According to a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army: “The Syrian army is slowly disintegrating as troop morale plummets and more soldiers defect to join rebels fighting a regime crackdown against dissent.” Facts or Pollyanna thinking.

It is reported that there is growing discontent among many officers and the rank and file against army commanders, who are largely drawn from President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite community, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam. Most of the conscripts in the military are from Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community.

In a newspaper interview In Turkey, General Mustafa al-Sheikh, who has defected from the Syrian military, gave a dim view of the state of the regime – despite its attempt to reassert control this past weekend.

Gen. Sheikh said only a third of the army was at combat readiness due to defections or absenteeism, while remaining troops were demoralized, most of its Sunni officers had fled, been arrested, or sidelined, and the military equipment is degraded.

An estimated 6,000 people have died in the bloodshed according to civil rights groups.

Syrians and Turks in Istanbul are protesting the Syrian bloodshed with major demonstration of support for the rebels.

A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria, supported by the West and most Arab countries, failed with a double veto by Russia and China on Saturday. This came only hours after the Syrian military attacked the city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the deadliest government assault in the nearly 11-month uprising.

The veto and the mounting violence are making what is proving to be the Arab world’s bloodiest revolt. Diplomatic stalemate in Syria leave what many are already calling a civil war? Arab and Western diplomats have little options in pressuring the Syrian government, and even some Syrian dissidents worry about what the growing confrontation will lead to – more violence.

It is becoming more and more probable that the Assad regime cannot win, but it certainly can continue the bloodshed and prolong the conflict.

Unfortunately, it’s certainly Pollyanna thinking if anyone thinks the U.S. and/or NATO can help the rebels.

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The unrest in Egypt, with its population of 80 million, has made people around the world sit up and watch the events unfold. Egypt was the most important U. S. ally in the region, and now has some of the most ultra-radical Islamic groups holding 70% of the seats in the new Egyptian parliament.

By the current constitution, the legislative branch of the Egyptian government, the Parliament, enacts laws, approves the general policy of the State, the general plan for economic and social development and the general budget of the State, supervises the work of the government, and has the power to vote to impeach the President of the Republic, or replace the government and its Prime Minister by a vote of no-confidence. The new parliament will most certainly keep some of this but re-write the constitution to fit Islamic law.

The events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya have led Al Qaeda’s ideologues and strategists to avoid going public. Apart from issuing a few statements, they don’t plan any immediate involvement. They trust that the upheavals will lead to further chaos across the region and at this point there is no popular political force capable of providing alternative leadership.

Accordingly, Al Qaeda will wait and see in the hope that the chaos will sufficiently dilute the Islamic state apparatuses to allow their organization
to establish a firm footing, as it has done in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda will not publicly have any role in these circumstances and at the moment, these Islamic movements are spreading all across the Arab world.

Unfortunately, there is no secular leadership to direct those developments.

Al Qaeda will let the ultra Islamic movements go on without specifying its role at this stage. Al Qaeda’s role will begin after the elections, when the
radicals reach a climax and the system of government may collapses in chaos in these countries.

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Many news media and political pundits are providing their top challenges for 2012. So, I thought I would add my top five.

1. The economy which includes the debt and the massive Administration spending. Economic power come before political and military power. The US is very week in this area right now.
2. Divisive politics at all levels and a disorganized National Military Strategy. The recent Strategy document seems to provide lots of challenges but little prognosis for realist answers. The world powers must be confused.
3. Iran and it’s lunatic leadership. Iran is probably the most dangerous nation any where at this time. There seems to be no rational answer for their belligerency except a falling government that needs to galvanize its people to follow the leaders.
5. Venezuela is going to continue to use its vast oil revenue to run opposition to any thing the US tries to do or not do in Latin America.
I do not see Korea as a problem because it has too many internal problems and much weaker military than it has been in the past.
Iraq is over and Afghanistan is at a level acceptable to the American people. China will try to hold back any misadventures.
Additionally, I believe it is not in China’s interest to confront the US because it has a lot to lose over any conflict – economic, political or military.
There are many hot spots in the world but we have more problems at home than abroad

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The Egyptian Islamic parties who seem to have an insurmountable lead in the Egyptian elections have said that they plan to push for a stricter Islamic religious code. This means Shariah law and the end to democracy, women’s rights, minority issues and much more.

The Egyptian Coptic Christian minority and all secular political parties will be persecuted or banished to the wilderness. There will be no thought of social or political freedoms that were the rallying cry of the street demonstrations only weeks ago.

Preliminary vote count indicates that 62% of those eligible voted. The preliminary results give the Muslim Brotherhood 40% and the ultraconservative Islamic Nour Party, who preach jihad, gets 30% of the vote. This has given impetus to a movement whose ideology is far removed from Western constitutionalism.

The Islamic Nour Party are ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in public life.

Something like this was predictable and predicted by many of us who knew that the Muslim Brotherhood was the most organized and rich with finance to get out their vote.

With the recent pronouncements coming out of the Administration it would seem to indicate that they did not have a clue as to the potential ramifications of a radical Islamic state evolving along the lines of Iran and the future of an Islamic caliphate form Morocco to Iran.Islamists have formed governments in Tunisia and Morocco. 

It would seem that Islamists are positioned for a major role in post-Qaddafi Libya as well. But it is the victory in Egypt — the largest and once the most influential Arab state that has the potential to upend the established order across the Middle East.

The future of Egypt would seem to be far from the former  traditions of personal freedom, private enterprise, and the separation of civic and religious authority.

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JIMMY CARTER has written that the U.S should “call off the global drug war.” In an extraordinary statement announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, Mr. Carter is a leading member, has made some unusual recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade.

The report describes the total failure of the present global anti drug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders. They want to legalize marijuana because, they say, of it’s a major use in the U.S.

Marijuana is not the big money maker for the Mexican cartels. “Legalizing” it would neither cure nor solve anything. Both Mexican and ”official sources” have repeatedly claimed that MJ makes up less than 20% of the profits for the cartels - and make up only 25% of the drugs coming north. The big money comes from the hard drugs. 

A truck load or even a backpack of MJ is a pittance in street value compared to the same amount of hard drugs in the same containers. Plus it is much more difficult and labor intensive to transport due to its bulk. MJ shipments are often used as “feints” when shipping cocaine, heroin or meth across the border. Losing a MJ shipment, even a truckload full, is not a major hit in the pocketbook for the cartels. While Customs or the Border Patrol praises a major MJ recovery, the hard drugs are being shipped past them to their affiliates in the U.S.

 Another point to make is that of the over 300 “open investigations” of corruption on our side of the border, most point directly to illegal hard drug smuggling!

Therefore, one can easily conclude that the cartels are bribing our federal and local LEA with big money to overlook, or aid and abet, because it is the hard drug smuggling that brings in the big profits!

Now the cartels are branching out into other criminal enterprises. This is the normal chain of events for all organized crime groups.

Mr. Larry Martines contributed to this column.

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Many news media reporters are falling all over themselves in praising the announcements for Defense, the CIA and Afghanistan. This new security team has formidable challenges to navigate the dangerous and difficult three-year transition period of total troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.  However, my guess is that there were more political considerations than military.

Panetta is a former Army intelligence officer who started out as a Republican then switch to the Democrat party to run for Congress. He has been a White House chief of staff, budget director and chairman of the House Budget Committee. He has good credentials for anything but the Pentagon.

Petraeus has run the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many give him credit for “turning around the war in Iraq.” He certainly has been involved in Intelligence all his military career. He is also credited with leading the effort to write a “new counterinsurgency doctrine.” Unfortunately, many, including myself, feel that “new doctrine” is long on academics and short of practical applications.

Then we have LtGen John Allen, USMC, and Ryan Crocker as Ambassador to Afghanistan.

All this change while engaged in three wars across the globe.

In one major swoop we have a faithful Democrat in the DoD, removal of a potential political rival and sent him to the CIA, and assigned men to Afghanistan that if anything fails we have convenient scapegoats.

(NOTE: Poliquics.com will now appear only once a week on Mondays.)

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A referendum on 5 May 2011, will ask UK voters whether they want to change how Members of Parliament are elected in general elections.

Instead of just voting for one candidate voters could rank candidates in order of preference, and these preferences could be used to decide the outcome in places where no candidate wins more than 50% of votes cast.

BBC news says that  too many votes are effectively wasted under the current system, with elections decided by a small number of voters in a handful of seats where no single party has a large majority. According to BBC this discourages people from voting and makes them disengage with the political process. A key weakness of first-past-the-post, they say, is that two thirds of MPs are now elected with less than 50% of support of voters and this undermines democracy. They argue that a different system will provide voters with more choice, force candidates to appeal to a broader section of the public and work harder to get elected.

The Labour Party is expected to make gains in the 5 May elections due to incumbents being unpopular in hard fiscal times.

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The U.S. has a long record of running out on its friends and allies. Somehow Lebanon, Vietnam, Somalia, etc., come to mind.

The worse case of all was when the U.S. encouraged the Iraqi Shiites, Kurds and Marsh Arabs to rebel against their brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein; they believed American forces would protect them against Hussein’s superior firepower. Never happened – we abandoned them…

Then there is Bosnia, where NATO took too long to protect civilian populations in the mid-1990s. Others remember Rwanda, where President Bill Clinton expressed regret for not acting to save innocent lives

In 2006, the United Nations adopted a doctrine known as the “responsibility to protect.” Under R2P the international community has the responsibility to protect populations from atrocities including genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and if peaceful means are unsuccessful, the doctrine holds, the world is justified in taking other forms of “collective action” to stop those crimes

Unfortunately, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven long, costly and not terribly successful, and have left some Americans with a sense that their country has neither the resolve nor, despite its overwhelming military superiority, the power necessary to achieve its aims. Some go beyond that to say that the U.S. now lacks the moral authority to help enforce R2P.

Now we have Libya. The U.S. Authorities start a war then beg off. But wait, we’re going to send $25 million in humanitarian aid and the Predator UAVs with sophistica6ed sensors and bombs. The question is: “To do what?”

Maybe the cost of war, even in a humanitarian cause, has become too high to pay on a government which has its eyes set on the next election.

 The new Libyan moves can only enhance the U.S. loser reputation.

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A leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, sees cause for optimism in the limited-government traditions of Arab and Muslim culture; but, he says the U.S. should not push for quick, Western-style elections.

 “First, Tunisia has real potential for democracy, largely because of the role of women there. Tunisia, as far as I know, is the only Muslim country that has compulsory education for girls from the beginning right through. And in which women are to be found in all the professions,” says Mr. Lewis.

“My own feeling is that the greatest defect of Islam and the main reason they fell behind the West is the treatment of women,” he says. He makes the powerful point that repressive homes pave the way for repressive governments. “Think of a child that grows up in a Muslim household where the mother has no rights, where she is downtrodden and subservient. That’s preparation for a life of despotism and subservience. It prepares the way for an authoritarian society,” he says.”

Democracy in almost all Muslim countries is a foreign term. This is mainly because the Muslim religion or way of life does not lend itself to democracy. However, to say you have democracy you have to have two basic elements – representative government and human rights.

Improvement on the daily lives of women in any Muslim country is the first sign of progress in human rights.

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According to AP, the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency is ready to split with the CIA because of frustration over what it calls heavy-handed pressure and its anger over what it believes is a covert U.S. operation involving hundreds of contract spies, according to an internal document obtained by AP.

This could seriously damage the U.S war effort in Afghanistan, limit a program targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents along the Pakistan frontier, and restrict Washington’s access to information in the nuclear-armed country.

According to a statement drafted by the ISI, supported by interviews with officials by AP, an already-fragile relationship between the two agencies collapsed following the shooting death of two Pakistanis by Raymond Davis, a CIA U.S. contractor who is in jail in Pakistan facing possible multiple murder charges.

Another report has said that Pakistan’s ISI has stopped giving CIA drone operators information to target terrorists inside Pakistan including the Pakistan Taliban.

It has been obvious that Pakistan is playing both sides in the Afghanistan war. The U.S. has sent too many mixed signals that we are not in for the long haul. The Paks know that they will have to live with the Taliban after we leave – and we will.

It seems the U.S. and Pakistan militray leaders are still talking including a recent meeting between Adm Mike Mullen, USN, CJCS, and the head of the Paksitan army.

However, the strained relations between the CIA and the ISI is a very difficult situation that the U.S. must resolve on Pakistan terms.

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