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December 2016

Erdogan’s Syrian U-Turn By:Srdja Trifkovic |

On November 29 Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised many eyebrows when he declared that Turkey’s military involvement in Syria, which started in the last week of August, had the objective “to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror.” He even added that Turkey did not intervene there “for any other reason.”

Only two days later Erdogan completely reversed his position. Speaking in Ankara on December 1, he said that Turkey’s military operation in Syria was not directed “against any country or person,” but only against terror organizations. “No one should doubt this issue that we have uttered over and over,” he went on, “and no one should comment on it in another fashion, or try to misrepresent its meaning.”

Both statements were made with emphatic clarity. They were remarkably contradictory even for a politician well known for unpredictable moves. One possible explanation for Erdogan’s volte-face is the pressure from Moscow, which has been supporting Bashar with air operations since September 2015. The issue was reportedly raised in Erdogan’s telephone conversation with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on November 30, and at the meeting of the two countries’ foreign ministers in the Turkish coastal resort town of Alanya on the same day.

In view of his strained relations with Washington and Brussels in the aftermath of last July’s coup attempt, and the ensuing radical purge of real, potential, or imagined enemies, Erdogan is keen to maintain his rapprochement with Russia. He initiated it last July, after an eight-month freeze that followed the shooting down of a Russian bomber by Turkish F-16s over northern Syria just over a year ago. In addition to the political imperative of broadening his diplomatic options, Erdogan is keen to avoid further losses to the Turkish economy—amounting to tens of billions of dollars—which had resulted from the cancellation of Russian trade, construction, and package tour contracts.

As it happens, neither stated reason for Turkey’s intervention in Syria is true. Erdogan’s real motive in launching “Operation Euphrates Shield” was to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish de facto statelet along Syria’s border with Turkey, and specifically to push back its strategically significant foothold west of the Euphrates River. This zone included the city of Manbij, which the Kurds had taken after heavy fighting against the Islamic State earlier last summer. The Obama administration went out of its way to prevent any further clashes between the Turkish army and the YPG (People’s Protection Units, the Syrian Kurdish militia), earning neither side’s gratitude but initially managing to keep them apart. An uneasy truce had prevailed between them until recently, allowing the Kurds to focus on battling the IS while the Turks were sitting tight in their limited, 2000 square mile occupation zone. Tensions have resurfaced recently, however, with Turkey and its local allies (a few hundred members of the misnamed “Free Syrian Army”) seeking to establish control over the disputed city of al-Bab.

Michael Galak Castro Dead. Hooray!

Fidel’s popularity, I suspect, was due largely to the cinematic good looks of a testosterone-dripping alpha male, rather than his accomplishments. So, whatt were his achievements? What did Fidel Castro bring to the world to prompt such eulogies and admiration? What did he leave behind? Nothing but tides of blood and tears.
The ancient Romans had a saying – De mortuis nihil nisi bonum – about the dead, say either nothing or good. Hard as I tried, I was not able to do either. Progressives the world over, when describing the achievements of Fidel Castro, Hero of the Soviet Union, who died at the ripe old age of 90, have been dripping tears of loss, admiration and grief. The words used in such eulogies range from fiery to passionate, and include “charisma”, “ideals”, “belief” and many superlatives in between.

Let me give you my perspective, that of a former USSR citizen. Picture the port of Odessa in the early Sixties. The Caribbean missile crisis has just ended. The Odessa port workers, the very same proletarians, purportedly bound by class solidarity with the oppressed of the world, refuse to load grain onto a cargo ship bound for Cuba. Quite possibly, because of the chronic food shortage in the motherland of the world proletariat, this grain had been bought in capitalist Canada of the US, shipped to the USSR and then consigned to be shipped once again, this time back across the Atlantic to feed the revolution in Cuba. The wharfies sing a ditty, very poplar in Odessa at the time. It is a parody of a revolutionary Cuban song much beloved by disseminators of official Soviet propaganda:

Cuba, return our bread,
Cuba, take back your sugar,
Cuba, why don’t you go away and get f…ed,
Cuba, you’re such a loser

It was such a politically incorrect, counter-revolutionary ditty that the port area was immediately surrounded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ uniformed enforcers and the ‘ringleaders’ summararily arrested. There are no prizes for guessing what happened to them. I suspect that there were no ringleaders as such. Those dragged away were simple stevedores, struggling to feed their families in the semi-starving Soviet Union of Khrushchev times, and outraged that, instead of nourishing their own children, the food they were loading was destined for ‘the bearded maniac’.

Oh, Fidel Castro was popular with some, alright, but his popularity, I suspect, was largely due to the cinematically exotic good looks of a testosterone-dripping alpha-male, rather than his politics and accomplishments. So, what were his accomplishments and goals? What did Fidel Castro bring to the world? What, in short, did he leave behind?

I will not recount Castro’s bio – anyone remotely interested can find plenty of information. I’d like to start from January 1, 1959, when the rebels of his rag-tag army rolled into Havana and declared Cuba free – Cuba Libre! Freedom and cigars for everyone! Yippee! Hurray!

WHO IS MANUEL VALLS? HE SAID “FRANCE WITHOUT JEWS IS NOT FRANCE” AFTER TERRORIST ATTACK IN JANUARY 2016

Just a reminder…..

http://www.timesofisrael.com/france-without-jews-is-not-france-french-pm-says-at-hyper-cacher/

‘France without Jews is not France,’ French PM says at Hyper Cacher

At a ceremony Saturday evening commemorating the four victims of a jihadist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the thought of Jews leaving France because they no longer feel it is their home was “an unbearable idea.”

Valls, speaking outside the Hyper Cacher supermarket, said France without its Jewish community was “not France” and vowed to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Nothing, he said, could explain an attack by a Frenchmen on fellow citizens. “Nothing can explain the killing at outdoor cafes. Nothing can explain the killing in a concert hall. Nothing can explain the killing of journalists and police. And nothing can explain the killing of the Jews! Nothing can ever explain it,” he called, to cheers from the crowd.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls Announces Run for President Despite low approval ratings, Mr. Valls is more popular than his boss, President Hollande, whose decision not to stand for re-election cleared the way for his prime minister to run.By Matthew Dalton

PARIS—Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared his candidacy for the French presidency, seeking to bolster the left’s electoral chances amid record-low approval ratings for the Socialist government he helped lead for the last 2½ years.

Surrounded by supporters on Monday, Mr. Valls cast himself as an experienced hand ready to stand against authoritarian and populist political forces that have risen around France.

“I want an independent France,” Mr. Valls said, “inflexible in its values faced with the China of Xi Jinping, the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the America of Donald Trump, the Turkey of Recep Erdogan. We need strong experience in this world.”

Mr. Valls is running as a centrist in the Socialist party amid a crowded field of candidates on the left. Yet his low approval ratings show his candidacy faces an uphill climb; opinion polls suggest he would lose easily in the first round of the general election to François Fillon, the top center-right candidate, and Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front.

Still, Mr. Valls is more popular than his boss, President François Hollande, whose decision last week not to stand for re-election cleared the way for Mr. Valls to run.

Mr. Valls said his candidacy would act as a bulwark against the possibility of Ms. Le Pen winning the presidency.

The extreme right “is today on the verge of power,” he said. “It would remove us from Europe, and from history.”

Mr. Valls also took aim at Mr. Fillon, whose sweeping program of economic liberalization helped push him to victory in last month’s center-right primary. Mr. Fillon has proposed to slash government spending, eliminate up to 500,000 civil-servant posts, raise the retirement age and cut taxes for the wealthy.

“I don’t want civil servants to work more to earn less,” Mr. Valls said, defending one of the Socialist party’s key constituencies. “I don’t want our children to have fewer teachers, that our cities and countryside have fewer police and gendarmes.”

Mr. Valls may have trouble emerging from the Socialists’ primary. He remains an unpopular figure within the left wing of the party, which he angered by championing a law to strip the citizenship of some French nationals who are convicted of terrorist crimes. Mr. Hollande backed away from that proposal amid stiff opposition from his own party and some on the right.

Global Survey Finds Little Progress in Science Education High-school students in Singapore and Japan lead the rankings and there is little evidence that higher spending on education is improving results, according to the OECD By Paul Hannon

High-school students in many parts of east Asia continue to have a better command of science and other subjects than their counterparts in the rest of the world, but there is little sign that increased spending on education is producing better results in most countries.

That is a worrying development for the long-term economic outlook, since most economists believe that growth is partly driven by improvements in education levels—or what they call human capital—although the strength of the relationship is uncertain.

Students in Singapore had the highest average score in science, followed by their counterparts in Japan, Estonia, Taiwan and Finland, in triennial testing of 540,000 15-year-olds across 72 countries and regions during 2015. The U.S. ranked 25th, ahead of France but below the U.K. and Germany.

While the rankings have changed slightly since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last conducted its examinations under the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2012, the most arresting outcome is that higher spending on schooling around the world is having little impact on outcomes.

Scientific understanding was the focus of the third iteration of PISA in 2006. Since then, smartphones have become ubiquitous, while social media, cloud-based services, robotics and machine learning “have transformed our economic and social life,” said OECD Secretary General Ángel Gurria.

“Against this backdrop, and the fact that expenditure per primary and secondary student rose by almost 20% across OECD countries over this period, it is disappointing that, for the majority of countries with comparable data, science performance in PISA remained virtually unchanged since 2006,” he said.

One feature of weak global growth over recent years has been very low rates of productivity growth, in both developed and developing countries. The PISA results suggest stalled progress in educational attainment may be partly responsible.

The System Didn’t Work From Italy to the U.K. to Ohio, the populist complaint is about justice, not economics. Bret Stephens

Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Among the lessons of 2016 is that, politically speaking, Tolstoy was wrong.

This was the year in which everything that couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t happen, happened. In May, Filipinos elected a man who said he’d be happy to slaughter millions of drug addicts the way Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews. In June, the British tossed out the European Union, along with the toffs who had told them to stay in it. In October, Colombians rejected a deal with the FARC for which their president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A month later: President-elect Donald Trump.

Now Italians have overwhelmingly rejected proposed constitutional changes that were supposed to make their political system functional and economic reform possible. Beppe Grillo, the populist politician who led the charge against the changes, crowed on his blog Sunday that “times have changed.” Yes, they have.
The Philippines, Britain, Colombia, America and Italy are big unhappy families. So is France, where the incumbent president doesn’t dare stand for re-election; and Brazil, which impeached its president in August; and South Korea, which is expected to impeach its president later this week. Nobody should think that Angela Merkel is a shoo-in for re-election next year, or that Marine Le Pen won’t be the next president of the Fifth Republic. One thing unhappy families often have in common is that their members aren’t averse to smashing the plates.

What happened? In 2014, Daniel Drezner, a professor at Tufts, published a book extolling the International Monetary Fund and other institutions of “economic global governance” for putting out the fires of the 2008 financial crisis. The global economy had been teetering on the brink of another Great Depression, but it didn’t fall in. Ergo, success.

The book was called “The System Worked.” Except it didn’t. The system did more to mask problems than it did to solve them. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s Last Stand The White House tries to kill another pipeline for U.S. oil.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday delivered a symbolic victory to the environmental left by denying a permit to complete the 1,200-mile Dakota Access oil pipeline. The political obstruction illustrates why it’s so hard to build anything in America these days.

Construction is almost complete on the Dakota Access, which aims to transport a half million barrels of oil each day from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota to Illinois for delivery to refiners on the East and Gulf coasts. About 99% of the pipeline doesn’t require federal permitting because it traverses private lands. But the Corps must sign off on an easement to drill under Lake Oahe that dams the Missouri River.

After an exhaustive consultation with Native American tribes, the Corps in July issued an environmental assessment of “no significant impact.” Construction is unlikely to harm tribal totems because the Dakota Access would parallel an existing gas pipeline. The route has been modified 140 times in North Dakota to avoid upsetting sacred cultural resources.

After largely refusing to engage in the Corps’s review, the Standing Rock Sioux sued. A federal court in September rejected the tribe’s claims, only to be overruled by the Obama Administration, which ordered a temporary suspension to work around Lake Oahe. Although the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in October refused to enjoin construction on the pipeline, the Corps has maintained its administrative injunction.

Tensions have escalated between local law enforcement and protesters, who have signaled an intent to defy Corps orders to disband before Dec. 5. North Dakota winters are cold, and a charitable reading of the Corps’s political mediation is that the Administration is trying to allow squatters to save face so that they can disperse before imperiling their own safety.

Grand Strategy and Grand Illusion

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

Is it possible to detoxify the United States’ relations with Russia, China and the Muslim world? Is there a grand strategy that could maintain the honor of America and at the same time introduce stability in areas of the globe fraught with tension?

With a new administration taking hold in DC, new ideas abound. Among them is the offering of a grand strategy, i.e. an ideology that transcends and yet ameliorates competitive states. An example often cited is the Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815), chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, which provided a long-term plan for the resolution of conflict resulting from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Despite conflicting claims and regional wars, the Congress accord did maintain relative tranquility for Europe till World War I, through an elaborate balance of power arrangement.

This model has reemerged with Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory and the work of several U.S. political theorists from the Kissinger School of Thought. While different in content, all rely on the supposition that “realists” can determine the fate of global affairs based on a system of “recognition and acceptance.” Dugin, for example, contends that if the U.S. were to accept Russian interests in Crimea and Syria, harmony with the U.S. might emerge.

More significant is what Dugin describes as “regional globalization,” what is usually referred to as spheres of influence. Presumably that would include an Anglo-American sphere, a European sphere and a Eurasian sphere including Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Iran. Dugin is not alone, in my judgment, albeit the carving out of spheres may vary from one philosopher to the next.

It is also presumed that this reconfiguration would occur peacefully through democratic means, on the order of a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna. This, of course, would be a metaphysical shift in world affairs were it to be anything more than a utopian fantasy.

But a fantasy it is. Clearly this idea would legitimate Putin’s imperial vision violating the sovereignty of several states. Second, it is hard to believe eastern Europe and the Baltic states would willingly accede to antebellum Russian domination. Third, the Chinese are already engaged in the subtle, but discernible effort to convert the Pacific Ocean into a Chinese Basin. Alarm bells throughout Asia have already gone off. Yet these arguments stand in stark contrast to America’s core belief in a liberal international order guided by an Enlightenment faith in individual liberty, the rule of law and the free market. Should the U.S. concede on this front in order to acquire global equilibrium, the tenets of international liberalism will be interred.