Monday, July 2, 2012
Assad to Kremlin: I can finish the revolt in two months
In a phone call to the Kremlin Sunday, July 1, Syrian President Bashar Assad said he needed just two months to finish off the revolt against his regime. “My new military tactics are working,” he said in a secret video-conference with Russian intelligence and foreign ministry officials who shape Moscow’s policy on Syria.
Reporting this exclusively, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources also register the fleeting life span of the new plan for ending the Syrian war which UN envoy Kofi Annan announced had been agreed at a multinational Action Group meeting in Geneva on Saturday, June 30. Within 24 hours, the principle of a national unity transitional government based on “mutual consent” was rejected by the regime and the Turkish-based opposition leaders alike, as the violence went into another month.
On the first day of July, 91 people were reported killed in the escalating Syrian violence after a record 4,000 in June.
The new military tactics to which Assad referred are disclosed here:
1. The sweeping removal of most of the veteran Syrian army commanders who led the 16-month bloody assault on regime opponents and rebels. They were sent home with full pay to make way for a new set of younger commanders, most of them drawn from the brutal Alawite Shabiha militia, which is the ruling family’s primary arm against its enemies.
The regular commanders had shown signs of fatigue and doubts about their ability to win Assad’s war. Their will to fight on was being badly sapped by the mounting numbers officers and men going over to the opposition camp in June.
One of the tasks set the new commanders is to stem the rate of defections.
To keep the veteran commanders from joining the renegades and reduce their susceptibility to hostile penetration, the officers were not sacked but retired on full pension plus all the perks of office, including official cars.
2. But a higher, unthinkable level of violence is the key to Assad’s “new tactics.” He has armed the new military chiefs with extra fire power - additional tank and artillery units, air force bombers and attack helicopters - for smashing pockets of resistance and unlimited permission to use it. Already the level of live fire used against the rebels has risen to an even more unthinkable level which explains the sharp escalation of deaths to an average of 120 per day.
On the Syrian-Turkish border, tensions continue to mount. Monday morning, Turkey was still pumping large-scale strength including tanks, antiaircraft and antitank guns, artillery, surface missiles and combat helicopters to the border region.
Saturday, half a dozen Turkish jets were scrambled to meet Syria helicopters approaching their common border.
In Tehran, Brig. Gen. Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iran’s IRGC Aerospace Division, warned Ankara that if its troops ventured onto Syrian soil, their bases of departure would be destroyed. The threat was made during Hajizadeh’s announcement of a three-day missile exercise starting Monday in response to the European oil embargo. He reported that long-, medium- and short-range missiles would target “simulations of foreign bases in the northern Semnan Desert,” without mentioning any specific nation except Turkey.
DEBKA file
Iran to deploy subs in Caspian Sea
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A semiofficial Iranian news agency says Tehran plans to deploy submarines in the Caspian Sea.
The Saturday report by Fars quotes Adm. Abbas Zamini as saying Iran plans to deploy “light submarines” to the oil-rich sea that adjoins Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. He did not elaborate.
Relations between Iran and Azerbaijan have soured in the past year. Iran accuses Azerbaijan of harboring anti-Iranian terrorists linked to Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Azerbaijan in return says Iran supports Islamist dissidents. Both countries deny each other’s charges.
Earlier this month Iran said it has begun the “initial stages” of designing nuclear-powered submarines.
Iran has domestically built several small submarines over the past years. It has recently overhauled one of the three non-nuclear Russian Kilo-class submarines it bought in the 1990s.
Times of Israel
Seismic activity continue to plague El Hierro
The pressure of the magma detected in El Hierro has caused in the past four days on the island deformation of four to five inches vertically and three to four horizontal, as reported by the Security Directorate of the Canary Islands. The energy released has reached 420,000 million joules, a fact which, together with the ground deformation evidence magmatic process acceleration on the Canary Island, where there is an inflation process is centered in the area which earthquakes occur. The General Directorate of Security, who coordinates the Civil Protection Plan Risk Volcanic Islands, said that since the beginning were found in magmatic process, last Sunday, have occurred in El Hierro over 750 earthquakes. The earthquake with greater magnitude of 4.0 degrees on the Richter scale occurred on Wednesday at 18.55 hours in the Sea of Calm, 2 km from the coast and 20 kilometers deep. The seismic activity began in the Sea of the Gulf (north of El Hierro) and then move to the center of the island, coinciding with the point of intersection of the ridges, to subsequently migrate to the west. From noon on June 25 the seismicity is concentrated in an area that includes the west and the dorsal side of the Julan, and from 1200 hours on June 27 the focus of the earthquake begins to migrate towards the Sea of Calm.
The Extincion Protocol
European leaders have held 18 summits since the beginning of the debt crisis
Has Europe finally been saved this time? Has this latest "breakthrough" solved the European debt crisis? Of course not, and you should know better by now. European leaders have held 18 summits since the beginning of the debt crisis. After most of the preceding summits, global financial markets responded with joy because European leaders had reached "a deal" which would supposedly solve the crisis. But a few weeks after each summit it would become clear that nothing had been solved and that the financial crisis had actually gotten even worse than before. How many times do they expect us to fall for the same sorry routine? Nothing in Europe has been solved. You can't solve a debt problem with more debt. European leaders are just kicking the can down the road. More debt will relieve some of the short-term pressure, but in a few weeks it will be apparent that the underlying problems in Europe continue to grow. Unfortunately, there is not an unlimited amount of EU bailout money, so once all of these "financial bullets" have been fired European leaders are going to find that kicking the can down the road will not be so easy anymore. The truth is that the financial crisis in Europe has not been cancelled - it has just been put off for a few weeks or a few months.
Do you solve the problems of a credit card addict by giving that person another credit card? Of course not. You may delay the short-term financial problems of the credit card addict by giving that person another credit card, but in the process you make the long-term problems even worse.
Well, that is essentially what is happening in Europe. European governments and the European financial system have become ridiculously dependent on debt. By giving European debt junkies another "hit" or two it may relieve a bit of short-term suffering but it doesn't solve anything.
Just think about it.
Did the first bailout package solve the problems in Greece?
No.
Did the second bailout package solve the problems in Greece?
No.
Today, the Greek financial system is a complete and total mess, and Greek politicians are saying that a third bailout package may be necessary.
Many are claiming that Italy and Spain have been "saved" by this new deal, but that is a joke.
Yes, the ability to inject bailout funds directly into troubled banks is going to keep some of them going for a little while. But the deal also calls for a new governing body to be established that will supervise those banks. Will that governing body be established in time to even provide the short-term help that is needed?
Yes, spending bailout funds to buy up Spanish debt and Italian debt will artificially suppress bond yields for a time.
We have seen this before.
But what happened?
After the bond buying program was over, bond yields started spiking again.
So do the Europeans plan to suppress bond yields forever?
Of course not. There is not enough bailout money to do that.
Let's review the equation that I have shared in previous articles....
Brutal austerity + toxic levels of government debt + rising bond yields + a lack of confidence in the financial system + banks that are massively overleveraged + a massive credit crunch = A financial implosion of historic proportions
Have any of those elements been removed?
No.
Bond yields will be suppressed for a period of time, but that will not last forever, and all of the other underlying issues are still there.
Meanwhile, the rest of Europe continues to follow the Greek economy into economic depression.
The Spanish economy shrunk again in the second quarter of 2012, and austerity in that nation has barely even begun.
As a recent CNBC article detailed, the big spending cuts are still coming....
The conservatives, who inherited from the outgoing Socialists one of the euro zone's highest public deficits, at 8.9 percent of GDP in 2011, have said they will shrink the shortfall to 5.3 percent this year and 3 percent in 2013.
Austerity has absolutely shredded the Greek economy, and we are starting to see that same pattern be repeated all over Europe.
When you spend far more money than you bring in for decades, eventually you have to go through a very painful adjustment. What is going on in Greece should be a lesson for all of us. Debt allows you to live above your means, but the consequences of going into way too much debt can be absolutely horrific.
More debt can delay the consequences of a debt problem but it cannot solve a debt problem. The following is what Jim Rogers told CNBC on Friday....
“Just because now you have a way to get them (the banks) to borrow even more money, this is not solving the problem, this is making the problem worse,” Rogers said on Friday.“People need to stop spending money they don’t have. The solution to too much debt is not more debt. All this little agreement does is give them (banks) a chance to have even more debt for a while longer,” he added.
But if you just went by the headlines in most of the newspapers around the world you would think that European leaders had discovered the cure for cancer or something.
Sadly, the truth is that they are simply choosing to fire off a few of the "financial bullets" that they still have left as a recent Washington Post article described....
The European bailout funds don’t have unlimited resources. If they throw $125 billion at Spain’s banks and another couple hundred billion toward Italy, pretty soon they’ll be running low. The only entity with unlimited euros is the European Central Bank. And right now, there’s no talk of using the ECB to provide bailouts. Which means that this latest move might have just forestalled the crisis, rather than ending it permanently.
So what comes next?
Bruce Krasting believes that the "half-life of this bailout will be measured in weeks". The following is his summary of what he sees coming next in Europe....
If I'm right, after a few weeks things turn south again in the capital markets. Then what?- More LTRO. No – there is no more collateral. All of the swill loans have already been hocked.- Cut ECB % rate. Doesn’t matter. It won't change conditions in Italian or Spanish funding markets one bit.- A spending plan of <1% of GDP. That won’t put a dent in the recession that is building.- Brussels buys more sovereign bonds to avoid a catastrophe of Italian 10-year exceeding 7% (capitulation).Sorry. There are “wise men” in Germany who will simply not allow this to happen in the scale that is required.- The ECB goes Defcon 1 and launches a E2T QE program. No – same answer as above.- Merkel does a 180 and embraces Euro bonds. No chance in hell.-The US or China are going to start buying EU bonds?Lunacy – not happening.-The IMF will come to the rescue? No way – the IMF does not have the resources to solve anyone’s problems.
In other words, kicking the can down the road is going to get quite a bit harder after the current "sugar high" wears off.
Europe is still headed for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression (at least) and European leaders seem powerless to stop it.
Of course the United States is also facing a crisis of too much debt and a great day of reckoning is on the way for this country as well.
So yes, the global economy is still heading for collapse and there is still a multitude of reasons to be extremely concerned about the second half of 2012.
What is your opinion about all of this?
Do you think that European leaders will be able to keep kicking the can down the road?
Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below....
The Economic Collapse
Russian Military to Hold Over 1,000 Drills in June-October
The Russian Armed Forces will conduct over 1,000 command-and-staff and tactical exercises during the summer training period from June to November this year, the Defense Ministry said.
The summer training will focus on improving interoperability of all branches of the Armed Forces and efficient use of automated battlefield management systems, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
The training will be carried out on average 2-3 times a week with the emphasis on weapons proficiency and driving skills.
The training period will culminate with the Kavkaz-2012 large-scale strategic exercises in southern Russia and North Caucasus, which would also involve Abkhaz and South Ossetian military units.
In addition, Russia will hold about 50 joint military exercises with foreign countries, including the Slavic Commonwealth – 2012 with Ukraine and Belarus, the INDRA-2012 with India and the Selenga with Mongolia.
The Russian Navy will traditionally take part in RIMPAC, FRUKUS, Northern Eagle and Blackseafor international naval drills.
RIA Novostri
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)