debaltseve impressed upon the Obama administration the ease with which Russia could take Kiev. So I suspect the word went out to ratchet down coverage of the New Cold War in Ukraine, and editors of "the newspaper of record" complied. The free press at work.

I think what happened in Debaltseve at the beginning of last year in Ukraine is something similar to what the Russians accomplished in Syria with the recent victories in Aleppo Province. A game changer. The West and the Gulf sheikhs were forced to the table; we got the ceasefire and now the gradual press blackout.

There has been little coverage of the ongoing peace talks in Geneva. One thing seems clear though, federalization of Syria is the country's future. It is hard to believe that Turkey will accept any form of Kurdish statehood. I think this is where the refugee deal with Europe comes in. Beginning this summer, provided certain unnamed conditions are met, Turkish citizens will be able to enjoy passport-free travel to Europe. If Turkey and the EU manage to accomplish this, then Turkey's membership in the European Union is closer to becoming a reality than ever before; such a historic achievement for Erdogan would likely grease Turkish support for a federalized Syria.

As for Merkel's Rube Goldberg scheme to block refugees in Greece for rapid return to Turkey at the same time admitting to Europe a refugee warehoused in Anatolia, I think it is bound to fail. Just supplying the administrative manpower needed to process migrants in Greece for return to Turkey is an enormous logistical feat. What about corruption? What prevents smugglers from pursuing an Italian route? The agreement only covers Greece. How long can the heinous canard of listing Afghans as "economic migrants" be maintained? At least there is a partial ceasefire in Syria; in Afghanistan there is nothing of the sort. What about international humanitarian law? Merkel's EU plan is in violation. Refugees will not be allowed to seek asylum. They will be registered in Greece and then whisked back to Turkey.

Geneva III Dies Aborning, Greece to be Sacrificed to Ares

For an excellent snapshot of the stillborn UN-brokered peace process on the war in Syria, which is scheduled to begin this Friday in Geneva, what is being referred to as Geneva III, consult this morning's Reuters story, "Syria Peace Talks Hinge on Envoy's Answers." 

The title of the piece refers to a list of clarifying questions that the handpicked Saudi opposition, which has dubbed itself the High Negotiations Committee (HNC) in an attempt to appear officially legitimate, has submitted to UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The questions purportedly have to do with the lifting of sieges on opposition-held territory as a precondition of the peace talks.

The Saudis have no intention of bargaining in good faith. These conditions are an attempt to shift blame for the stillborn Geneva III to the Russians and Syrians. The talks were never going to get off the ground. This became apparent yesterday when de Mistura sent out invitations omitting the Syrian Kurds:

De Mistura's bid to convene the talks has already faced problems, including a dispute over who should represent the opposition. While the Saudi-backed HNC includes powerful rebel factions fighting Assad in western Syria, Russia has been demanding wider participation to include the Syrian Kurds. 

But de Mistura has not invited the Syrian Kurdish PYD party, which is affiliated to the Kurdish YPG militia that controls wide areas of northern and northeastern Syria and has become an important partner in the U.S.-led war on Islamic State.

Turkey, a major sponsor of the rebellion which views the Syrian Kurdish PYD party as a terrorist group, had said it would boycott the talks if had been invited.

Fabius said: "The PYD group was causing the most problems, and Mr de Mistura told me he had not sent them an invitation letter."

The PYD's representative in France, Khaled Eissa, who had been on a list of possible delegates proposed by Russia, blamed regional and international powers, in particular Turkey, for blocking the Kurds and forecast the talks would fail.

"You can't neglect a force that controls an area three times the size of Lebanon," he said. "We will not respect any decision taken without our participation."

One prominent Syrian opposition figure said he would boycott the talks unless the PYD was invited.

"I'll go with my friends or not (at all). There is no compromise in this question," Haytham Manna told Reuters. Manna is co-leader of an opposition group called the Syrian Democratic Council, which includes the PYD and was formed in December in Kurdish-controlled Hasaka province.

Independent Syria dissident Jihad Makdissi said would not attend the initial round of talks in order to help overcome differences over who should represent the opposition.

Not surprisingly, de Mistura's promises of robust participation by women and civil society groups in the peace process have proven hollow. According to Somini Sengupta reporting from Geneva in "An Odd Diplomatic Dance as U.N. Prepares for Syria Peace Talks":

Mr. de Mistura had promised to seek the guidance of women’s groups and civil-society representatives. But none got the mysterious invitations on Tuesday, diplomats said, which galled Mouna Ghanem, a Syrian politician who is not part of either the Russia-backed or Saudi-backed blocs. 

“Just on the doors of Geneva III, majority of men are rushing to negotiate Syrian future,” Ms. Ghanem, coordinator for the Syrian Women Forum for Peace, said in a statement. She called women’s participation “shallow and insignificant.”

De Mistura is dancing to the Saudi fiddler, as is the United States. Or Saudis are dancing to a tune produced at Langley. It is often hard to understand where the U.S. deep state stops and the House of Saud begins, so intertwined are the two. In any event, a couple things are clear at this point: 1) Russian-backed Syrian Arab Army military victories are mounting, and 2) the Saudis and Turks refuse to bargain while their regime-change operation is backpedaling.

Where do the Saudis go from here? The old standby. Terror bombing like the one the other day in the Shiite area of Homs. The Saudis work through multiple proxies, secular and Salafist.

The maintenance of our status quo of perpetual warfare means that Europe will keep its role as escape valve for a disintegrating Middle East. Now that the oft-floated solution to the problem of refugees fleeing perpetual war by bribing Erdogan to warehouse the migrants in Turkey is pretty well accepted to be a public relations gimmick, tossing Greece out the Schengen area seems to be the plan du jour. This from a Reuters story this morning, "EU Gives Greece Warning to Fix Border 'Neglect' ":

BRUSSELS — The EU executive concluded on Wednesday that Greece could face new border controls with other states of the free-travel Schengen zone in May if it does not fix "serious deficiencies" in its management of the area's external frontier. 

"If the necessary action is not being taken and deficiencies persist, there is a possibility to ... allow member states to temporarily close their borders," European Commission Vice President Vice President told a news briefing after the executive accepted a report that Athens had "seriously neglected" its obligations to fellow Schengen states. 

The move is part of a process in which EU governments aim to give them the option of reinstalling controls on their national borders for up to two years, once short-term derogations currently in place expire in May. 

Following the arrival of more than a million irregular migrants in the European Union last year, most of them via Turkey into Greece from where they trekked northward to Germany, other EU member states have instituted emergency controls on their internal Schengen borders and have warned that they might effectively suspend Athens from the passport-free travel zone. 

In practice, Greece has no land borders with the rest of the Schengen zone, so installing new frontier checks would affect only air and sea ports. Diplomats and officials have described the move to penalize tourism-dependent Greece as a means of raising pressure on Athens to implement EU measures intended to identify and register all those arriving from Turkey.

James Kanter had a story ("E.U. Ministers Spar as Bloc’s Promise of Free Movement Wavers") about this move underway in Brussels to penalize Greece for the German-, British- and French-backed Saudi/U.S. war on Syria:

The European Union has been trying to persuade Turkey to take a more active role in resolving the crisis by doing more to look after refugees there and stop them from trying the journey to the European Union. 

Another idea that has gained growing attention is to choke off some of the northward flow of migrants at the border between Greece and Macedonia, potentially leaving huge numbers of migrants in Greece at a time when that country is still recovering from its depression-like downturn. 

On Monday, over lunch at the Dutch National Maritime Museum, the ministers discussed freezing the free movement of people inside parts of the bloc for up to a further two years.

So far, six countries, including Germany and Austria, have suspended the system for a legally permissible period of six months. For Germany and Austria, that six-month period expires in late spring, just as a surge of new arrivals from the Middle East and Africa is expected. 

The ministers also agreed to continue hashing out plans to create a European Border and Coast Guard Agency. 

That plan would double the staff of the current border agency, Frontex, and would create a separate reserve force to be deployed even when a member state rejects help. [!] But some politicians suspect a blunt power grab by Brussels intended to diminish national sovereignty. 

Arriving at the meeting in Amsterdam, the Austrian interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, warned that “the external Schengen border will move back towards Central Europe” — a thinly veiled threat to exclude Greece from the passport-free area unless Athens acted more forcefully.

Rather than work for peace in the Middle East, Western power brokers will carve up the European Union piecemeal and toss the chunks of flesh on a pyre to Ares.

Hersh on the Squalor that is Obama's Antinomial Syria Policy

Every six months to a year Seymour Hersh publishes a story in The London Review of Books that confirms for those of us who try to stay abreast of the daily news what we already know.

In his latest story, "Military to Military," Hersh relies on his longtime anonymous source within the Pentagon to inform us that following an exhaustive Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis completed in the summer of 2013 (prior to the false-flag Ghouta sarin attack), which concluded that regime change in Syria would lead to another Libya, a failed state rife with rival Salafi jihadists committing a series of escalating atrocities, the Joint Chiefs under General Martin Dempsey decided to undercut the Obama administration's covert regime-change program. Dempsey accomplished this by feeding intelligence to Russia, Israel and Germany, knowing full well that it would be passed along to Syria.

Why this is being considered a "bombshell" I don't know. It is reported in the mainstream press if not daily at least on a regular basis, and has been for years, that the Obama administration is pursuing a contradictory policy in relation to Syria. On the one hand Obama says "Assad must go"; while on the other hand, he makes sure not to grease the skids to Assad's exit. For instance, the U.S. does not supply antiaircraft weapons to the mythical "moderates" who are battling the Baathists, nor does it enforce a no-fly/no-go zone the type of which the U.S. implemented in Saddam Hussein's Iraq (what Hillary has in Strangelovian fashion been calling for from her lectern in the Democratic debates despite the presence of the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile system). The one obvious fact for a news consumer about the U.S. policy towards Syria is that it is a contradiction.

Hersh gives us a plain-spoken insider's perspective how this contradiction has played out in the corridors of power over the last several years. In his opening paragraph, Hersh situates the U.S. contradiction on Syria within Obama's reboot of the Cold War with Russia and China, something which I believe will mark Obama in the annals as one of the worst leaders in U.S. history.

Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

Hersh is merciless when it comes to Obama's favorite fiction, that of a decent non-jihadist opposition that is bravely fighting the bloodthirsty Syrian state; it doesn't exist, something that the DIA figured out and which, according to Hersh, motivated the Pentagon to undercut the CIA's funneling of weapons from Libya into Syria via Turkey. Once across the border, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) would promptly unload their Western-&-GCC supplied arms to the jihadists. This has all been reported before, as has been Turkey's active and nefarious role, but it is always helpful to read it again, and in such clean, clear prose.

One of the aspects of the disinformation campaign in the mainstream press that I have been interested in is the shifting explanations of how ISIS funds itself. The whopper told right from the get-go during the dark days of the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the capture of Mosul was that ISIS funded itself by stealing the hard currency in banks in territory under its control. Never mind the absurdity of claiming the outcome of an event, the capture of Mosul, as the source of its funding. There you have it. It was regularly repeated in the mainstream press when ISIS went on its blitzkrieg in June 2014.

The next ISIS funding source du jour became black market oil. No doubt there was some truth to this, but the revenue numbers thrown around seemed ludicrously inflated to me. It made no sense that with oil prices depressed globally the caliphate jihadists could be raking in $100 a barrel.

Then suddenly, after the Friday the 13th Paris massacre, when it became inconvenient to acknowledge any connection between the West, its allies and the Islamic State, the black market oil trade had to be erased as the explanation of how the caliphate generated funds to pay the wages for its tens of thousands of fighters and to provide all the weapons and munitions in their possession. The next funding source presented by the press was extortion and ad hoc taxation. The ISIS jihadists are shakedown artists raising money by fining women for an inappropriate hijab or bakers for baking bread.

All these excuses are thrown out there to obscure the obvious: The jihadists get their principal funding from the Gulf sheikhdoms. Saudi Arabia funds the Syrian opposition. And we know that there are precious few "moderates" who remain among the opposition. So the obvious inference is that the Gulf sheikhs must fund ISIS as well. As Hersh notes,

In the early stages of the talks, the adviser said, the Joint Chiefs tried to establish what Assad needed as a sign of their good intentions. The answer was sent through one of Assad’s friends: ‘Bring him the head of Prince Bandar.’ The Joint Chiefs did not oblige. Bandar bin Sultan had served Saudi Arabia for decades in intelligence and national security affairs, and spent more than twenty years as ambassador in Washington. In recent years, he has been known as an advocate for Assad’s removal from office by any means. Reportedly in poor health, he resigned last year as director of the Saudi National Security Council, but Saudi Arabia continues to be a major provider of funds to the Syrian opposition, estimated by US intelligence last year at $700 million.

More proof along these lines is Monday's lengthy story, "Behind the Black Flag: The Recruitment of an ISIS Killer," about front-line jihadist commander Hassan Aboud. Aboud started his own local brigade after the Arab Spring uprising, the Dawood Brigade, but in 2013 he was offered $2 million by ISIS to join them:

People who know Mr. Aboud describe a series of meetings with Islamic State leaders from Iraq, including with Abu Ali al-Anbari, a former Iraqi military officer who moved outside the city of Aleppo with a security contingent and a mission to recruit local commanders. 

Abu Ameen described a “secret operational phase” by ISIS in 2013 that targeted rebel and activist networks. Its timing aligned with Mr. Aboud’s disputes, he said, “and Dawood Brigade is one of the groups that was infiltrated.” 

At one point, activists said, Abu Ali called a meeting of rebel leaders in Idlib Province to discuss relationships with ISIS. He also sent ISIS agents to Sarmin to woo Mr. Aboud, who had begun to noticeably fall under the Islamic State’s sway. 

Mr. Dugheim said he mediated between Abu Issa and Mr. Aboud at the time. ISIS, he said, was flattering the brigade with attention and gifts. 

“ISIS offered Hassan Aboud a big amount of money — $2 million — when Hassan Aboud actually had nothing in hand,” Mr. Dugheim said. “They gave him weapons and money and food.” 

This sum could not be independently confirmed.

What jumped out at me was not only the amount, $2 million for a mid-level commander, but the year, 2013. ISIS didn't claim control of Fallujah until the beginning of 2014. That much money tossed around for someone like Aboud reeks of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

In the end, Hersh provides a lucid picture of the squalor of the Obama administration's Syria policy, which he summarizes as follows:

The four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that there really are significant moderate opposition forces for the US to support.

One silver lining  is the Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS will hasten the collapse of the radical neoliberal center. European leaders are already moving to embrace Hungary's Orbanism, as the radical left finds an electoral footing. We are seeing the sunset of the EU as NATO lackey and lickspittle to U.S. hegemony. Only good can come of this.

****

I'm out of town for the holiday. The next post should be this weekend.

After Paris: A Few Hopeful Signs but Overall Business as Usual

There are indications this morning that the Friday assault on Paris by Islamic State hit teams that murdered 129 might actually prompt a shift by the West. Ever since Mosul fell at the end of spring 2014, the West, led by the United States, has been engaged in largely cosmetic attacks on ISIS as the jihadist offshoot of Al Qaeda pursued goals identical to the West, namely, regime change in Iraq and Syria. The collapse of the Iraqi Army was used to oust Nouri al-Maliki, but Bashar al-Assad has not proven so easy to dislodge.

Beginning early last month with Russia's active militarily involvement against the potpourri of jihadist groups operating in Syria, many with the direct support of Western intelligence services and GCC funding, the war in Syria began to shift. Islamic State struck back by blowing up a Russian charter jet in the Sinai two weeks ago, followed by a suicide bombing in a Beirut neighborhood, capped off by the assault on Paris on Friday.

Indications that this ISIS assault on a Western capital city has elicited a move away from the cosmetic to the substantive in the war against the caliphate are contained in two stories this morning: "France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks," by Alissa Rubin and Anne Barnard, and "U.S. Warplanes Strike ISIS Oil Trucks in Syria," by Michael Gordon.

First, Michael Gordon's story. Many commentators have pointed out that if the U.S. were truly serious about knocking out the caliphate it would go after its black-market oil pipeline. As Pepe Escobar argued ten-days ago in "What's the Big Deal Between the Russians and the Saudis?":

Meanwhile, fomenting all sorts of wild speculation, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still manages to collect as much as $50 million a month from selling crude from oilfields it controls across “Syraq”, according to the best Iraq-based estimates. 

The fact that this mini-oil caliphate is able to bring in equipment and technical experts from “abroad” to keep its energy sector running beggars belief. “Abroad” in this context means essentially Turkey – engineers plus equipment for extraction, refinement, transport and energy production. 

One of the reasons this is happening is that the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) – which includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey – is actually bombing the Syrian state energy infrastructure, not the mini oil-Caliphate domains. So we have the proverbial “international actors” in the region de facto aiding ISIS/ISIL/Daesh to sell crude to smugglers for as low as $10 a barrel.

Or as John Newsinger points out in a footnote to his "Wars Past and Wars to Come" in the latest Monthly Review:

The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.

Now, according to Gordon, the U.S. has finally decided to target the Islamic State's oil:

ISTANBUL — Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.
The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey. 

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory. 

American officials have long been frustrated by ability of ISIS to generate tens of million of dollars a month by producing and exporting oil.

To disrupt that source of revenue, American officials said last week that the United States had sharply stepped up its airstrikes against infrastructure that allows ISIS to pump oil in Syria. 

Until Monday, the United States had refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact. 

The new campaign is called Tidal Wave II. It is named after the World War II effort to counter Nazi Germany by striking Romania’s oil industry. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September assumed command of the international coalition’s campaign in Iraq and Syria, suggested the name. 

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

Don't believe the window-dressing about concern for civilian casualties. Just ask the survivors from the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. The U.S. and its allies obviously wanted to maintain the viability of the caliphate as a way to pressure the governments of Iraq and Syria.

My concern is that these airstrikes on the oil-tanker trucks are going to be a PR one-off, evidence of good faith for the voters back home who are paying attention. Kerry's statement coming out of the negotiations in Geneva stick to the "It's All Assad's Fault" script, which is the same one that got us ISIS to begin with. According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Attacks in Paris Add Urgency to Talks on Ending Syria War":

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov sparred openly over the fate of Mr. Assad, a central question in any final agreement. 

The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, believes Mr. Assad must go as part of any final settlement, and Mr. Kerry described him on Saturday as an enabler of the Islamic State and a “magnet” for foreign fighters who are spreading terror through the region and beyond. 

“This war won’t end — this war can’t end — as long as Bashar al-Assad is there,” he said. [Clear statement that there will be more terror attacks like Friday's in Paris.] 

But Russia has been a strong Assad supporter, and Mr. Lavrov argued that the conflict in Syria goes far beyond him, noting that past crises in Iraq and Libya only worsened with the ouster of their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi. 

“I cannot agree, therefore, with the logic that Assad is the cause for everything,” Mr. Lavrov said to Mr. Kerry, seated with him in a hotel ballroom for the news conference. “The Paris attacks have shown, alongside with ISIS claiming responsibility for it, that it doesn’t matter if you are for Assad or against him; ISIS is your enemy, so it’s not about Assad.” 

Also left unresolved was the critical question of which groups would be considered terrorist organizations and which legitimate members of the opposition would be included in the political transition talks, an issue that the diplomats agreed to work on in the days ahead.

Not good. Yet in the Rubin and Barnard story about French airstrikes on the caliphate's capital of Raqqa, there is some hopeful news that the West is finally getting serious:

There is a growing focus on both reducing the Islamic State’s territory and its financing, said French government officials and experts. 

“We need to push the organization away from its territories,” said Jean Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert, who worked in the French government and now is the chairman for the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research group. 

“Most of its resources are from the territory, so we have to push it away from its resources in Syria and Iraq and that means going in on the ground with a regional power,” he said.

The United States currently has soldiers on the ground in Iraq working with Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to dislodge the Islamic State. France has not yet said whether it will adopt a similar course. 

On Sunday, Mr. Hollande met his predecessor and rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Élysée Palace. Afterward, Mr. Sarkozy urged decisive action against the Islamic State — a position Mr. Hollande has also taken. 

“We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh,” Mr. Sarkozy told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

We'll see. A danger here is this "going in on the ground with a regional power" could be the green light that Erdogan has been looking for all along -- a buffer zone in northern Syria. Erdogan is going to get his billions and his special session in Brussels for Turkey. He has been playing his cards like a poker shark.

So despite hints here and there of a shift, it looks like business as usual. It is going to take a shift in Europe away from the United States and closer to Russia and China to bring about real change. That is not going to happen unless there is a cracking of the European Union. Something that "business as usual" is rapidly bringing about. Look for Marine Le Pen in 2017.

Shocks to the European Union

The European Union is facing a wide array of challenges, and not just the blow back from the cracking apart of the Middle East. Several developments this past week point to a series of shocks ahead for the continental union.

First, I should say that I think that the EU is an institution that serves the United States. The way it works is that you create a political union that is subordinate to the economic union, and the economic union answers to Germany. Germany answers to the United States in foreign policy matters. So in a series of short steps you have a huge continent-sized economy that eclipses the U.S. but is politically supine at its feet.

The left has to give up for the time being on its European Dream of progressive government in Brussels. It is not going to happen before several shocks shake the shack.

Shock #1: Anti-austerity government is coming to Portugal.  Despite headlines early last month touting the first-place finish of the coalition of Portuguese prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho as a great vindication of austerity, the conservatives were unable to form a government. Now it will be up to the left anti-austerity bloc, led by the Socialists but also including the long-resistant-to-left-leaning-coalitions Communist Party, to form a government, assuming that conservative president, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, allows them to. He might ask Passos Coelho to remain at the head of a caretaker government until new elections can be held next year.

Waiting until new elections is likely the preferred outcome for the elites who preside over governance in Brussels. Despite the object lesson that Greece was supposed to provide for all the restless natives who didn't wanted to accept a pauperized future of ever-increasing austerity, it is apparent the citizens of another European nation are ready to tilt again at the neoliberal consensus.

As Raphael Minder pointed out last week, "Rising Left Bloc in Portugal Could Threaten Austerity Drive," if the left bloc is successful at forming a government in Portugal, this points the way to a fall of the conservative, pro-austerity Popular Party in Spain:

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain, who champions austerity, hopes to get re-elected, but most polls show his Popular Party falling short of keeping its parliamentary majority. That raises the possibility that the Spanish could end up in a similar situation to that of the Portuguese. 

“The Iberian left is forming alliances against those in power and trying to create governments of losers,” said Pablo Casado, a conservative lawmaker who is spokesman for Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party. “This could also happen in Spain.” 

At the very least, Portugal’s political deadlock has signaled the deep divisions the austerity debate continues to generate. 

“You can have an election where there is no winner, only losers,” said Mr. Cabral, the economics professor. “Which is an odd situation in a democracy.”

Shock #2: Spain Splits Over Catalan Independence. Despite a ruling from the Spanish constitutional court, the parliament of Catalonia is moving full speed to independence. How is that for a shock to the system?

Shock #3: Greece Burns. Today the first general strike directed at the once "great leftist hope" Syriza government shows that Alexis Tsipras' capitulation to the troika bought Brussels maybe six months.

Shock #4: Brexit. Cameron published the list of demands that Conservatives need met in order to support remaining in the EU. Wishy washy and ready-made for fudging is how I would characterize them. The main item garnering attention is reduced welfare payments for immigrants. I don't see how the referendum on remaining in the EU passes.

Shock #5: Walls Go Up. Slovenia is the latest country to erect a border wall in Europe. So much for the promise of an "ever closer union."

Europe Will Close Its Borders: Not a Matter of "If" but "When"

The refugee flow from the Syrian war zone is increasing. The last three paragraphs of "Violence in Syria Spurs a Huge Surge in Civilian Flight" by Kareem Fahim and Maher Samaan tell us that

If the current hostilities continue, Turkey could face more pressure to open the border, opening the door for a new wave of refugees to make the dangerous voyage toward Europe, relief workers said. Approximately 48,000 migrants arrived in Greece over five days last week, the highest rate this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. 

In northern Homs, for now, fleeing villagers sheltered under trees or in destroyed houses or slept in the open on the side of the road. To leave the province meant risking the government’s checkpoints. “There are no safe roads for them,” said Hassan Abou Nouh, an activist in the area. 

“You can see people everywhere, scattered around the roads,” he said. “The situation is disastrous.”

Turkey is making the situation worse by attacking the People's Protection Units of Syrian Kurdistan, a proven anti-ISIS fighting force. Turkey, purportedly a NATO ally of the U.S., is time after time exposed in the mainstream press as being a principal backer of the jihadists invading Syria and a spur to the crisis of displaced persons but to no consequence. The "indispensable nation" does nothing. The war continues, and now it is continuing at an accelerated pace.

Turkey is another Pakistan: a purportedly close ally who is simultaneously a main prop to an enemy on the battlefield. In Pakistan's case it is openly reported in the "newspaper of record" that the Taliban answers to Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Yet the U.S. is preparing to send additional F-16s to Pakistan.

The only conclusion one can draw is that the U.S. foments war, The United States will provision its enemy in order to fight that enemy. War is its preferred state.

But with war you end up with death, mayhem, dislocation. The Middle East is cracked and its contents are spilling onto European soil.

Andrew Higgins' piece from the other day, "European Leaders Look Again for a Unified Response to Migrant Crisis," does a good job showing what a pickle EU leaders are in:

The gathering was the fifth consecutive meeting of leaders focused on how to deal with a crisis that has led to acrimonious divisions among European nations and helped bolster the political fortunes of anti-European populist forces across the Continent. In Poland on Sunday, the right-wing Law and Justice party trounced a more Europe-friendly governing party in parliamentary elections. 

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Union’s top executive, who convened Sunday’s meeting at the behest of Ms. Merkel, said reception centers would be established along the so-called “Balkan route” taken by most migrants that could hold and process 50,000 people, with facilities for 50,000 more to be set up in Greece. He said leaders had also agreed to stop “waving through” migrants who cross their countries as they rush north toward Germany and Scandinavia. [What happened to the have-Turkey-stockpile-the-refugees plan?]

“The only way to restore order is to slow down the uncontrolled flows of people,” Mr. Juncker told reporters. 

Voicing dismay that previous promises of action had not been put into effect, he said countries must now follow through on their commitments so that order can be reached in a flow of migrants that keeps increasing.

The European Commission, the union’s executive arm, of which Mr. Juncker is the president, has proposed numerous plans and programs since the early summer to deal with the issue, but a wide chasm has opened between talk in Brussels and real action on the ground. 

In the five months since the commission first announced a plan to relocate 40,000 refugees from Greece and Italy to other European countries, for example, only 87 people have so far been moved. At the current pace, it would take more than 750 years to relocate the 160,000 asylum seekers covered by a now-expanded resettlement plan.

Adding to a growing sense of urgency in recent days has been fear that Germany, the final destination of many of the newcomers, might decide to close its borders.

Asked early Sunday whether this was a possibility, Ms. Merkel did not answer directly. She faces growing pressure over her handling of the crisis from within her conservative bloc, which has suffered in opinion polls because of a flood of what are expected to be at least 800,000 asylum seekers into Germany this year. Support for the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union has dropped to its lowest point in three years, according to one prominent German polling firm.

Recent weeks have seen a rise in the number of far-right attacks in Germany, and the tone of the political discourse has become increasingly raw, worrying security officials and raising questions over whether Ms. Merkel will stick to her insistence that Germany’s borders stay open.

The only way to slow down the influx of refugees is to have an immediate ceasefire in Syria and a start to negotiations without preconditions, such as the U.S.-Saudi demand that Assad go. Whether explicitly or implicitly, I think most voters in the West understand that their leaders are fiddling about in the Middle East with their despotic sheikh buddies and have created a huge mess. It is clear to me that U.S. and EU honchos agreed to a quid pro quo to get buy-in from the GCC on the nuclear deal with Iran: you agree to this deal with Iran and we will swear to Assad's elimination. Then Russia stepped in. Now the hell that was breaking loose over the last four years is really gushing heavy.

Western voters are swinging and will continue to swing to the right to try to address the situation. Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban has captured the mood. As Higgins says,

Mr. Hahn’s comments signaled growing alarm in Brussels over efforts by some countries in Eastern Europe, notably Hungary, to keep asylum seekers out. A fence built by Hungary along its southern border has pushed the flow toward Croatia and Slovenia. 

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s pugnacious prime minister, sounded a characteristically defiant tone upon his arrival Sunday in Brussels, saying that he was attending as only an “observer,” as Hungary was no longer part of the migrant trail. Mr. Orban repeated his longstanding position that the only realistic solution to the crisis is for the European Union to take control of Greece’s eastern border with Turkey, the main corridor for those seeking entry to Europe. 

"We should go down south and defend the borders of Greece if they are not able to do that,” Mr. Orban said, complaining that he had proposed this many times, “but no one accepted.” 

The cornerstone of the commission’s migration policy, the slow-moving relocation plan, has been stalled by bitter resistance from Hungary and other Eastern and Central European countries that object to taking in migrants for resettlement. But even a sharp acceleration of a plan to relocate 160,000 people would barely make a dent in the number who continue to flood into Europe. 

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 537,000 migrants and refugees have crossed into Greece alone so far this year. Instead of slowing after a series of summit meetings in Brussels focused those numbers, the flow of migrants through Greece has only increased, with around 9,600 people arriving there from Turkey each day last week, the highest number so far this year.

There will not be a ceasefire. The refugee influx will increase. Merkel will eventually close Germany's borders or Germans will elect politicians who will close them. And the dream of an open-bordered Europe will end.

It's Axiomatic: The Coming Dissolution of the European Union

Safe bets are not easy to come by in politics. The future remains open. Even though there appears to be broad agreement among citizens throughout the West that we live in a dystopian age and that things need to change pronto if we are to avoid a cataclysm, the power of money is so dominant that entrenched interests continue to set the agenda long past their sell date.

One such safe bet though is that the refugee crisis presently convulsing Europe will destroy the European Union.

The refugee crisis is blow back from the nihilistic campaign of the West, along with its autocratic monarchical allies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, to rid Syria of its Baathist leadership. Turkey has control of the spigot, both of foreign mercenary jihadists entering Syria to wage war, and war-torn refugees fleeing the region to the safe, social-democratic European north.

As long as there is war in Syria and Iraq, and the U.S. and its allies continue to play the double game of bad jihadist terrorists (ISIS) vs. good jihadist terrorists (Ahrar al-Sham), instead of sitting down and negotiating peace with Assad, Iran, Russia and Iraq, the outpouring of Europe-bound refugees will continue.

And as long as the refugees pour into Europe, voters in France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, and all other EU-member nations will increasingly opt for politicians of an ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU stripe. Marine Le Pen is surging in France for instance. For those on the left who would never vote for a hard-right politician, there is a renascence of the radical left, which, while not axiomatically anti-EU, is more a threat to the neoliberal status quo because of its anti-imperalism.

Under these conditions, the date to look at is the spring of 2017; that is when the French presidential election takes place. Marine Le Pen has promised to take France out of the EU. Cameron, who promised a referendum on EU membership if elected, as he was this past spring, confidently talked about moving that vote up to next year as opposed to waiting until 2017, the date originally promised for the referendum. He might be re-thinking that now.

The European power brokers see what is happening. Their plan to deal with it is to basically capitulate to Turkey; pay it billions of euros to warehouse the refugees and block them from entering Europe. Another demand of Turkey is membership in the European Union, something Germany's Angela Merkel has long opposed. My sense is that Merkel, the Queen of Europe, might not grant de jure recognition of Turkey's membership in the EU but rather de facto membership in the form of visa-free travel in Europe for Turkish citizens.

In either case, the European Union will not survive. Politicians like Marine Le Pen and UKIP's Nigel Farage will see their popularity soar.

The only thing that might switch up this outcome is if peace were quickly settled. But with weapons arriving in even great numbers once Russia began bombing jihadists, war and more refugees are all that we can be sure of. And we haven't even mentioned Afghanistan and Yemen.

The Saudi Price for Supporting the Iranian Nuclear Deal: The Election of Marine Le Pen and the End of the EU?

It is clear to me from reading the extensive coverage of what is being labeled Europe's refugee crisis that any period of "feel good" magnanimity and open-hearted welcome is going to be very short lived. The political response is going to be the election of right-wing parties; it is almost a certainty. The future of the European Union does not look bright.

It is always important to remember that this current crisis is just the latest of many resulting from the war on Syria. Whether the chemical-weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of two-years back, or the skyrocketing rise of ISIS shortly thereafter, the U.S.-GCC-Turkey regime-change operation directed against the Syrian Arab Republican has been a constant source of murder, mayhem and global instability. One could make the argument that the New Cold War triggered by the ham-handed U.S.-backed coup in Kiev at the end of February 2014 was payback for Russia's steadfast support of Assad's Syria.

At the end of last week a story written by stalwart USG mouthpieces Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt appeared. Based on information provided by unnamed "American officials," "Russian Moves in Syria Pose Concerns for U.S." alleged a new Russian military buildup:

WASHINGTON — Russia has sent a military advance team to Syria and is taking other steps the United States fears may signal that President Vladimir V. Putin is planning to vastly expand his military support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, administration officials said Friday. 

The Russian moves, including the recent transport of prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to a Syrian airfield and the delivery of a portable air traffic control station there, are another complicating factor in Secretary of State John Kerry’s repeated efforts to enlist Mr. Putin’s support for a diplomatic solution to the bloody conflict in Syria. 

The Russians have also filed military overflight requests with neighboring countries through September.

American officials acknowledge that they are not certain of Russia’s intentions, but some say the temporary housing suggests that Russia could deploy as many as 1,000 advisers or other military personnel to the airfield near the Assad family’s ancestral home. The airfield serves Latakia, Syria’s principal port city.

Other American officials say they see no indication that Russia intends to deploy significant numbers of ground forces, but they say the housing would enable Russia to use the airfield as a major hub for ferrying in military supplies for the Syrian government, or possibly as a launching pad for Russian airstrikes in support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

American intelligence analysts are also looking at ship loadings in Russia to determine what might be bound for Syria, and one official speculated that the Russian deployment might eventually grow to 2,000 to 3,000 personnel.

“There are some worrisome movements — logistical, preparatory types of things,” said an administration official, who added that there was no confirmation that large numbers of Russian soldiers, aircraft or heavy weapons had yet arrived. Officials asked for anonymity because they were discussing classified intelligence reports.

This story paved the way for a reproving phone call from Secretary of State John Kerry to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov (Michael Gordon, "U.S. Warns Russia Over Military Support for Assad").

It is helpful to recall that King Salman of Saudi Arabia was visiting the White House at the same time; the Saudi despot gave his blessing to the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran.

The House of Saud's public acceptance of the Iranian nuclear deal was obviously purchased. What all was promised by Obama remains unknown. One thing though is clear: the story about the Russia's ramped up support for Assad, followed by Kerry's rebuke, was part of the price.

In a delightful story today, "Russia Answers U.S. Criticism Over Military Aid to Syria," by Neil MacFarquhar, Russia fires back. First, MacFarquhar provides a summation:

In Washington, the State Department announced on Saturday that Secretary of State John Kerry had telephoned his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, to warn against expanding Russian military aid to Syria. 

According to American intelligence sources, Russia is bolstering Syria’s air defenses in some key areas and possibly building a camp for Russian military personnel. 

Mr. Kerry warned Mr. Lavrov that such aid would further escalate the conflict, cost more lives, push more refugees to flee and risk a confrontation with other forces fighting the Islamic State, according to the State Department. 

In Greece on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said it was studying a request from the United States to deny Russia the permission it has sought for overflights to Syria, Reuters reported.

Then the wonderful Russian rebuttal:

MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry here expressed surprise on Monday over an American warning to Russia against escalating the conflict in Syria, saying that the Kremlin’s Syrian policy — in particular furnishing military aid to help the government confront extremist forces — had been consistent for years. 

“We have always supplied equipment to them for their struggle against terrorists,” Maria V. Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said in an interview. “We are supporting them, we were supporting them and we will be supporting them” in that fight.

The sharp exchanges over Russian military aid to the Syrian government appeared to have dampened a brief spirit of cooperation, starting in early August, when Russia, the United States and Saudi Arabia agreed on a renewed effort to reach a political solution to the Syria crisis.

Some analysts see any possible Russian move to strengthen military aid now as a maneuver by President Vladimir V. Putin to embarrass the United States. 

“It is basically a chance to play on Obama’s checkerboard,” said Konstantin Von Eggert, an independent political analyst, with Mr. Putin saying: “You want to fight the Islamic State. I am there. I am ready. Ah, sorry, you don’t really want to fight.” [!]

Russia may try to use American criticism of any military aid as proof that the Obama administration is soft on the Islamic State and only wants to topple President Bashar al-Assad, he said, so “it can be presented as an American unwillingness to fight evil.”

Mr. Putin is scheduled to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month, for the first time in 10 years. That will give him a high-profile platform to promise to use Russia’s resources in the fight against international terrorism, including at a Sept. 27 meeting on confronting the Islamic State that the Obama administration is organizing.

***

“The problem is that the West cannot show one example of how they would manage the Syria story right after,” Ms. Zakharova said. “What is the West planning to do right after? Do they have a magic wand that will transform Syria from civil war to economic prosperity?” [That's the unanswerable question, isn't it?]

The main challenge in Syria remains the future of Mr. Assad. Russia is generally dismissive of the argument that Mr. Assad created the current chaos in Syria and fostered the rise of Islamic extremism by having refused to engage with the peaceful opposition when street protests started in 2011. Much of the opposition in exile insists that he should be barred from a role in any political transition. Russia has said such a position amounts to an unacceptable precondition for talks.

Both Russia and Iran have made a show of rejecting claims that their support for Mr. Assad has softened. The Iranians, whose military aid has been vital to the Damascus government, defended Mr. Assad on Monday for the first time in a while. 

“Those who have set a condition about the Syrian president in the past two years should be blamed for the continued war and they should account for the bloodshed,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said at a news conference in Tehran.

With Obama locking down the Iranian nuclear deal in Congress, the Saudis took what they could get; in addition to a $1 billion arms deal, what they could get appears to include an increased commitment to hostilities against Syria. The refugees will continue to stream through Serbia to Hungary, and from there to points northwest. The EU will fray. Marine Le Pen will probably be elected in spring 2017.

Huge Win for Greece, Varoufakis Sacked, Troika Unlikely to be Placated

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' first move following the landslide anti-austerity "Oxi" vote in yesterday's referendum was to toss his finance minister and chief troika critic, Yanis Varoufakis, on the pyre. Varoufakis announced his resignation today with the blog post, "Minister No More":

Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my… ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today. 

I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. 

And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride. 

We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office. I shall support fully Prime Minister Tsipras, the new Minister of Finance, and our government. 

The superhuman effort to honour the brave people of Greece, and the famous OXI (NO) that they granted to democrats the world over, is just beginning.

There is no indication at this point that the eurozone power brokers are feeling any change of heart after a super-majority of Greeks rejected their last proposal. Jack Ewing reports from the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt that there is a wait-and-see attitude on Greece's access to emergency liquidity assistance (ELA):

The no vote by Greeks on Sunday makes it even more difficult for the European Central Bank to continue propping up Greece’s commercial banks, whose solvency is closely linked to that of the country’s government. 

But the central bank has so far avoided taking action that could force Greece out of the eurozone, a possible outcome if the banks fail. Without a banking system serving as a conduit for euros and a platform for transactions, Greece might have little choice but to begin printing its own currency.

“Pressure has increased further for the E.C.B. to revoke Greek banks’ access to central bank liquidity,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the Europe director for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm. “Still, the E.C.B. is very likely to keep its liquidity lifeline open for the time being.”

While the central bank probably will not cut off credit to the Greek banks on Monday, it is also unlikely to increase the amount available to them from its current level of 89 billion euros, or about $99 billion. The 25 members of the Governing Council will not want to increase the central bank’s exposure to Greece until there is tangible progress toward an accord with eurozone creditors and with the International Monetary Fund.

Without an increase in credit, Greek banks are in imminent danger of running out of cash to dispense to depositors. They are unlikely to open tomorrow, despite promises to the contrary by Athens.

“The Greek no puts the European Central Bank in a most difficult position,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg, a German bank, said in a note to clients. “We look for the E.C.B. to tread very cautiously, though, perhaps even seeing to it that small amounts of euro cash could still be withdrawn from Greek cash machines for a while until the political outlook becomes clearer.”

In other words, the historic "Oxi" vote by the Greek people means nothing to ECB apparatchiks. This attitude is also prevalent in Brussels where James Kanter quotes European Commission VP Valdis Dombrovskis saying "Oxi" will make things worse for Greece:

“The commission is ready to continue its work with Greece,” Mr. Dombrovskis told a daily news conference in Brussels. “But to be clear, the commission cannot negotiate a new program without a mandate from the Eurogroup.” 

Mr. Dombrovskis was referring to the name of the group of finance ministers from countries that use the euro.

The hurdles to a formal resumption of talks, including any official decision by the Eurogroup to begin negotiations on Greece’s third international bailout in five years, were high, Mr. Dombrovskis warned.

“The ‘no’ result unfortunately widens the gap between Greece and other eurozone countries,” he said. 

“There is no easy way out of this crisis,” he added. “Too much time and too many opportunities have been lost.”

Once again, to the eurozone power elite the "Oxi" vote means nothing; in fact, worse than nothing. The democratic referendum, we are told, has raised the costs of the any new bailout deal by tens of billions of euros.

What the "Oxi" vote reveals is the weakness of the "big lie." Greek voters saw clearly what was happening: Banks were shut because the European Central Bank capped ELA when Tsipras called the referendum. The ECB did this in an attempt to shock Greeks and stampede them in the direction of a Yes vote. It failed stupendously. Now, as Krugman outlines in his column, "Ending Greece’s Bleeding," for the ECB to increase ELA would be to acknowledge that the cap on lending was a political intervention meant to topple Greece's Syriza-led government:

The most immediate question involves Greek banks. In advance of the referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency. 

Specifically, if the money doesn’t start flowing from Frankfurt (the headquarters of the central bank), Greece will have no choice but to start paying wages and pensions with i.o.u.s, which will de facto be a parallel currency — and which might soon turn into the new drachma.

But the big lie must be protected. That is all neoliberalism is at this point. Krugman is not sanguine about the possibility of a new debt deal emerging quickly; and without this, Krugman sees no better alternative for Greece than abandoning the euro:

In the failed negotiations that led up to Sunday’s referendum, the central sticking point was Greece’s demand for permanent debt relief, to remove the cloud hanging over its economy. The troika — the institutions representing creditor interests — refused, even though we now know that one member of the troika, the International Monetary Fund, had concluded independently that Greece’s debt cannot be paid. But will they reconsider now that the attempt to drive the governing leftist coalition from office has failed?

I have no idea — and in any case there is now a strong argument that Greek exit from the euro is the best of bad options.

Of course, Greece no longer has its own currency, and many analysts used to claim that adopting the euro was an irreversible move — after all, any hint of euro exit would set off devastating bank runs and a financial crisis. But at this point that financial crisis has already happened, so that the biggest costs of euro exit have been paid. Why, then, not go for the benefits? 

Would Greek exit from the euro work as well as Iceland’s highly successful devaluation in 2008-09, or Argentina’s abandonment of its one-peso-one-dollar policy in 2001-02? Maybe not — but consider the alternatives. Unless Greece receives really major debt relief, and possibly even then, leaving the euro offers the only plausible escape route from its endless economic nightmare.

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over. If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

Basically we are back to where we were when negotiations first started between Greece and the troika. Absent significant debt write-offs there appears to be no rational alternative to a Grexit.

But a Grexit doesn't appear to be Tsipras' goal; axing Varoufakis is proof of that (though the finance minister didn't seem too broken up about it; at the end of the day, a scholar prefers the quiet of the cloister). Why the troika doesn't grab at the offer Tsipras made last Wednesday after Greece failed to make its repayment to the IMF and be done with the crisis can only be explained by a perception in Brussels, Berlin, and other European capitals (not to mention Washington D.C.) that protecting the big lie of neoliberalism -- at all costs -- is paramount, and this demands that a leftist party like Syriza must go.

New Cold War Another Sign of Neoliberalism's Collapse

In a post I do on Fridays called Hippies vs. Punks I explore the spiritual platform (in Schopenhauer's sense that music is pure spirit) of the industrialized Western world when our current listing, foundering political-economic paradigm was inaugurated. That paradigm, neoliberalism, has been dominant for 40 years; but for the last 15, it has lurched from crisis to crisis, from economic meltdown to war back to economic crisis. During this 15-year period it has been well known by both the ruling elite and a significant segment of those who are ruled that the planet is experiencing a man-made ecological crisis, what is being called "The Sixth Extinction."

The paradigm, neoliberalism -- defined by a worship of markets and mammon, a concentration of wealth in the 1%, the immiseration of the 99%, brutal wars of choice and record numbers of displaced persons -- is obviously bankrupt. Not only is it bankrupt and destructive to life on the planet, it is anachronistic. The United States has in little over a year reestablished a Cold War with Russia, the thawing of which 25 years ago was probably the greatest triumph of the neoliberal paradigm.

David Herszenhorn reports in "Russia Assails Extension of E.U. Sanctions in Ukraine Crisis":

MOSCOW — Kremlin officials reacted furiously Monday to the European Union’s extension of sanctions on Russia through January, calling the measure self-defeating and accusing the West of crass anti-Russian bias by timing the decision to the nation’s commemoration of the Soviet victims of World War II. 

The Russian government said it would retaliate with an extension of countersanctions in response to the decision by European Unionforeign ministers, at a meeting in Luxembourg, which had been widely expected after European ambassadors reached a tentative agreement last week in Brussels. Russia had lobbied against the renewal of sanctions, which were first imposed in July 2014 in response to the Kremlin’sinvasion and annexation of Crimea.

***

“We are deeply disappointed that once again the opinion of the Russophobic lobby, which pushed through the decision to extend illegal restrictions, dominated in the E.U.,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, said in the statement. “At the same time, in Brussels they are deliberately tight-lipped about the fact that this is guaranteed to be followed by hundreds of thousands of Europeans, or millions, according to some estimates, losing their jobs.”

Mr. Lukashevich also complained that the West was placing unfair responsibility on Russia for carrying out the Ukraine cease-fire agreement, which was signed in February in Minsk, Belarus. Russia has long insisted that the Ukrainian government bears the largest responsibility for the failure so far to put the accord in effect.

“The E.U. keeps laying all the responsibility over the implementation of the Minsk agreements on the Russian side,” Mr. Lukashevich said. “The absurdity of this approach has been long clear to everyone. The key to the internal Ukrainian crisis was and still remains in the hands of Kiev, which is not hurrying to implement its responsibilities.” 

As for the timing of the announcement, Mr. Lukashevich added: “It looks especially cynical that the decision to extend the anti-Russian sanctions was taken by the E.U. states on June 22, the day when fascist Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. We would like to believe that this is a coincidence, and not an intentionally planned step.”

Couple this with a story from Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, "NATO Returns Its Attention to an Old Foe, Russia," and you get the picture that the New Cold War is here to stay:

It has involved a marked increase in training rotations on territory of the newer NATO allies in the east, and stepped up patrols of the air and seas from the Baltic to the Black Sea intended to counter an increase of patrols by Russian forces around NATO’s periphery. 

Most of those are temporary deployments. But in February, NATO announced that it would set up six new command units within the Eastern allies and create a 5,000-strong rapid reaction “spearhead” force. 

And the Pentagon now plans to preposition heavy American tanks and other weaponry in Eastern Europe for the first time, prompting unease in some quarters ahead of the NATO defense ministers’ meetings, and strong protests from Moscow that coincided with an announcement by President Vladimir V. Putin that he was bolstering Russia’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. 

With the leaders of NATO’s 28 members scheduled to gather in Warsaw for an important summit meeting next year, the alliance is now considering what other measures are needed to adjust its forces, to increase spending that had plummeted as part of a “peace dividend,” and to revisit NATO’s military strategy and planning.

Soon "megadeath" will return to regular usage in our vocabulary as both the U.S. and Russia upgrade their nuclear arsenals.

Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize POTUS, will see his legacy defined as the leader who recreated the Cold War; hopefully when he is remembered he will be thought of with a feeling of nausea. Neoliberal leaders will go to any length to maintain their failed system.