Some say the Iranian threat to close the Straights of Hormuz is over. Actually there never was a threat.

Trying to close the Straights would bring a full military response against Iran from U.S. forces in the Gulf, possibly other Arab states, and turn Tehran¹s few remaining international allies against Iran.

The Straights would seem to be an easy target, a bottleneck only about 30 miles across at its narrowest point between Iran and Oman.

Oil tankers carrying one-sixth of the world¹s oil supply pass through the Straights, exiting the
Persian Gulf into the Arabian Sea and on to market. The tankers move through two two-mile-wide shipping lanes, one entering the Gulf, one exiting.

Also, it is well known that closing the Straights would be a heavier blow to Iran stopping the approximately 2.5 billion barrels a day of oil it exports, which provide some 80 percent of its revenue.

Additionally, Iran has very little refining capability. Most of the country’s refining needs come from other Gulf states.

I don¹t think Iran willing to close the Straights because the consequences would cost them too much.

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China has a history of shooting itself in the foot whenever it has internal problems.  Recall The Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, a plan by Mao Tse Tung to move China from peasant farmers into a modern society through industrialization and agriculture. It failed miserably with famine that caused over a reported million people in China to perish.  Then, for a lengthy 10 year period from 1966 to 1976 they underwent their Cultural Revolution in which the Communist leadership killed all intellectuals. 

Their population is 1.3 billion and in comparison to ours which is 0.3 billion (point three billion) it seems they can overwhelm us in anything.  In total land mass the U.S. is just a tad larger than China; U.S. arable land mass is 18.01% and China is less with 14.86%.  Water shortages and contamination are a serious problem in China.  The gap between the haves and have nots is growing and there is a serious imbalance between the numbers of marriageable young women versus men.

It was reported that thousands of villagers in Guangdong province’s Wukan village staged protests following the death of a local leader in detention. Roughly 6,000 farmers gathered in the village shouting slogans such as “save Wukan” and “return our farmland.” Wukan is currently surrounded by thousands of paramilitary police officers.

The Chinese Communist Party is acutely concerned that the country is on the verge of major social upheavals as the economy begins to slow. Zhou Yong Kang, the Party Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of state security, has called on all levels of government to prepare to deal with the possible eruption of social unrest.

China may be about due for another fall and if they have any public communications at all, the world fever from the so called “Arab Spring” to our “Occupy” movements will go endemic and soon spread into China and even possibly North Korea.

China is at a crossroads to see if it can move smoothly into the 21st Century or fall as previous great Chinese empires have done.

Cy Kammeier, USMC (Ret) contributed to this column

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According to the Miami Herald, 10 Dec 2011, Jose Azel: “Iran is an increasingly important politico-economic player in Latin America. Its influence transcends geography, language, culture and religion. At the heart of this growing Iranian influence is a peculiar trilateral political configuration with Cuba and Venezuela. The basis of this eccentric alignment is not East-West political philosophy, or a coalition based on congruent economic models, or North-South ideological affinity.”

According to Azel: “Even more perplexing, it is a strategic alliance that transcends profound theological differences. What, then, brings together Fidel Castro, a Marxist-Leninist atheist; Hugo Chávez, a putative socialist Christian; and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a product of Islamic fundamentalism? What allows the Iranian theocracy, so removed from Latin America by ethnicity, customs and values, to play an increasingly influential role in this hemisphere?”

It would be a mistake to scrutinize Iran’s influence in country-by-country terms rather than in terms of the interest of the Tehran-Havana-Caracas alliance. It should be obvious that Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, has the unifying point of virulent hostility toward the United States.

While the Administration is focused on European financial crisis and the Middle East it seems like no one in the Administration is aware of the shenanigans in our back yard.

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The ill informed U.S. news media, headline grabbing political pundits and many in Congress know not what they do in calling for “democracy” in the Middle East.

So how does the run up to “democracy” in the Middle look today?

Violent demonstrations have erupted in the initiator of the so called “Arab Spring” in Tunisia’s impoverished central region which had to be dispersed with tear gas. Demonstrations continue in the town of Kasserine made famous with the first American defeat in World War II.

In Cairo, on Friday, the President came out on the side of the Arab street, issuing a call for the Egyptian military to quickly hand over power to a civilian, democratically elected government. The president now has big risks, opening a fault line between the United States and the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other country in the region, has for 30 years served the U.S. protecting critical American concerns in the Middle East mainly the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

The president’s strategy is high-risk, because the ones who benefit most from it are the people who don¹t have our best interests in mind, the Islamist radical like the Muslim Brotherhood, who most certainly will not support the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty as the Egyptian military.

Now protests are growing in Jordon in intensity and geographic reach, degrading the royal stature with every event. Statements against the King, his family and queen have become a serious repudiation of the King. In September, demonstrators chanted S-S-S, a deliberately ambiguous call for both the regime’sislah, Arabic for reform, and overthrow the King. The crude one-liners with which Egypt’s revolutionaries toppled Hosni Mubarak with Bedouin rhyming couplets: “O Abdullah son of Hussein/Qadaffi’s a goner, whither your reign?”

It should be evident that the longer the fighting continues in any country, the less chance that any stable, order will emerge anytime soon.

These are dangerous times in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen. The U.S. should keep our mouth shut and not play one side against the other. There is only a no-win situation in all these countries if we chose up sides.

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It has been reported in the news media that deserters from the Syrian Army carried out attacks on symbols of the Bashar Al Assad government’s centers of power, targeting the youth offices of the ruling Baath Party after firing rocket-propelled grenades on a military intelligence base on Wednesday. These attacks, along with fraying relations among Syria’s religious communities, growing international pressure and a relentless crackdown, prompted Russia to say that the country was moving closer to a civil war.

Army desertions have yet to undermine the unity of Syria’s military leadership.

The U.S. and its allies are shifting their efforts to constrict Assad’s few remaining financial lifelines, focusing on ties to Lebanon banks as they increasingly voice confidence that economic problems will ultimately force the Assad regime from power.

It should be remembered that Syria controlled Beirut’s political class and security apparatus until 2005, when a popular uprising forced Assad to recall troops from Lebanon. But Syria maintains close ties to Hezbollah, the political party and militia that gained control of the Lebanese government in January.

Then there is the strong Iranian backing and support for Assad.

Syrians in Damascus describe setbacks to businesses, but otherwise paint a scene of normal daily life, with supermarkets well stocked and cafés open with many people in the evenings

There is no unified opposition driving events in Syria that could topple the regime.

Demonstrations in Syria on Sunday has brought a strong response from the military.

All is still TBD.

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It is well known that Iran is a Shi’ite theocracy.  It is also well known that Iran is the leader of the Shi’ites in the world. There’s the rub. The U.S. has been in disfavor of the Shi’ites for some time now.

So, why do they hate us so much?

First, it is the Shi’ite memory of the U.S. Navy shooting down a civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, on 3 July 1988, with 290 people on board including 66 children.

Then there is the first President Bush¹s urging Iraqi Shi’ites to rebel against the Iraqi government in 1991, and the U.S. standing by as thousands were slaughtered.

The perception of American betrayal still resides deep in the Shi’ite community. Someone wrote that  this explains one of this Iraqi war¹s enduring contradictions: that even though the Shi’ites benefited most from the war that overturned the reign of tyrannical Sunni rule, they have never completed trusted the Americans

So what can be done?

The U. S. ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, has offered Iraq¹s Shi’ite leaders something they have heard very little of from Americans since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 – remorse and humility. He apologized to Iraqi politicians and tribal leaders in the Shi’ite-dominated south for the United States inaction during the 1991 Shi’ite popular uprising.

Some feel that the Iraqi Shi’ite uprising of 1991 was the first Arab Spring, not the recent protest and revolutions.

Maybe our missteps are too many and too strong in the minds of Shi’ites to ever overcome.

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On 24 October STRATFOR published its update on the Mexican drug cartels.

The report stated that while there has been a reshuffling of alliances among Mexican drug cartels since the STRATFOR July cartel update, the trend continues. This is that there is  the polarization of cartels and associated sub-groups toward the two largest drug-trafficking organizations, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas.

According to STRATFOR, the three primary conflicts in Mexico’s drug war remain cartel vs. cartel, cartel vs. government and cartel vs. civilians.

The report said; “…operations launched by the military during the second quarter of 2011, primarily against Los Zetas and the Knights Templar, continued through the third quarter as well, and increasing violence in Guerrero, Durango, Veracruz, Coahuila and Jalisco states has resulted in the deployment of more federal troops in those areas.

Additionally: “The northern tier of states has seen a lull in violence, from Tijuana in Baja California state to Juarez in Chihuahua state. Violence in that stretch of northern Mexico subsided enough during the third quarter to allow the military to redeploy forces to other trouble spots. In Tamaulipas state, the military remains in charge of law enforcement in most of the cities, and the replacement of entire police departments that occurred in the state during the second quarter was recently duplicated in Veracruz following an outbreak of violence there (large numbers of law enforcement personnel were found to be in collusion with Los Zetas and were subsequently dismissed).”

The struggle in Mexico continues.

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Interesting “Half-Full Report,” written by Dr. Jack Wheeler, 14 Oct 2011, on China.

“China. No wives, no water, no banks – and a hyper-dangerous military. Much of China is uninhabited – deserts, mountains, and wastelands. Habitable China is about the size of the US east of the Mississippi, with over a billion people squeezed into it. Northern China is turning into a waterless dust bowl. Scores of millions of Chinese men will never get married due to the Chicom’s idiotic one-child policy and resultant mass female infanticide.

“100 million bachelors are explosively dangerous. Chinese state banks are insolvent after going on a post-2008 loan binge with debt and credit in China now (according to the IMF) above 200% of GDP. A sharp economic contraction (increasingly likely) plus all those angry unmarried men equals war, the history-honored scapegoat diversion of tyrants.

“The obvious Chicom choice for war would be Taiwan. But the Formosa Strait is 100 miles wide and China has no amphibious capacity. Taiwan is on the northern rim of the South China Sea, rapidly becoming one of the most jeopardous flash points in the world. Bordered by Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and China, over 50% by value of the world’s shipping traverses it – and China claims all of it, the entire South China Sea, as its own territorial waters.”

Interesting observations by anyone’s standards.

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The U.S. government has accused the Iranian government of what amounts to an act of war after disrupting what officials said was a plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian envoy in Washington, D. C.

According to the Washington Post, when nearly $100,000 landed in an undercover FBI bank account from a source linked to an Iranian paramilitary force, officials began taking seriously an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador that at first had seemed
outlandish.

The FBI investigation found a  name that concerned some in the U.S. government. The Iranian cousin of the man accused
of plotting the assassination was Abdul Reza Shahlai, a senior commander in Iran’s Quds Force, who had been linked to the killing of American troops in Iraq.

While the U.S. has mounted an intense diplomatic effort with its allies and other countries to condemn Iran, it has limited its punitive measures to anemic sanctions on an Iranian airline and five senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who are accused of having links to the men accused in the plot.

The plot failed when the prime suspect went to Mexico enlist assistance from a drug cartel associate who was actually working for the DEA. Additionally, according to court documents the prime suspect traveled to Iran to met with Quds Force officers and arrange payments of almost $100,000.

It is not surprising that Argentina was included as a possible area of involvement in the plot. Argentina has been a HizbAllah sphere of activities (Tri-Border region) as history has shown by the 2 attacks in Buenos Aires with mass casualties. The Iranian Ambassador was kicked out of Argentina for aiding and assisting HizbAllah back then.

Our noted terrorism expert, Larry Martines, says that Los Zetas would be the right cartel to go to for assassins. Apparently there may be an insufficient HizbAllah presence within the USA.

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NATO, which has been in combat in for nearly 10 years in Afghanistan and more than 12 in Kosovo, is desperately seeking to end actions in Libya.  At the senior levels of the NATO alliance there is an eagerness to end the Libyan campaign as soon as possible, and strong reluctance to get involved in nation-building or policing the country.

I’m reminded of the immortal words of Charlie Wilson on the end of U.S. helping the mujahedeen in Afghanistan: “We did a great thing and then screwed (sic) up the end game.”

The same thing happened in Iraq.

Meaning we did not finish what we started and both fell into anarchy.

The air campaign was intended to protect the people and would allow the opposition to oust Qaddafi’s regime in a matter of weeks. But nearly six months later, the conflict is not over.

The bombing campaign also revealed problems within the NATO military alliance. Only eight of the 28 members participated, while the others stayed.

No end game for Libya could mean another Islamic state like Iran.

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