Saudi Arabia

According to current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, US Central Command may have been involved in a year long effort to obscure the fact that America’s strategy to combat ISIS simply was not effective. "At the least, the prospect that senior officials intentionally skewed intelligence conclusions has raised questions about how much Mr. Obama, Congress and the public can believe the military’s assessments."  

Mass surveillance at home and endless military projection abroad are the twin sides of the same coin of national security, which must simply be maximized as much as possible. Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war however, was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship. A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’”

"Those who say the United States should have intervened in 2011 to topple Assad are left having to explain either how they could have rallied U.S. public support for an Iraq-like occupation and rebuilding of Syria, or, in the absence of that, how Syria would have avoided Libya’s fate."

There are so many strands of lies and distortions that it is now almost impossible for Official Washington to disentangle itself from all the false narratives that the neocons and the liberal hawks have spun in support of their various “regime change” strategies. So, the American people are left with the mainstream U.S. news media endlessly repeating storylines that are either completely false or highly exaggerated. Official Washington’s many false narratives about Russia and Syria have gotten so tangled that they have become a danger to the struggle against jihadist terrorism and conceivably a threat to the future of the planet.

Painful as it is to admit, the West, especially the United States, bears significant responsibility for creating the conditions in which ISIS has flourished. The recent attacks should be understood as “blowback terrorism”: a dreadful unintended result of repeated US and European covert and overt military actions throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia that aimed to overthrow governments and install regimes compliant with Western interests. These operations have not only destabilized the targeted regions, causing great suffering; they have also put populations in the US, the European Union, Russia, and the Middle East at significant risk of terror.

"Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books. The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciences."

Obamaworld is gone. We live again in an us-versus-them country in an us-versus-them world. And we shall likely never know another.

"Can the government maintain this strategy of flooding the oil market? In our view, it is unlikely that Saudi leaders would want to exacerbate its ongoing reserve drain by pushing prices below $40/bbl. After all, pressure will quickly build on the riyal’s 30 year peg to the USD if Brent crude oil prices keep falling."

Instead of Listening to Idiots Talking Their Book ... Let's Fact-Check the Myths

It may be all about ISIS these days, but just because al-Qaeda has been relegated to terrorist also-ran status doesn't mean they're not still operating and indeed, AQAP is still considered the group's most active and powerful branch. New footage uploaded today depicts a massive explosion at a checkpoint near Shibam, Yemen (the "Manhattan of the desert") as al-Qaeda battles both the Iran-backed Houthis and government forces for control of the country.

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

While talk of record backlogs of supertankers and an unprecented 3 billion barrels of crude oil stock-piles sound impressive - and are weighing on crude prices - the following stunning image provides some context for just what this means...

“Apparently, it’s a kind of a ‘honey is sweet, but the bee stings’ situation: they want IS to weaken Assad as soon as possible to make him leave somehow, but at the same time they don’t want to overly strengthen IS, which may then seize power."