World View: President Obama Considers Military Action in Iraq

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• Sunday’s attack on Pakistan airport signals terror tactical shift
• President Obama considers military action in Iraq
• Foreign exchange price fixing will exceed libor scandal in criminality

Sunday’s attack on Pakistan airport signals terror tactical shift

Smoke rises on Monday morning after the assault on Karachi’s airport (AFP)

The terrorist attack on the Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan, on Sunday did notachieve its primary objective of hijacking an aircraft and holding itspassengers hostage. Nonetheless, it represents a more sophisticatedkind of attack, following the model of previous major attacks thatwere more like complex military actions. One is Mumbai’s ’26/11′ three-day terrorist attack in 2008, and another is the three-day attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi Kenya, inSeptember of last year.

Apparently there had been Taliban sleeper cells planted in Karachiweeks or months before. These cells provided shelter, weapons,explosives, transport and intelligence to the terrorists whoeventually carried out the attack. As in the other cases,there were a series of well-planned attacks designed to defeatand kill layers of security and take control of the target.

It’s no longer a “simple” case of a suicide bomber walking into ashopping center or mosque to kill as many people as possible. Nowthere are more complex objectives, with huge financial rewards to fundfuture projects.

Pakistan’s government now has to face some hard realities. The “peacetalks” with the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban – TTP), which hasclaimed credit for the attack, were never more than a joke anyway, butthey did provide a fig leaf to hide government officials’ desperation.The TTP is headquartered in Pakistan’s tribal area, but analysts pointout that the army has only made half-hearted attempts to defeat themthere, not being willing to go in and clean out the hideouts andweapons stores that are making the terrorist strikes possible.Dawn (Pakistan) and Indian Express

President Obama considers military action in Iraq

President Obama is facing a dilemma about responding to the collapseof what he considered a major achievement, ending the war in Iraq.Islamic Emirate in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has executed a “blitzkrieg”in Iraq, giving it control of huge swaths of land, millions of dollarsof money stolen from banks, and huge volumes of heavy weapons stolenfrom weapons stores. When combined with ISIS’s control of parts ofneighboring Syria, ISIS is on the verge establishing a new “SunniIslamic Caliphate” nation, bounded on the west by Bashar al-Assad’srump Syria, and bounded in the east by Nouri al-Maliki’s rump Iraq.It’s not certain that ISIS will be able to indefinitely hold all thisterritory, but if it does, then the territory will serve as a base forterrorist and military attacks on other nations.

According to President Obama at a press briefing on Thursday:

“Well, this is an area that we’ve been watching with alot of concern not just over the last couple of days but over thelast several months, and we’ve been in close consultation with theIraqi government. Over the last year, we have been providing themadditional assistance to try to address the problems that theyhave in Anbar, in the northwestern portions of the country, aswell as the Iraqi and Syrian border. That includes, in somecases, military equipment. It includes intelligence assistance.It includes a whole host of issues.

But what we’ve seen over the last couple of days indicates thedegree to which Iraq is going to need more help. It’s going toneed more help from us, and it’s going to need more help from theinternational community.

So my team is working around the clock to identify how we canprovide the most effective assistance to them. I don’t rule outanything, because we do have a stake in making sure that thesejihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq orSyria, for that matter.

Part of the challenge … is that the politics of Shia and Sunniinside of Iraq, as well as the Kurds, is either going to be a helpin dealing with this jihadist situation, or it’s going to be ahindrance. And frankly, over the last several years, we have notseen the kind of trust and cooperation develop between moderateSunni and Shia leaders inside of Iraq, and that accounts in partfor some of the weakness of the state, and that then carries overinto their military capacity.

So I think it’s fair to say that in our consultations with theIraqis there will be some short-term, immediate things that needto be done militarily, and our national security team is lookingat all the options. But this should be also a wakeup call for theIraqi government. There has to be a political component to thisso that Sunni and Shia who care about building a functioning statethat can bring about security and prosperity to all people insideof Iraq come together and work diligently against theseextremists. And that is going to require concessions on the partof both Shia and Sunni that we haven’t seen so far.

The last point I’ll make — what’s happened over the last coupleof days I think underscores the importance of the point that Imade at my West Point speech: the need for us to have a morerobust regional approach to partnering and training partnercountries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. We’re notgoing to be able to be everywhere all the time, but what we can dois to make sure that we are consistently helping to finance,train, advise military forces with partner countries, includingIraq, that have the capacity to maintain their own security. Andthat is a long and laborious process, but it’s one that we need to

Phrases like “there will be some short-term, immediate things thatneed to be done militarily,” and “There has to be a politicalcomponent to this so that Sunni and Shia who care about building afunctioning state that can bring about security and prosperity to allpeople inside of Iraq come together and work diligently” indicate tome that President Obama still doesn’t have a clue what’s going on inthe world.

There’s a great deal of fury growing against President Obama.Statements like “American blood drove al-Qaeda out of Iraq, and Obamahas squandered all of it,” or “I fought in Afghanistan, and Obama hasgiven the worst of the worst of the Taliban a free pass” areincreasingly common. White House

Foreign exchange price fixing will exceed libor scandal in criminality

Britain’s government is proposing legislation to punishforeign exchange rigging with criminal sanctions, includingprison.

This is another case where bankers from different banks colluded withone another to defraud their customers making currency conversionsfrom one currency to another. One banker would call his pal atanother bank to let him know that some client was about to exchange,say, $10 billion for euros. The two bankers would collude onfront-running and setting the exchange rate so that when thetransaction went through, a few minutes later, the bankers couldpocket hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Readers may recall the Libor scandal that began a couple of yearsago, where bankers would collude with one another to fix interestrates. Those actions may have cost clients hundreds of millionsof dollars, but the foreign exchange market is much bigger,$5.3 trillion, and clients may have lost hundreds of billions ofdollars over the years.

It’s now been over ten years that Gen-X “financial engineers”flooded into banks and knowingly created tens of trillionsof dollars of fraudulent synthetic securities backed byfaulty subprime mortgages, and not a single one has gone to jail.The worst that happens is that the bank gets fined. But theindividual crooks who caused the global financial crisis keepthe millions of dollars that they gained fraudulently, andare free to go on in their jobs to find other ways todefraud investors. The Libor scandal proves that.

Now we’re going through the same process again, with theforeign exchange price-fixing scandal. Supposedly,UBS will pay $8 billion in fines, Deutsche Bank AG willpay $4.4 billion, and Citibank will pay $4.3 billion.

Supposedly, this time is different because legislation is beingproposed to make foreign exchange fixing a criminal activity. Butdefrauding clients is already a criminal activity. All of thefraudulent activities of these bankers is criminal activity. Theproblem is not the laws, but that the criminals are rewarded byletting them keep their money, and they’re not prosecuted and sent tojail. AFP and Reuters

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