This first article comes from Washington's Blog and further reveals the concept of "war and rumors of war" as described in Matthew 24:
The Economist argues that there are ominous parallels between the conditions which led to the first world war and today:
The United States is Britain, the superpower on the wane, unable to guarantee global security. Its main trading partner, China, plays the part of Germany, a new economic power bristling with nationalist indignation and building up its armed forces rapidly. Modern Japan is France, an ally of the retreating hegemon and a declining regional power. The parallels are not exact—China lacks the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions and America’s defence budget is far more impressive than imperial Britain’s—but they are close enough for the world to be on its guard.
Which, by and large, it is not. The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China’s leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons.
The New Republic points out that global downturns can lead to war:
As the experience of the 1930s testified, a prolonged global downturn can have profound political and geopolitical repercussions. In the U.S. and Europe, the downturn has already inspired unsavory, right-wing populist movements. It could also bring about trade wars and intense competition over natural resources, and the eventual breakdown of important institutions like European Union and the World Trade Organization. Even a shooting war is possible.
The Telegraph notes that the economic crisis in Europe is increasing tensions:
Tensions between European countries unseen in decades are emerging.
Initially, believe it or not, one cause is that many influential economists and talking heads hold the discredited belief that war is good for the economy.
We’re in the middle of a global currency war – i.e. a situation where nations all compete to devalue their currencies the most in order to boost exports. Brazilian president Rousseff said in 2010:
The last time there was a series of competitive devaluations … it ended in world wartwo.
Jim Rickards agrees:
Currency wars lead to trade wars, which often lead to hot wars. In 2009, Rickards participated in the Pentagon’s first-ever “financial” war games. While expressing confidence in America’s ability to defeat any other nation-state in battle, Rickards says the U.S. could get dragged into “asymmetric warfare,” if currency wars lead to rising inflation and global economic uncertainty.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Kyle Bass writes:
Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.
Economist and investment manager Marc Faber says that the American government will start new wars in response to the economic crisis:
Martin Armstrong – who has managed multi-billion dollar sovereign investment funds – wrote in August:
Our greatest problem is the bureaucracy wants a war. This will distract everyone from the NSA and justify what they have been doing. They need a distraction for the economic decline that is coming.
“Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Vicenza, Italy, will conduct the National Guard training mission at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, in Yavoriv, which is in western Ukraine, near the border with Poland,” Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said.
Another defense official told Fox News 290 U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade will begin training 750 Ukrainian soldiers in late April.
NATO scrambled jets Tuesday from Estonia and Lithuania to intercept a group of 11 Russian aircraft. Eight fighters and three military transports were among the Russian aircraft in international airspace over the Black Sea.
Kaliningrad, the tiny Russian enclave in the Baltics, is also where the Kremlin announced this week that it plans to deploy state-of-the-art missiles - known as Iskander missiles - along the border with Poland and Lithuania.
Of all the idiocies uttered in reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s stunning election victory, none is more ubiquitous than the idea that peace prospects are now dead because Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state while he is Israel’s prime minister.
The fundamental reality remains: This generation of Palestinian leadership — from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas — has never and will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a Jewish state. And without that, no Israeli government of any kind will agree to a Palestinian state.
With or without elections, the West Bank could fall to Hamas overnight. At which point fire rains down on Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and the entire Israeli urban heartland — just as it rains down on southern Israel from Gaza when it suits Hamas.
Any Arab–Israeli peace settlement would require Israel to make dangerous and inherently irreversible territorial concessions on the West Bank in return for promises and guarantees. Under current conditions, these would be written on sand.
Israel is ringed by jihadi terrorists in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic State and Iranian proxies in Syria, and a friendly but highly fragile Jordan. Israelis have no idea who ends up running any of these places.
Well, say the critics. Israel could be given outside guarantees. Guarantees? Like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S., Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”? Like the red line in Syria? Like the unanimous U.N. resolutions declaring illegal any Iranian enrichment of uranium — now effectively rendered null?
In the interim, I understand the crushing disappointment of the Obama administration and its media poodles at the spectacular success of the foreign leader they loathe more than any other on the planet. The consequent seething and sputtering are understandable, if unseemly. Blaming Netanyahu for banishing peace, however, is mindless.
The United States is allied with Sunni Moslem aristocracies (and therefore with Sunni-headed nations), against Shia Moslem aristocracies (and therefore also against Shia-headed nations). Sunni aristocracies provide the huge ($1 million and larger) financial donations that sustain ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other jihadist armed movements, commonly called “terrorists.”
Islamic terrorism is virtually entirely a phenomenon of Sunni Islam, and the U.S. is allied with the aristocracies that fund it.
Islamic terrorism is allied with the U.S., not with Russia. (Russia experiences it in places like Chechnia.) Sunni extremists were even key U.S.-Saudi tools in weakening Russia and ending the U.S.S.R. This (and especially the Saudi aristocracy’s funding of Al Qaeda) is the reason why the U.S. White House refuses to allow the blocked 28 pages of the U.S. Senate’s Feinstein terrorism/torture report to be made public. The U.S. White House is, and has been at least since 2000, and maybe even before that, controlled by the U.S. aristocracy, no longer by the public. The U.S. Federal Government is, already, a dictatorship — actual rule by the country’s aristocracy or “oligarchs” — no authentic democracy anymore. This is a scientifically proven fact. Democracy in this country is now merely mythological, whatever the case might possibly have been before (when there were unfortunately no rigorous scientific studies yet regarding the question).
Above all: Iran is Shia, and has therefore been allied with Russia, the country that Obama’s Administration (including Kerry) are seeking to destroy. An inevitable part of Kerry’s negotiations with Iran is to turn Iran against Russia; it would be a geostrategic sea-change.
On Wednesday, March 18th, Iran’s Fars News Agency headlined “Iraqi Commander: Tapped Communications Confirms US Aids to ISIL,” and opened as follows:
A commander of Iraq’s popular forces disclosed that wiretapping of ISIL’s communications has confirmed the reports that the US planes have been airdropping food and arms supplies for the Takfiri terrorists.
“The wiretapped ISIL communications by Iraqi popular forces have revealed that the US planes have been dropping weapons and foodstuff for the Takfiri terrorist group,” Commander of Iraq’s Ali Akbar Battalion told FNA on Wednesday.
He noted that tapping on ISIL disclosed the terrorist group’s regular contacts with the US army, and said, “They exchanged sentences like if they would have a share of the ammunition dropped near (Spiker Military Base) or responses such as ‘you will also receive your share’.”
“The US forces by dropping weapons and ammunition for ISIL, specially in Yassreb, Al-Ramadi and near Spiker Base in Hay al-Qadessiya have provided a lot of help to the ISIL,” he added.
Many similar reports by Iraqi officials and forces have surfaced in the last few months.
In February, an Iraqi provincial official lashed out at the western countries and their regional allies for supporting Takfiri terrorists in Iraq, revealing that the US airplanes still continue to airdrop weapons and foodstuff for the ISIL terrorists.
On March 2nd, I headlined “Obama Prioritizes Weakening Russia, Over Weakening ISIS,” and linked to a news report from Michael Snyder the day before, titled “Is Barack Obama Actually Trying to Help … ISIS … Take Over Syria?” which concluded in the affirmative, because the air-drops of weapons were specifically into areas that were firmly under the control of ISIS. I placed this into the broader context of Obama’s overriding foreign-policy objective: weakening or even destroying Russia.
Although the United States Government pretends to be opposed to terrorism, the United States Government is also the global leader in militarily supporting the aristocracies that fund terrorism; and is, in the final analysis, more of a friend than a foe of terrorist organizations, because Russia is allied with the Shiite side in the Sunni-v.-Shiite conflict, and the U.S. is allied with the Sunni side — the side that sponsors terrorism and that supplies almost all of the actual terrorist fighters.
This explains a lot of the inconsistencies and absurdities in U.S. Government allegations about terrorism and its causes.