Peace Through Strength

There is a sad irony going on in the world today…  America, once a great and powerful nation was both loved and feared.  We had one "equal" and that was the Soviet Union. When the USSR fell apart it left us…the U.S.  We only needed to rattle a saber and bad guys often just stopped whatever nefarious deeds they were doing and scattered.  Things were good.  Good not just for us but really for the rest of the world.  We, while we sure could have been, were not bullies.  Just because we COULD be if we chose -- we often got labeled as such.  We weren't. They were jealous.

This power brought peace…not just here but all over.  It isn't because you USE your might that brings about good behavior -- it is because you COULD.  The military was a fighting force -- not a humanitarian force.  But because it was so mighty it brought the world more humanity.  

As this nation creeps closer and closer to mediocrity and to being just one of many like us, our ability to feed the starving, to help the oppressed and to be the do-gooders that we have always been, is slipping away. In our power and benevolence we have fed more people, aided more nations and done more good than any nation on earth in our short 230+ year lifetime. We are mere children on the planet. There are nations that have existed for twice, three, four times our life that have done nary a fraction of what we have done. We were able to do all this good because we were powerful.

As our strength wanes we continue to TRY to be the leader and the feeder of the world…and in doing so we are neglecting our own.  We are sending billions of dollars in aid abroad and we can't pay our own bills. If a parent allows herself to starve to death by giving all of the food to her child, who will feed the child when she is dead?

There is no such thing as global peace through agreement -- stop even imagining it.  We are animals and we all have self interested motivations.  There will always, I mean ALWAYS be a nation or faction fighting to be on top -- the ONLY way to keep that in check is to be on top and to gently kick them off the ladder they are scrambling up.  We will never be able to call them down from the bottom by negotiating. 

Europe has been a negotiator for a good long time and Europe is weak.  They look good and it looks appealing that they all sort of get along -- but in a sense they have to.  They share borders; they are geographically vulnerable to one another.  We are not.  Even when Europe is lamenting that the US has too much power we need to let them vent and go about our business.  The only reason they have the freedom to lament is because we had the power to let them. It is because we were mighty that they are not all speaking German.  How quickly we forget.

The United States of America needs to get back to the basics of lifting weights, eating right and getting enough sleep.  We need to let the world have their skirmishes because they will.  We need to regain a single mindedness that we are #1!  Notre Dame doesn't go into a bowl game saying "we are number #1 but let's all just decide we can all be #1".  Being #1 allows us to be both the mighty force we must be and the benevolent care giver we want to be.

On this anniversary of the attacks on the United States let's all get together for a single cause.  Let's all decide that we want a strong coach, a powerful leader who puts our nation first.  Let's all step back and look at the formula that will produce the results we want.  Whether you are a global peace person or you simply like the idea that we can kick ass.  It is ONLY through power that we will get either… This is the only way that we can all get what we want… Think about it.

 

Syria: The Rest of the Story

The official Western narrative against Syria goes something like this:

"The Syrian government has abused basic human rights, maintains deep ties with rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea, and just recently launched a chemical weapons strike on hundreds of its own people. In addition to killing its own people, the Assad regime is serving to destabilize an already unstable Middle East. Assad must go…"

Now for the rest of the story…

Syria is none of our business in the context of the above statement.  Neither side is a "good guy" and for our president to even THINK of going in there borders on utter insanity.  He and is loose lipped cronies who demanded swift action to the gassing of a group of people need to save face and not look like the buffoons they really are. The spouted off in a knee jerk way to news…"We must DO something!" they clamored. The sad fact is that an overthrow of Syrian President Assad has long been in the works.  This is a deadly and dangerous performance -- all the chess pieces began to move when the U.S. backed each of the Middle East uprisings… To date, rulers have been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt (twice), Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings have erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests have broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan; and minor protests have occurred in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti and Western Sahara.

The real aim of the US, it is being said, is to remove all the independent governments in the Middle East, to destroy the popular movements in order to secure the domination of this key strategic and oil rich region. Pretty sinister and frighteningly believable.

This is about natural resources and energy my friends…this time it is not oil but liquefied natural gas or LNG. The US has plenty of it and we don't need it -- and if we are smart we will keep it that way. Europe however is thirsty.  This has NOTHING to do with any children who were or were not gassed.

Have you not wondered why Russia is so concerned? Russia has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. Which country has the second largest reserves? Iran.

Iran, however, is isolated with no current ability to export its vast energy supplies to Europe. Russia has its eye on the potential profits of bringing Iranian oil and gas online for Europe. For this reason, (among myriad others) it has sought to solidify its relations with Iran. Of course, the most direct route for moving Iran’s energy supplies to Europe is right through the heart of Iraq and into Syria. So, it appears that Russia’s alliance with Syria has less to do with Syria and much more to do with the Iranian gas that may soon flow into Syria. As we already said, Europe is thirsty.

Assad wants to cut a deal with Russia and will not work with the U.S. or Israel.  So of course we want him out. Russia has stepped up its diplomatic and trade activities in the Middle East and North Africa in a bid to enhance its geopolitical clout and gain access to, and at least partial control over, the region's oil and gas reserves. Among the former global superpower's tactics: linking arms deals and debt-forgiveness to energy deals. The strategy has been most apparent in former client states of the ­Soviet Union including Libya, Iraq and Syria, although by no means limited to such countries. Moreover, Moscow has not shied away from courting the authoritarian regimes of countries such as Iran, Syria and Libya that are or have been shunned by the US and other western governments. So Russia is shopping for partners and picking all the ones we are not friendly with.  Reagan would be outraged.

Sadly, when it comes to the US (and of course Israel), it does have a very hidden agenda: one that involves lying to its people about what any future intervention is all about, and the fabrication of narrative about chemical weapons and a bloody regime hell bent on massacring every man, woman and child from the "brave resistance." What they all fail to mention is that all such "rebels" are merely paid for mercenaries of the Qatari emir, whose sole interest is to accrue even more wealth even if it means the deaths of thousands of Syrians in the process.

A bigger read through of the events in Syria reveals an even more complicated web: one that has Qatar facing off against Syria, with both using Syria as a pawn in a great natural resource chess game, and with Israel and the US both on the side of the petrodollars, while Russia and to a lesser extent China, form the counterbalancing axis and refuse to permit a wholesale overthrow of the local government which would unlock even more geopolitical leverage for the gulf states.

Up until today, we would have thought that when push comes to shove, Russia would relent. However, with the arrival of a whole lot of submarines in Cyprus, the games just got very serious. After all the vital interests of Gazprom, the largest extractor of natural gas and one of the largest companies in the world and perhaps the most important "company" in the world - are suddenly at stake.

I see two take aways here.  One is that the Syrian outrage is a big lie.  I am not saying that Obama is the FIRST president to lie to us about this but he is the CURRENT president and there are a lot of very powerful and very dangerous characters at play now.  This has got to stop.  The second is that we MUST recognize and EMBRACE that we may have the largest oil reserves on the planet. It is estimated that this area dubbed the Green River formation, contains a massive three trillion barrels of oil, half of which is currently recoverable. To give you an idea for how significant that number actually is, three trillion is approximately equivalent to the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.

We can and must rely on ourselves…if we do, we can stay out of this nasty and never ending turmoil.