Meaning the GOP members on the committee will include some of these exciting young Tea Party Republicans, except only Christine O’Donnell to join, so I guess she’ll probably end up chairwoman. The Foreign Relations committee is not as much fun as Appropriations, Finance or Armed Services — because no lobbyist wants to deliver giant comedy sacks of money to a member of the stupid Foreign Relations committee — so, should the GOP take the Senate, all the Republican senators who want to be big wheels will jump ship to one of the cool committees.
For comparison, the U.S rate of growth leaped from 1.7 percent in the second quarter to 2.3 percent in the third quarter, with some experts predicting no growth or even shrinkage by year’s end. : Here’s the bad news when it comes to China — a weak third quarter dropped the growth rate of its gross domestic product to 9.6 percent. They have even learned how to be thoroughly belligerent while relying only on economic power. Make no mistake, China has its lurking problems, including an overheating urban real-estate market verging on bubbledom (which, post-2008, should cause any leadership to shudder) and tens of millions of peasants left in dismal poverty in the long decades when “to get rich” was “glorious.” Still, the country has managed to pass Japan for number-two-global-economic-power status, to corner a startling range of future global energy reserves so that its economy can drink deep for decades to come, to forge a front-running position in various renewable-energy fields. Its leaders have accomplished all this thanks to economic muscle, diplomacy, and cash (think: bribes) without sending its soldiers abroad or fighting a war (or even a skirmish) overseas. Check out, for instance, the over-the-top way they crushed Japan in a recent stand-off over a Chinese trawler captain in Japanese custody, wielding only the threat to withhold rare earth metals (necessary to various advanced industrial processes), 95-97 percent of which are, at the moment, produced by China. We’re definitely talking global winner here. Yep, you read that right: 9.6 percent (down from 10.3 percent in the second quarter).
For every bad guy they kill, they kill civilians as well, seeding new enemies in what is essentially a war to create future terrorists. But that hardly matters. Not only are American companies starting to export the craft to allies willing to pay in global hotspots, but other countries are lining up to create drone industries of their own. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the jewel in the crown of Southern California’s drone industry, now employs 10,000 workers and runs double shifts in, as W.J. These “precision” weapons are capable of taking out people, including civilians in the vicinity, from thousands of miles away. Expect the friendly skies to continue to fill. The drones themselves — termed by CIA Director Leon Panetta “the only game in town” when it comes to stopping al-Qaeda — turn out to be capable of settling nothing. : If America’s wars are eternal field laboratories for new weaponry, then the grand winners of the latest round of wars are the drone makers. Hennigan of the Los Angeles Times writes, a “fast-growing business… fueled by Pentagon spending — at least $20 billion since 2001 — and billions more chipped in by the CIA and Congress.” Washington has been plunking down more than $5 billion a year for its drone purchases, the development of future drone technology, and the carrying out of 24/7 robot assassination campaigns as well as a full-scale Terminator war in the Pakistani borderlands. Terminator wars are hot and the drone, as a product, is definitely a global winner.
Well-connected, savvy, and willing to shift tactics on a moment’s notice, Petraeus is a figure to contend with in Washington, our most political general since I don’t know when. Like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, he may be playing a cagey hand to extend matters through 2012, when a president ready to fight on till hell freezes over could take office. He’s a man on the cusp, destined for success, but only a few hops, skips, and jumps ahead of failure.
: The question here is straightforward enough: Just how badly can Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and his government treat the Obama administration (and the president himself) and get away with it? Right now, the answer seems to be, as badly as it wants. The real question is: Can the prime minister play out this version of the game until 2012 in hopes that Obama will lose out and a new U.S. If Obama and his team ever get tired of being kicked around by Netanyahu & Co., especially with the U.S. If the Obama administration can’t do better than this, then at the next TomDispatch handicapping session Israel has a reasonable shot at being elevated into the winner’s circle. The result: Israeli settlers are again building up a storm on the West Bank while the Netanyahu government plays even harder to get. midterms behind them, life could get tougher for Bibi. After all, Washington put almost all its global diplomatic apples in one ill-woven negotiating basket, named it making progress on a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem, started talks, and then offered Israel a package of goodies of a sort that would normally only be given away deep into negotiations, if at all, for nothing more than a two-month extension of the Israeli settlement-construction freeze. president will be ready to give away the store?.
By then, of course, women and children in the U.S. Sooner or later, it will be your turn, too. : The British lion just got a haircut and — who could be surprised — most of the hair that got cut was shorn from women and children, always first to disembark from the HMS Economy. As the Washington Post politely put the matter: “[T]he [government's] moves amount to a tactical scaling down of military ambition by the one European ally consistently willing to back the United States with firepower in international conflicts.” Put more bluntly, as the British in their imperial days used native recruits to help police their colonies and fight their wars, so in recent years, the Brits have been America’s Gurkhas. The Brits are the canary in the mine on this. will already be well shorn.). No longer, however, will Britain be, militarily speaking, the mouse that roared. One other casualty of government slashing, however, is the British defense establishment, suffering an 8 percent budget cut over the next four years — which means losing lots of jets, 17,000 bodies, and even the fleet’s flagship aircraft carrier, which will be “decommissioned,” leaving the British unable to launch a plane at sea until at least 2019. has lost its key sidekick in any future “coalition of the willing.” (Note for the Pentagon: Carpe diem. Despite pathetic pledges to remain at the American side in Afghanistan forever and a day, the sun is now setting on the British military, which means that the U.S.
: He had the numbers (in the polls and in Congress) and the popularity in early 2009. Now, the president stands a reasonable chance in 2012 of turning over to a new (possibly far more dismal) administration an even more disastrous Afghan War, an unfinished Iraq crisis, a Guantanamo still unclosed, “don’t ask, don’t tell” still in place (who says the coming Congress will care to do Obama’s bidding on this one, now that he’s bypassed the courts), and a jobless nonrecovery or worse — and that’s just to start down the path of DisObamapointment. But first, in the key areas of foreign and economic policy, he surrounded himself with the old crew, the deadest of heads, and the stalest Washington thinking around. He could have done almost anything. They missed out on jobs (about as simple and basic as you can get), and took a dismal year of review to double down twice on a war from hell. While this was presented as an Ivy League fest of the best and the brightest, so far their track record shows them to be politically dumb and dumber.
The bottom line is that, by 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying economic heights courtesy of natural gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer-long Central Asia Pipeline, then projected to be operating at full capacity. When the Bush administration’s armchair generals launched their Global War on Terror, this was not exactly what they had in mind. . And to think that, in a few more years, China’s big cities will undoubtedly also be getting a taste of Iraq’s fabulous, barely tapped oil reserves, conservatively estimated at 115 billion barrels, but possibly closer to 143 billion barrels, which would put it ahead of Iran.
At the moment, it is the only swing producer — one, that is, that can move the amount of oil being pumped up or down at will — capable of substantially increasing output. Saudi Arabia controls 13% of world oil production. By 2013-2014, if all goes well, the Chinese expect to add Iraq to that list in a big way, but first that troubled country’s oil production needs to start cranking up. In the meantime, it’s the Iranian part of the Eurasian energy equation that’s really nerve-racking for China’s leaders. The top three, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce, are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Angola. It’s no accident, then, that, pumping 500,000 bpd, it has become one of Beijing’s major oil suppliers.
Nonetheless, trade between China and Iran grew by 35% in 2009 to $27 billion. Unlike the West, they are all investing like crazy there because it’s easy to get concessions from the government; it’s easy and relatively cheap to build infrastructure; and being on the inside when it comes to Iranian energy reserves is a necessity for any country that wants to be a crucial player in Pipelineistan, that contested chessboard of crucial energy pipelines over which much of the New Great Game in Eurasia takes place. Sanctions can be a killer, slowing investment, increasing the cost of trade by over 20%, and severely constricting Tehran’s ability to borrow in global markets. Undoubtedly, the leaders of all three countries are offering thanks to whatever gods they care to worship that Washington continues to make it so easy (and lucrative) for them. So while the West has been slamming Iran with sanctions, embargos, and blockades, Iran has been slowly evolving as a crucial trade corridor for China — as well as Russia and energy-poor India.
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