good to know.



ps. fiddy

lmao @ "anti-semite retard" hahah...

Stratfor.com - Of Mosques, Oil Fields and PortsHi gang --

Friedman is the founder and head of StratFor, and this topic intersects his
main areas of expertise. (He is often quoted in Barron's and Newsweek --
and his inferences are almost as helpful as his group's wide sources of
info.)

Enjoy.


UsGEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT02.28.2006



US - IRAQ War Coverage
Of Mosques, Oil Fields and Ports
By George Friedman

Last week was dominated by three apparently discrete events. The
al-Askariyah mosque -- a significant Shiite shrine in As Samarra, Iraq --
was bombed, triggering intensifying violence between Shiite and Sunni
groups. A group linked to al Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacking a
major oil facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia. And a furor broke out in the
United States over the proposed purchase, by a government-owned United Arab Emirates (UAE) firm, of a British company that operates a number of
important American ports. Apart from the fact that all of these incidents
involve Muslims, the stories don't appear to b linked. They are.

All three stories are commentaries on three things. First, they are measures
of the current state of the U.S.-jihadist war. Second, they are measures of
the Bush administration's strategy of splitting the Islamic world against
itself, along its natural fault lines, and using that split to contain and
control the radical Islamist threat against the United States. And finally,
they are the measure of U.S. President George W. Bush's ability to manage
public perceptions of his plans and operations.

The Fault Lines in Iraq

Begin with the bombing of al-Askariyah, or "the Golden Mosque," in As
Samarra.

After the failures of U.S. intelligence and operations in Iraq in spring
2003, the United States adopted a long-term strategy of using the natural
split between the country's Shiite and Sunni populations to first stabilize
its own position, and then improve it. During the first phase, Washington
tilted heavily toward the Shia, doing everything possible to assure that
there would be no Shiite rising to accompany that of the Sunnis. Since the
Shia had no love for the Sunni minority, given their experiences under
Saddam Hussein's anti-Shiite regime, this was not overly difficult. In
addition, the Shia were able to take advantage of the U.S.-Sunni war to
shape and dominate post-Hussein politics. The Shia and Americans suited each other.

In the second phase of this policy, the United States reached out to the
Sunnis, trying to draw them into a Shiite-Kurdish government. Washington had two goals: One was a Sunni counterweight to the Shia. Whatever it had promised the Shia, Washington did not simply want to hand Iraq over to them, out of fear that the country would become an Iranian satellite state. The second goal was to exploit fault lines within the Sunni community itself, in order to manipulate the balance of power in favor of the United States.

By the time this phase of the policy was being implemented -- at the end of
the first battle of Al Fallujah, in 2004 -- the U.S.-Sunni war had developed
a new dimension, consisting of jihadists. These were Sunnis, but differed
from the Iraqi Sunnis in a number of critical ways. First, many were
foreigners who lacked roots in Iraq. Second, the Sunni community in Iraq was
multidimensional; Sunnis had been the backbone of support for Hussein's
regime, which had been far more secular than Islamist. The jihadists, of
course, were radical Islamists. Thus, there was the potential for yet
another rift; the stronger the jihadists grew, the greater the risk to the
traditional leadership of Iraq's Sunnis. The jihadists might increase their
influence within the community, marginalizing the old leadership.

The U.S. success in manipulating this split reached a high point in December
2005, with Iraq's national elections. The jihadists opposed Sunni
participation in the election, but the Sunni leadership participated anyway.
The jihadists threatened the leadership but could not strike; as foreigners,
they depended on local Sunni communities to sustain and protect them. If
they alienated the Sunni leadership without destroying them, the jihadists
would in turn be destroyed.

Thus, after the disaster in December, the jihadists embarked on a different
course. Rather than focusing on American forces or Shiite collaborators, the
goal was to trigger a civil war between the Shia and Sunnis. The brilliantly
timed attack on the Golden Mosque, much like the 9/11 attacks, was intended to ignite a war. There would be an event that the Shia could not ignore and to which they would respond with maximum violence, preferably against the Sunnis as a whole. In an all-out civil war, the Sunni leadership would not be able to dispense with the jihadists, or so the jihadists hoped. Their own position would be cemented and the Americans would be trapped in a country torn by civil war.

The Sunni leadership, of course, understands the situation. If the Sunnis
protect the jihadists who carried out the attack -- and we are convinced
they were jihadists -- they will be in a civil war they cannot win. Given
their numbers compared to the Shiite majority, the Sunnis -- if they were to
break with the Shia -- eventually would have to come back to the table and
make some sort of a deal. The jihadists are betting that the terms the Shia
would impose would be so harsh that the Sunnis would prefer civil war. The
United States has an interest in limiting what terms the Shia can impose,
and the Iraqi Shia themselves understand that if there is civil war, they
will need Iran's help. Getting caught between the United States and Iran is
not in their interest.

There is, interestingly, the possibility of what passes for peace in Iraq
embedded in all of this. The jihadists, marginalized and desperate due to
American maneuvers, have tossed up a "Hail Mary" in the hope of disrupting
the works. It is certainly possible that the maneuver will work. But a more
reasonable assumption is that the bombing of the Golden Mosque achieves
merely a shift in the time frame the Sunnis thought they had for
negotiations. What might have taken months now could take much less.
Certainly, the Sunnis have been forced to a decision point.

Continued...

Attempt at Strategic Attack

The al Qaeda attack against the Abqaiq facility has similar roots.

Prior to 2003, the Saudi position on al Qaeda was one of benign neglect. The
Saudi regime tried to limit both its exposure to the American war against
the jihadists, and to intelligence cooperation with the United States, out
of fear of the consequences from al Qaeda. After the invasion of Iraq,
however, and the realization that the United States was rampaging just to
the north, the Saudis shifted their position, and significant intelligence
cooperation began. There were two consequences of this shift: One, the
United States was receiving Saudi intelligence and became much more
effective than before in blocking al Qaeda attacks and disrupting their
operations; and two, the jihadists went to war against the Saudi regime,
launching a series of strikes and counterstrikes over the next two years.
The United States had split the Saudi government off from the jihadists, and
the Saudis absorbed the price of collaboration.

Al Qaeda has been relatively quiet in Saudi Arabia since June 2004. It had
appeared to many observers that al Qaeda was finished in Saudi Arabia. thus, just as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's faction in Iraq had to assert itself or be
marginalized, the al Qaeda faction in Saudi Arabia had to demonstrate its
continued capability to mount operations -- however dangerous and difficult
that task might be. It was Hail Mary time in the kingdom as well. The result
was the Feb. 24 attack against Abqaiq, a critical oil processing facility.

This was intended to be a strategic attack. A strategic attack differs from
a tactical attack in several ways:

1. It shifts the political equation dramatically by demonstrating
capabilities.

2. It involves a strike against a target or resource that, if destroyed,
changes the economic or political scene definitively.

3. It requires a substantial commitment of resources.

The Sept. 11 strikes amounted to a strategic attack; a suicide bombing by
jihadists in Iraq normally does not. The Abqaiq operation was an attempt at
a strategic attack. It was designed to be a shocking demonstration of al
Qaeda's continued capabilities -- and to massively affect world oil
supplies. Such an operation would involve a great deal of planning and, we
suspect, a substantial proportion of trained and available al Qaeda
personnel in Saudi Arabia (as opposed to sympathizers).

But the strike was a fiasco. Rather than demonstrating al Qaeda's
capabilities in Saudi Arabia, the attackers barely penetrated the first
security cordon before they were gunned down by security forces. Certainly,
they demonstrated that al Qaeda still has operatives who are willing to
attempt a strategic attack, but they failed to demonstrate that they still
have the ability to actually execute one. Special operations are always
difficult, but it now appears that either the group had been penetrated by
Saudi security from the beginning, or the cell was not trained in the arts
that al Qaeda previously dominated. All three cars used in the strike appear
to have been identified and destroyed before there was any possibility they
could reach their targets inside the Abqaiq compound.

In Iraq, two divisions in the Muslim world revealed themselves and were
manipulated. The first was the Sunni-Shiite split, the second was the rift
between the jihadists and mainstream Sunnis. In Saudi Arabia, the split was
between, on one side, the state apparatus and the leaders of the royal
family -- who had lost their ability to remain neutral in the face of the
Iraq invasion, U.S. bellicosity and the fear of a U.S.-Iranian entente over
Iraq -- and an increasingly radicalized faction of the religious
establishment that was supporting al Qaeda. Within the kingdom, the latter
could not withstand the weight of the former, and the result showed itself
last week, with a feeble al Qaeda effort that was followed by bombastic
rhetoric.

The Debate on the Ports Deal

The third dimension in all of this became apparent with the ports issue.
Washington has tried to draw a line between Muslim states that have
cooperated with the United States in due course -- regardless of what their
earlier behavior might have been like -- and those states that it still
doesn't trust. It distinguishes in this way between, for example, Syria and
Kuwait. The former has always been seen as hostile to the United States, the latter has been a mainstay of American strategy since its liberation by the United States in 1991. The rest of the Muslim world is distributed along a
continuum between these poles.

Washington's only hope for something approaching a satisfactory outcome in
Iraq was to work with factions it never would have spoken to prior to 2003.
Its hope for a satisfactory outcome in the global war with the jihadists was
in getting Saudi intelligence to work with the United States. That also
required actions and compromises that would not have been made before 2003. Finally, in order to reshape the Muslim world, the United States needed to have relations with countries that did not have immaculate records but
which, on the whole and for a variety of reasons, now found it in their
interest to work with Washington.

For Saudi Arabia, the motivating factor was fear. For the UAE, it was greed.
To be more fair, the UAE is something like a Switzerland: Its business is
business, and it tilts its politics in such a way that business is likely to
be good. The Islamic world is a complex place, and there are many players.
If the United States is to be successful, it must divide, manipulate and
conquer that world along the lines of its complexity. The Sunni-Shiite fault
line is one axis, but the division between countries that are motivated by
mercenary considerations, as opposed to those that have more complex
motives, is another.

The UAE wants to do business, and it is good at it. One of its businesses is
managing ports. Purchasing a British company in the same industry is a
natural thing to do in business; the fact that the purchase in question
would give the UAE company oversight of ports in the United States is
another attraction of the deal. The attraction is not that the UAE could
facilitate the movement of al Qaeda operatives into the United States; that
is not what the UAE is after, since it would be bad for business. What it is
after is the profits that come from doing the business.

Now, some argue that this business deal will make it easier for al Qaeda
operatives to get into the United States. We find that doubtful. Al Qaeda
operatives -- the real ones, not the wannabes -- if they are out there, will
get into the United States just fine by a number of means. And if they try
to slip a bomb into a container ship, it won't be one sent from a Muslim
country -- the level of scrutiny there is too high. It would be from a place
and under a flag that no one would suspect for a moment, like Denmark. At
any rate, given what it means to "operate a port," the risk to the United
States from having a British company manage its ports is about the same as
that from the UAE: Has anyone noticed that holding a British passport these
days is no guarantee of loyalty to Western ideals?

Continued...

The Administration's Strategy

The point here is not to argue the merits of the Dubai ports deal, but
rather to place the business deal in the context of the U.S. grand strategy.
That strategy is, again, to split the Islamic world into its component
parts, induce divisions by manipulating differences, and to create
coalitions based on particular needs. This is, currently, about the only
strategy the United States has going for it -- and if it can't use
commercial relations as an inducement in the Muslim world, that is quite a
weapon to lose.

The problem has become political, and stunningly so. One of the most recent
opinion polls, by CBS, has placed Bush's approval rating at 34 percent -- a
fairly shocking decline, and clearly attributable to the port issue. As we
have noted in the past, each party has a core constituency of about 35-37
percent. When support falls significantly below this level, a president
loses his ability to govern.

The Republican coalition consists of three parts: social conservatives,
economic conservatives and business interests, and national security
conservatives. The port deal has apparently hit the national security
conservatives in Bush's coalition hard. They were already shaky over the
administration's personnel policies in the military and the question of
whether he had a clear strategy in Iraq, even as they supported the
invasion.

Another part of the national security faction consists of those who believe
that the Muslim world as a whole is, in the end, united against the United
States, and that it poses a clear and present danger. Bush used to own this
faction, but the debate over the ports has generated serious doubts among
this faction about Bush's general policy. In their eyes, he appears
inconsistent and potentially hypocritical. Economic conservatives might love
the ports deal, and so might conservatives of the "realpolitik" variety, but
those who buy into the view that there is a general danger of terrorism
emanating from all Muslim countries are appalled -- and it is showing in the
polls.

If Bush sinks much lower, he will breaks into territory from which it would
be impossible for a presidency to recover. He is approaching this territory
with three years left in his presidency. It is the second time that he has
probed this region: The first was immediately after Hurricane Katrina. He is
now down deeper in the polls, and it is cutting into his core constituency.

In effect, Bush's strategy and his domestic politics have intersected with
potential fratricidal force. The fact is that the U.S. strategy of dividing
the Muslim world and playing one part off against the other is a defensible
and sophisticated strategy -- even if does not, in the end, turn out to be
successful (and who can tell about that?) This is not the strategy the
United States started with; the strategy emerged out of the failures in Iraq
in 2003. But whatever its origins, it is the strategy that is being used,
and it is not a foolish strategy.

The problem is that the political coalition has eroded to the point that
Bush needs all of his factions, and this policy -- particularly because of
the visceral nature of the ports issue -- is cutting into the heart of his
coalition. The general problem is this: The administration has provided no
framework for understanding the connection between a destroyed mosque dome in As Samarra, an attack against a crucial oil facility in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE buyout of a British ports-management firm. Rather than being
discussed in the light of a single, integrated strategy, these appear to be
random, disparate and uncoordinated events. The reality of the
administration's strategy and the reality of its politics are colliding.
Bush will backtrack on the ports issue, and the UAE will probably drop the
matter. But what is not clear is whether the damage done to the strategy and the politics can be undone. The numbers are just getting very low.

Yeah Iraq is a much better place now isn't it? :1orglaugh ......:error

Jews rule!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...72980962281458

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

non-stop bickerings and wars!

when will we experience genuine peace?

do you know of a time in history when there was ever lasting peace?

you have to be a jew to make a nazi statement :321GFY


suck cock and gag you worthless piece of shit

Where do you see me making anti semite remarks?

by clearly defining how israeli companies own every single telecommunication and security company labels me an anti semite?

By stating israel blackmails and controls u.s. politics makes me an anti semite?

your a fuckin fool.

stick this up ur smelly hebrew ass:321GFY
bwahahahahahahhahahaa:1orglaugh

As my husband said it best....

"We need George Bush SENIOR!"

He didn't get caught up in this crap of Good vs. Evil.
Instead he strove for stability.

We need to leave these concepts of bad guys vs. good guys and evil vs. sacred for the pope, clerics, priests, etc to argue.

Political science needs to go back to be a SCIENCE! Goverment only by the numbers and not by personal opinions.

If Bush and Blair did that, Iraq would never have happened and Osama Bin Ladin would have been caught by now. (Actually he might never have happen)

AIPAC is pushing for it and what AIPAC usually puts on their political agenda happens.

Yep, and now the rest of the world is as well :1orglaugh

Yeh, we fucked that cocksucker over real good this time around.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Um, I think you sorta misunderstood...what I meant is that the rest of the world is laughing at the US :upsidedow

I don't see an invasion at all, by us or by Israel. What will come first will be behind the scenes stuff. The younger generation in Iran want the country to be a democratic society, so our government just needs to get them to overthrow the govt. If that doesn't work the next option is to overthrow it ourselves. Then after that, an invasion is on the table. But then I agree with the Israel part; Israel would be doing the work and we'd be backing them up.

The leader of Iran should not be allowed to have nukes, it's scary how crazy that mother fucker is. "The Holocaust never occured." In my best Dr. Evil voice,

"Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight."

http://www.k-inet.com/~brown/newsarc/99May/evil.jpg

And I was beginning to think American propogander was becomming ineffective, I guess not. There is about as much chance of the 'younger generation overthrowing the Government in favour of true Western style democracy' (they already democratically elect their leaders) as there was of Iraqi's greeting the American's in the streets with flowers as they rolled in. Iranian's are eating up this hardline stuff, and the 'Islamic Republic' is actually a lot stronger because of it (the previous semi-toned down leaders started loosing support). Furthermore if you understood what he is saying about the Holocaust you would realise he isn't out and out saying it didn't happen, he is saying that it has been exaggerated and used very politically by Israel still to do this day to do as they will in the ME (i.e. to build nuclear weapons themselves). I know I sound like an apologist for their leaders, but whilst I honestly find Islamic society quite disturbing and scary, the propogander beating up the war drums is ridiculous.

you know someone called me an anti-Semite on some board for saying that the Jewish lobby in Washington is powerful and that Israel has a big influence on U.S. foreign policy lol

While a revolution from the younger crowd may not happen anytime soon, we've tried it before and we may very well do it again. I think simply decapitating the leadership is a more plausible route at this stage, but that's easier said than done.

I'm not gonna get into it with you on the Iraq statement, but CNN of all mediums took a nationwide poll of the citizens of Iraq asking if they were glad that Saddam was removed from power. They overwhelmingly voted yes, they were. Were they carrying flowers in the streets greeting our soldiers? Some were.

The Iranian president is completely insane. No way should he be allowed to build nuclear weapons; Isreal will be his first target. Everyone knows Iran has been working against us in Iraq.

An invasion is not out of the question either as a last option. However, the key here is that it'd be a much different scenario than Iraq. We wouldn't be occupying it after the invasion; it's not necessary. All we would do is something similar to the first Gulf War (enough to the point to overthrow the leadership), that way it avoids mass casualities and still gets the point of deterrance across.

[QUOTE=AndyWoods Is A Crook]As far as the person who said 1.8 billion muslims cant do shit....lol

1. these people are nothing but simpletons. They can have millions in the bank, yet they prefer to sip hot tea in a desert tent .
2. Take away their rights, and they have no problem dying for their cause.

can u say that about americans?
I doubt it .QUOTE]

Are you serious? Americans die for their country, freedom and beliefs every fucking day .. have a little love and respect for us.

You bring a war to my backyard, I'll be sitting there in full gear with my AR15 locked and loaded.

Yeah okay, let's all be scared of Iran.

THAT WAS AWESOME .... :thumbsup :thumbsup 4 JEWS

It's in keeping with all the other scare tactics and paranoia - why not Iran?

I just swotted this Iranian guy with a nuke under my bed - sheesh, they are everywhere :1orglaugh