28 Aug 2013

Obama Has Already Made The Decision To Go To War With Syria

The Obama administration seems absolutely determined to help radical Islamic jihadists that have beheaded Christians, that have massacred entire Christian villages, and that have pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda topple the Assad regime and take over Syria.  Yes, the Assad regime is horrible, but if these jihadist lunatics take control it will destabilize the entire region, make the prospect of a major regional war much more probable, and plunge the entire nation of Syria into a complete and utter nightmare.  It has been estimated that somewhere around 100,000 people have already been killed in the civil war in Syria, and now it looks like the U.S. military and the rest of NATO plan to become directly involved in the conflict.  The Obama administration is actually considering an attack on Syria even though the American people are overwhelmingly against it, Obama does not have Congressional approval to start a war, and he will never get approval for military action from the UN because it will be blocked by Russia.  This is setting up to become a colossal foreign policy disaster for the United States.
A potential war with Syria has been brought to the forefront because of a chemical weapons attack near Damascus last week that killed as many as 1,400 people.  The Obama administration and several other western nations are blaming this attack on the Assad regime.
But others are pointing out that it would make absolutely no sense for the Assad regime to do such a thing.  They appear to be winning the civil war, and Assad knows that Obama has previously said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "red line" for the United States.
So why would the Assad regime launch a brutal chemical weapons attack against women and children just miles from where UN inspectors were staying?
Why would Assad risk war with the United States and the rest of NATO?
Assad would have to be extremely stupid or extremely suicidal to do such a thing.
The ones that benefit from this chemical weapons attack are the jihadist rebels.  The odds of foreign intervention in the conflict just went way, way up.
We will probably never learn the real truth about who was actually behind that attack.  And even if it had not happened, the U.S. and the rest of NATO would have probably come up with another justification to go to war anyway.  They appear absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Assad, but they have not really thought through the consequences.
The following are 15 signs that Obama has already made the decision to go to war with Syria...
#1 Syria has agreed to allow UN officials to inspect the site of the recent chemical weapons attack that killed up to 1,400 people, but a "senior U.S. official" says that such an inspection would be "too late to be credible".
#2 According to ABC News, the White House is saying that there is "very little doubt" that the Assad regime was behind the deadly chemical weapons attack last week.
#3 Four U.S. warships with ballistic missiles are moving into positionin the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If the command is given, they will be able to rain Tomahawk cruise missiles down on targets inside Syria within minutes...
U.S. defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria.
U.S. Navy ships are capable of a variety of military actions, including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles, as they did against Libya in 2011 as part of an international action that led to the overthrow of the Libyan government.
#4 CBS News is reporting that "the Pentagon is making the initial preparations for a Cruise missile attack on Syrian government forces".
#5 On Saturday, Barack Obama met with his national security teamto discuss what actions should be taken in Syria.
#6 U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says that Barack Obama has asked him to "prepare options for all contingencies" as far as a conflict with Syria is concerned.
#7 After a phone conversation with British Prime Minister David Cameron about the situation in Syria, the White House announced that both leaders expressed "grave concern" about the chemical weapons attack that took place last week.
#8 Military commanders from the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, France, Italy and Canada are meeting in Amman, Jordan on Sunday to coordinate plans for upcoming attacks on Syria.
#9 According to France’s second largest newspaper, rebel forces that have been trained by the CIA have been pouring toward Damascus "since mid-August"...
According to our information, the regime's opponents, supervised by Jordanian, Israeli and American commandos moving towards Damascus since mid-August. This attack could explain the possible use of the Syrian president to chemical weapons.
According to information obtained by Le Figaro , the first trained in guerrilla warfare by the Americans in Jordan Syrian troops reportedly entered into action since mid-August in southern Syria, in the region of Deraa. A first group of 300 men, probably supported by Israeli and Jordanian commandos, as well as men of the CIA, had crossed the border on August 17. A second would have joined the 19. According to military sources, the Americans, who do not want to put troops on the Syrian soil or arming rebels in part controlled by radical Islamists form quietly for several months in a training camp set up at the border Jordanian- Syrian fighters ASL, the Free Syrian Army, handpicked.
#10 The U.S. military moved a significant number of F-16 fighter jets to Jordan earlier this year for military exercises, and kept them there afterward "at the request of the Jordanian government".
#11 According to a government document that Wikileaks released back in March 2012, NATO personnel have been on the ground inside Syria preparing for regime change since 2011.
#12 The Times of Israel is reporting that an internal military assessment has concluded that "Washington is seriously considering a limited yet effective attack that will make it clear to the regime in Damascus that the international community will not tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction against Syrian civilians or any other elements".
#13 U.S. Senator John McCain recently said that if the U.S. military does not hit Syria, it will be like "writing a blank check to other brutal dictators around the world if they want to use chemical weapons".
#14 According to the New York Times, "the NATO air war in Kosovo" is being studied "as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations".
#15 The White House has released a statement that says that the Obama administration has no plans to put "boots on the ground", but it did not rule out any other types of military action.
This is not a conflict that the U.S. military should be involved in.
And we should especially not be on the side of the rabidly anti-Christian, rabidly anti-Israel and rabidly anti-western forces that are attempting to take control of Syria.
The terrorists that the Obama administration is backing are absolutely psychotic.  Just check out the following example from a recent article posted on the Blaze...
New video posted on YouTube purports to show the graphic murder – execution style – of three Syrian truck drivers who did nothing more than belong  to a minority faith the local Al Qaeda affiliate does not like.
In the video, a small band of Islamist radicals with the Al Qaeda-linked ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) group is seen waving the tractor trailers off the side of an Iraqi road and then proceeds to interrogate the unsuspecting drivers about their prayer habits, trying to discover if they are Sunnis or members of the Alawite minority in Syria.
When they “fail” the Sunni jihadis’ pop roadside quiz, the truck drivers are seated in a line in the median of the road and shot in the back of their heads firing squad style by the self-appointed law enforcers, jury, judge and executioner.
Why in the world would the United States want to arm such people?
Why in the world would the United States want to go to war to help such people take power?
It is utter insanity.
And as I mentioned earlier, most Americans are totally against getting involved.  According to a stunning new poll, 60 percent of all Americans are against U.S. military intervention in Syria, and only 9 percent are in favor of it.
So in light of all that you have just read, why is the Obama administration so determined to help the rebels in Syria?


7 Countries in 5 years

The Creeping Fear Of The "Great Normalization" Of US Monetary Policy

There is a recurring nightmare that is playing out once again in many of the most leveraged asset-classes in the world's so-called 'markets'. The theme is that of an improving US economy which is pointing a normalization of US monetary policy. Good news, right? It would seem not; as Chris Wood's Greed and Fear notes, that the practical reality is that the emerging world, including Asia, will remain vulnerable to further selling so long as markets are anticipating normalisation of American monetary policy and a related strengthening in the US dollar. However, there is a conundrum, if the world was so sure of the relative strength of the American economy, surely the yen should be selling off more against the dollar. For CLSA the real test is yet to come when the new fiscal year in America begins on 1 October and the revival of US economic growth that is so hoped-for, does not materialize... and given the correlation in the chart below, it is clear that there is only thing that matters - the US 10Y rate.

Via CLSA's GREED & Fear Report (Chris Wood),
Not so surprisingly, the normalisation scare has picked up momentum over the past week with renewed focus on the ‘panic’ in the emerging market debt space and related equity markets.

...

the practical reality is that the emerging world, including Asia, will remain vulnerable to further selling so long as markets are anticipating normalisation of American monetary policy and a related strengthening in the US dollar. This for now appears to be the case with the further pick up in the 10-year Treasury bond yield over the past week, even if this latest normalisation scare is different from the one that hit in June in that it has not been accompanied as yet by a sell-off in gold.
If the world was so sure of the relative strength of the American economy, surely the yen should be selling off more against the dollar. This suggests to GREED & fear that the normalisation story, which has been driving market action all this year, may be nearer an end than the beginning. Still the real test of it will come when the new fiscal year in America begins on 1 October. For then, based on the Federal Reserve’s forecast, the American economy is meant to accelerate with the end of so-called ‘fiscal drag’.

If this does not happen as anticipated, then the issue will become whether the Fed is really prepared to exit unconventional monetary policy. That seems most unlikely under a Fed led by Billyboy or his deputy Janet Yellen.

But the markets will be less sure under a Fed led by President Obama’s seeming favoured candidate, Larry Summers. This is why the uncertainty posed by an Obama decision to nominate Summers has the potential to trigger more of a normalisation scare in the form of a further back up in Treasury bond yields and a further sell-off in equities, be it Asian equities or American equities.

For now, the ongoing normalisation scare and related back up in sovereign bond yields is causing research departments in Asia to recalculate their valuations based on the increase in the so-called “risk free” rates. Thus, the Indonesian 10-year rupiah government bond yield is up from 5.19% to 8.46% since the beginning of the year.

But the key driver here, for the most part, is the action in the US Treasury market. In this respect CLSA’s technical analyst Lawrence Balanco makes an interesting point in his latest weekly. This is the correlation between the US 10-year Treasury bond price and emerging market assets so far this year. That is 0.93 with emerging market bonds, 0.81 with emerging market equities and 0.71 with emerging market currencies.


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